For a brief moment this afternoon, I could almost see a 3D-shadow effect on the white letters on a slate blue background in my laptop menu bar. I don’t know if it’s deliberate, or if I hallucinated it, but I was suddenly put in mind of Kaleidoscope.
Kaleidoscope was a project by Greg Landweber, a Harvard hacker who famously cooked up Greg’s Buttons as a landmark piece of Mac customization shareware. It gave you options to change colors and fonts and the like in the classic macOS in the early-to-mid 90s. But Kaleidoscope was a leap beyond that – originally called “Acid,” it proved to be the fulfillment of something Apple was promising in Copeland: a way to customize the entire windowing system.
System 7.5 was no place to try to tinker with your OS and expect stability, but God knows I was doing by best. RAMDoubler, Speed Doubler, any number of things to try to max out the performance of a PowerMac 6100 on a grad student’s budget. but I couldn’t help customizing the look. He had separate extensions to try to mimic the appearance of the BeBox or of Copeland itself, but I always ended up with something in black and gold or graphite and silver or some other wild combination, and I stuck with Kaleidoscope all the way to the coming of MacOS X.
And then there were the various appearance themes for that, even. Some built in, some less so, but you could use Unsanity’s ShapeShiftter to get similar results, or even find one or two stray Apple beta themes – but those were gone for good with OS X 10.4 and later, it seems like, and that was an end of Mac customization. And nothing of the sort ever appeared for iOS at all, until the coming of iOS 16 and the handful of color and font options for the Lock Screen.
While I’m all for consistency, I would almost rather have some sort of tools for tweaking up the look of the OS than I would an external App Store framework or some of the other nonsense that’s apparently going to be forced on Apple by the EU. I don’t have any intention of opening up my phone to un-gatekept software, if only because every hack of iOS I’ve been aware of depends on jailbreaking and I like being secure. But it would be nice to be able to trick up the look with more than just a bunch of Shortcut icons. Moreso even than the PowerBook of yore, what’s on your iPhone is you. (Although to be fair, I never found anything that really suited my requirements for customization on Android 5 with my Moto X. Maybe it’s different now.)
And you may as well. It’s not like it’s going to scratch the CPU capability. Open iOS to arbitrary third party code and appearance consistency will be the least of your worries, so why not make it official? Then again, whimsical customization might keep me on my mini another year instead of sighing and biting the bullet and buying the iPhone 17 Pro whose smallest size is 6.4” and starts at $1199…and it’s hard not to think this ends with an Apple Watch Ultra on my wrist as the remote control for the ridiculous-size phone I never take out of my jacket…