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http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=1036
Apple Closing the Door on OS X Customization
By Remy Davison, Insanely Great Mac
October 1st 2002
Aqua poses a disincentive to ingenious interface hackers.
Can't tweak OS X to your liking? It's all part of a grand plan, says a story at Wired.
With the Classic OS, you could conceivably have about 25 million permutations of the
Mac desktop. From eyeballs that followed the mouse to Kaleidoscope themes that turned
your Mac desktop into the flight deck of Enterprise, every Mac could look different.
But Wired argues that many of the APIs that give third-party developers access to the
interface to build under-the-hood tweaks are not accessible. As the story notes, some
developers have managed to hack into the GUI though.
Examples include FruitMenu and Classic Menu, two different hacks which do similar
things - they give you an Apple menu back, just like the good old days.
The article quotes Greg Landweber, the well-known developer of Kaleidoscope, who says
that under the classic Mac OS, anything and everything could be changed. Now, says
Landweber, you can only change what things look like. Not how they work.
Wired speculates that the killing of Appearance manager themes and the demand for
interface consistency is the result of Steve Jobs' personal influence on OS
development. One result of this has been that it's become much more difficult to get
inside the OS, and hacks may simply cease to work when Apple upgrades the OS.
Analysis: While Apple may incorporate improvements to the GUI gradually, the company
is notoriously slow at making these a standard part of the OS. The Apple Menu control
panel in the classic OS was buggy from day one, and BeHierarchic and Menu Choice had
done a better job for years. Similarly, double-scroll arrows on both ends of the
window pane are an undocumented feature of the OS 8/9 Appearance Manager, and takes
only an AppleScript to unlock.
Apple may be concerned with stability, but customization is part of Mac ownership -
they're extremely personal machines. Remember how Steve wanted a useless blue Apple in
the middle of the menu bar in the OS X betas? He still doesn't want the Apple menu to
have anything in it that's useful.
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