A Collection of Kaleidoscope Schemes, Sourced from the WayBack Machine. | Hacker News Reader

A Collection of Kaleidoscope Schemes, Sourced from the WayBack Machine.

kaleidoscope.hryjksn.com

29 pointsbookofjoe10 comments

Mac OS 9 really had a 'personal' feel to it and part of that was thanks to Kaleidoscope. Many authors also designed accompanying icon sets, to complete the look.

Japanese authors were responsible for my favorite schemes/icon sets.

Same developer would go on to make Konfabulator for Mac OS X, a desktop widgets application which Apple directly aped for their Dashboard widgets and Yahoo eventually acquired.

The era of Kaleidoscope was so full of creativity, I have a lot of nostalgia for it. My sister and I would have wars for what scheme would be set on the family Performa, and it would change out weekly.

There's also a Mastodon bot that randomly toots out schemes/themes https://social.erambert.me/@macthemes

Idea (I lack the skills to implement):

Train an upscaler/style transfer model on these lovely things (plus Winamp skins etc) to create a teachable AI theme engine.

That's interesting! Training a stable diffusion model seems relatively easy! [1] (implementing a stable diffusion model from scratch or even understanding how it works seems like the difficult part :-).

1: https://huggingface.co/docs/diffusers/main/en/tutorials/basi...

The about, https://kaleidoscope.hryjksn.com/about

This looks cool but very hard to make use of. I wish the author had some info on how to operate on the file format too. I could see myself using this for a retro looking game or something like that.

> I wish the author had some info on how to operate on the file format too.

There's some documentation in some of the archives linked from [1]. You'll need to be familiar with classic MacOS file formats to make much sense of it, though; it relies heavily on technologies which died with that platform.

That being said:

> I could see myself using this for a retro looking game or something like that.

You'd probably be better off using the previews as inspiration and designing your own graphics. The themes are all built out of bitmap graphics, and are designed at a scale appropriate for a 640x480 display. The preview images aren't scaled down; that's how big the widgets really were.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20110728002932/http://www.kaleid...

Luxurious 640x480 sounds suitable for the coveted retro graphics look :-)

I switched to OSX late and was not acquainted with Stuffit. It appears these .sit archives are in that format, but the "unar" utility on my system extracts only a readme file (in plain text), with the remainder being 0 byte files.

     unar -version # v1.10.7

Maybe an alternative unarchiver or a previous version might work.

StuffIt compression is proprietary, but they’re (somehow) still in business, _and_ provide free decompressors for Mac and Windows: https://stuffit.com/

> It appears these .sit archives are in that format, but the "unar" utility on my system extracts only a readme file (in plain text), with the remainder being 0 byte files.

A lot of these files (including the themes themselves) will have all their data in the resource fork. Your system may not support those.

The easiest way to get started looking at these files may actually be to open them up on an emulated classic Mac, e.g. http://system7.app/. There's an installer for Kaleidoscope already downloaded in Infinite HD:Control Panels & Extensions:Kaleidoscope.

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