Crystal Clear for Mac1.2

Hey! i love this theme, and i love the alphavalue thing that comes with it. Suggestion though: That weird white box that appears on the back of some frames... get rid of that. On some of my apps, it covers up the icon text for the menus... not all, but some. and it makes the finder look funny lol. thanks!

How do you get rid of this utility/program?

Amazing THEME, congratulations, it's a lot of work, i hope we have an update SOON....amazing job.

I like this Theme too, but it does not work with firefox. I am right? Is there a workaround? TIA

Hello again, First, I wanted to let those of you who are particularly interested in a solution to the "menu extras" problem that I have a solution that's much easier than the one used for PhotoPro. It's still not as seamless as I'd like, and does require a little setup, but only one step, really. If you'd like to try it out, I'd appreciate the help in deciding if it's easy enough to "put out there" as an official part of Crystal Clear. Second, one thing readers of this listing may not realize (unless you've somehow found time to read through the entire article on Crystal Clear) is that the theme isn't suitable for users who rely on Microsoft Office and Macromedia (Flash, Dreamweaver) products. Those are the main Carbon apps I'm aware of that use some strange background element that Crystal Clear tries to make transparent. Since Carbon apps don't support transparency, the elements show up as black, and in the cases mentioned above, the black backgrounds can make the applications not just ugly, but also hard to use. This isn't the case with all Carbon apps, mind you. I have no problems with Photoshop CS3, BBEdit, YummyFTP, StyleMaster, iTunes, or many others. Now, the Macromedia products aren't as big a problem as the Microsoft ones, because you can at least enter them in ShapeShifter's list of excluded apps so they don't get themed. Microsoft Office is a total oddball, however, and doesn't respect the exclusion at all. I've tried and asked around, and as far as I know, it's impossible to exclude them from being themed. That's it! If you're a user of mostly Cocoa applications, Crystal Clear will be gorgeous and you'll wonder what the fuss is about. :-) If you spend a lot of time in Microsoft Office, you might want to pass this opportunity up. Better yet... switch to apps from some other vendor, preferably one who is developing in Cocoa! (e.g., Pages, Keynote, Mesa, Tables, TextEdit...) Cheers, Leland

I love it and hate it at the same time. The transparency itself looks great, but usability and UI are somewhat hindered. I will be following development closely, but right now overall it looks ugly. I think the developer is well aware of these limitations, and I am fully aware this is more like an experiment in motion. Transparency can work, but its hard to pull off. Hoping for the best!

I used this theme. Its Excellent. But when you try to open any PDF file in Adobe Acrobat 8.0 it quits. when you open acrobat 8.0 its menubars are themed properly. Its only when you try to open any PDF file it quits. Acrobat 7.0 does not launch only with this theme. Any suggestion is highly appreciaited.

To EASER... Funny you should mention this... After getting the latest version out the door, I was once again turning to the problem of menu "extras" in themes with transparent/translucent menubars. I'm toying with the idea--suggested by another Crystal Clear user--of offering the fix that the developer of PhotoPro did. When I first tried that fix a couple of months ago, I thought it was too difficult to expect users to mess with. I still do, but if you are someone who doesn't reboot very often and are not a heavy user of menu extras (or at least, don't add them to your menubar many times during a session), it might be worth it to fix the look temporarily. If I did this for Crystal Clear, the fix would involve these steps: Apply Crystal Clear, or have it run normally at login. Apply a second theme (the fix) that would eliminate the toolbar entirely. While this theme is in place, you would quit and restart all of the menu extras that do the "double layer" thing. Next, set ShapeShifter's preferences to NOT restart the Finder/Dock when it applies themes, and then apply Crystal Clear a second time. Once this is done, restart the Finder. I'm going to try this myself tomorrow, but if it works as I expect, I would then have no menu extras that were "too shiny". Again, my concern is that this procedure would be necessary every time you log in and out or reboot, and any new menu extras you add after the "fix" would be too "shiny." Any opinions from users of PhotoPro who've lived with these steps would be appreciated. Obviously, you could set up a trigger to stop and restart all of your normal menu extras (I already have such a trigger using iKey), but there's still the extra steps in ShapeShifter to deal with... Finally, if any Cocoa developers out there know of a way to tell a given Mac application to suppress its main menu loading, PLEASE let me know. Apps that run as menu extras do this even though they don't need to, and that's the source of the problem. Cheers, Leland

I've followed the progress of this theme for quite awhile. I have no doubt that this author put a lot of work and research into this. And the effect is interesting. For me, it suffers from one shortcoming, which is that menubar items from 3rd party programs often do not cooperate with the overall aesthetic effect. This is not the author's fault but, rather, a tendency on the part of 3rd party authors to put their own menubar background into their programs. (I believe I'm explaining that correctly.) Alas, this makes the theme aesthetically unappealing to me. I wonder if the author could reach a compromise wherein there could be an option within the theme to have a solid menubar. Granted, it would not provide 100% transparency, but I would be happy with just having this effect with my windows.