Kaleidoscope Theme Archive (With Images!)

ataraxia

ataraxia

Member
I wanted to find a nice Kaleidoscope scheme, and wanted to preview the theme before applying it (or even downloading).

There was a twitter account which did this (account suspended), and the archive.org copy of it only shows a few schemes.

So I trawled through the Wayback Machine, and extracted all the scheme links that they had, along with pulling the preview images that were displayed in the Kaleidoscope "Scheme Spotlight" section and collated them all on my site, with an archive.org link to download the scheme if you like the look of it!

Currently I have roughly 3567 schemes up to preview, some the image links are broken and I will get around to fixing them eventually. Screenshot of the layout below.

example.png

Check it out here
 
C

cheesestraws

Well-known member
Scrolling through these is quite a trip. I love how totally unconcerned with anything approaching æsthetic restraint a lot of these are. Great fun.
 
jessenator

jessenator

Well-known member
wonderful! I had thought (keyword: "thought") about doing something like this, and MAJOR kudos to you for seeing it through.
 
jessenator

jessenator

Well-known member
Okay, this one is evil genius
qsdilemma.gif
 
ataraxia

ataraxia

Member
cheesestraws said:
Scrolling through these is quite a trip. I love how totally unconcerned with anything approaching æsthetic restraint a lot of these are. Great fun.
Click to expand...
Totally, my favourites are the ones that throw everything and the kitchen sink at it. Every element is an image? Why not!

jessenator said:
wonderful! I had thought (keyword: "thought") about doing something like this, and MAJOR kudos to you for seeing it through.
Click to expand...
I felt this in my bones, I've been avoiding it for a couple of months. Glad you could get some use out of it!

That blank scheme fills me with terror at the thought of trying to fix that, my favourites have to be the holiday themed schemes. Something about decorating your GUI like a Christmas Tree is so 90's.

christmasfir.gifbemyvalentinemartha.gif
 
C

cheesestraws

Well-known member
Yes, it was absolutely that 'bemyvalentinemartha' theme that made me grin when I hit it. And all the other weirdly floral ones that look more like agèd armchairs than user interfaces.
 
demik

demik

Well-known member
That's awesome. Someone tried to make a video a while ago on youtube


But having this as a list with download links is priceless ! Good job
 
unity

unity

Well-known member
I miss those days. Computers were exciting, shareware/freeware abound. So many companies coming and going. Heck, even the Aaron Copeland theme extension was fun.
 
CC_333

CC_333

Well-known member
@unity Agreed.

TL;DR: Modern UIs are, in my opinion, boring and inflexible compared to those of the 90s and early 2000s.

I'm glad I was able to experience those times, albeit at the tail end (the concept of "theming" one's UI did persist well into the 2000s and even the early 2010s, though, so thankfully I didn't miss too much of the excitement).

But nowadays? The whole concept of customizing one's UI (especially on the Mac) has been reduced to minor things like the color of highlighted text or whether buttons and other widgets are blue or grey. It's so bad that everyone got excited when Yosemite "introduced" the concept of light and dark, and then again when Mojave "introduced" the concept of changing widgets to colors other than blue and grey (even at that, the choices are limited)!

Granted, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, as it's just the end result of years of refinement and simplification, it's just that modern UIs are not as innovative, creative or customizable as they had been back then, and that tends to make things rather boring, particularly to someone (such as myself) who enjoys tinkering with such things.

c
 
EtherRad

EtherRad

Well-known member
I wish I had a whole day to try all these. Can the background be changed separately from the scheme?
 
JustG

JustG

Well-known member
What a blast from the past! My friend and I would spend hours downloading and trying out different themes. Thanks for putting this together, it's going to be fun downloading and playing around with themes again!
 
ataraxia

ataraxia

Member
joshc said:
Nice. Would you be happy for me to host a mirror of your site?
Click to expand...
Sure thing! You might want to hold off for a week as I'm adding in all the new images, plus a basic search function. Bigger updates will come in the next month or so as well.
 
ataraxia

ataraxia

Member
Site updated with search and fresh images from SheepShaver, taking us to a total of 4197 schemes saved. If you ever made a scheme or have one that's missing feel free to PM me here to get it added!

GuiBer said:
A great work, congratulations ataraxia !
I'm happy to see my scheme, yellowdeber that I did in 1997, is there :).
👋
Click to expand...
That's amazing! Glad to see your work survived all those years! In my eyes, after staring at these schemes for so long, you're a celebrity :cool:
 
T

The Kaleidoscope Evangel

New member
I thought I’d check in with you guys.:) I ran the Kaleidoscope scheme archive from 1996-2001, the entire time it existed. So if you ever submitted a scheme, I tried it out and made the preview for the website and the .sit.hqx files to protect them. It’s nice to see there are some people who remember our work. Greg went on to become a physics professor concentrating on M-Theory and Arlo slowly disappeared. I still live in the same city and the same house my KSA salary helped my wife and me buy. I can’t believe you managed to save 4200 schemes. The whole collection is over 10,000, and I still have them all, but they’re on a CD-RW and I don’t even own a drive any more! But they’re safe. Tell me the schemes you guys made. I’d love to here who still remembers our hard work.
 
sfiera

sfiera

Well-known member
The Kaleidoscope Evangel said:
The whole collection is over 10,000, and I still have them all, but they’re on a CD-RW and I don’t even own a drive any more! But they’re safe.
Click to expand...
I hate to be a worrywart, but it might be time to think about moving that data to a more durable storage medium. Optical media doesn’t last forever, and a CD-RW burned 25 years ago is already at risk of failure. Uploading to the Garden or archive.org is a good way to ensure that these kinds of things aren’t lost.
 
adespoton

adespoton

Well-known member
Interestingly, there's currently a discussion over at the Garden specifically around ensuring we preserve the entire collection. I know somewhere (I think on archive.org) there's a massive dump of 13,000-ish, but that includes broken ones, duplicates, and people's various tweaks that never made it onto the official site, and which it's debatable whether there's utility in actually saving them. AFAIK, @ataraxia's site is the only place that has a properly managed and verified set available to the public, so it'd be great to get the rest of the OG KSA set added to there and mirrored.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

pcamen
Software versions for the various OS versions, and canned hard drive images
Replies
1
Views
481
dcr
dcr
Juliet Elysa
Kaleidoscope!
Replies
15
Views
1K
Juliet Elysa
Juliet Elysa
ClassicHasClass
Classilla 9.2
2
Replies
27
Views
4K
Tron
T
Top