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Kaleidoscope Theme Archive (With Images!)

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
 

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

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

jessenator

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

ataraxia

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.
Totally, my favourites are the ones that throw everything and the kitchen sink at it. Every element is an image? Why not!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!
 
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