How 'Bout Your Appearance

This month I will discuss what will be my first MacOS 8-only hack. It involves the Appearance control panel and the accent colors available to you (nutmeg, magenta, and all those other cool colors). These are what determine the color of various system items, like progress bars, scroll bars, and menu selections. This is a lengthy, trial-and-error process, but stick with me and you'll soon be reaping the rewards!

Change the CLUT

First, open a copy of your Appearance control panel in ResEdit and locate the clut resource. Open this resource by double-clicking on it. You will then see a window listing the Apple-supplied accents. Feel free to open these accents and familiarize yourself with the way in which the schemes are laid out. To create a new accent, select one of the existing ones and duplicate (command-D) it. Because it will be given an ID of 128, get info (command-I) and change the number to 219. Give it a new name, like "My Scheme" or something like that.
 
Edit the colors in your scheme by double-
clicking them and choosing colors from
the standard Apple color picker. As you
can see, I've created a rather lovely blue
scheme to complement my many Apple Wizards- and MacOS-related activities

If you then number these colors from 0 to 7 (don't change the black one to the far right — the one that would be "8"), left to right, you can then use the maps below to determine where the colors will be mapped in progress bars (left graphic) and scroll bar (left graphic). For example, in my above scheme, the lightest blue, given a #1, will be used in the orange areas of the diagrams below. It will be the highlight of scroll bars and the middle portion of a progress bar. The darkest blue in my scheme, color #6, is used as the dark portion of the progress bar, as you can easily see in the graphic to the left.

Pull-down menu colors are mapped with a 1-pixel wide portion of color 2, followed by color 4, with a 1-pixel wide sample of color 5 at the very bottom.

That's all there is to it. Save your new accent before moving on to the next step because it's not yet ready for your use. Why? Well, you have no way of choosing it! We'll now make a menu choice available to you for your new scheme.

Making the Menu PICT

Open up the PICT resource of the Appearance control panel. Now you have a pair of choices available to you:
1. You can copy-paste a PICT that closely resembles yours and simply remember that "My Scheme" represents your scheme.
— or —
2. You can copy-paste a PICT into a graphics program and modify it to match your new scheme.
Either way, make sure that your PICT is the same size as the others and be sure to give it an ID of 219 to match your clut. Save your changes and replace your old Appearance control panel with your new one. Save the original in case something goes wrong. Finally, open the Appearance control panel and choose your new accent scheme — there should be no need to restart the computer.
 
Here you can see the results of my blue scheme. Granted,
it looks very similar to the built-in Lavender and French
Blue schemes, but the menu colors are much brighter and
the overall look is, in my opinion, much softer. I like my
accent, and if you have a problem with that, make your own!

 
                                                      If you have ideas for future Wicked Clown
                                                      columns, please send me an email! I can be
                                                      reached at john@applewizards.net. Thanks.

                                                      ResEdit Info

                                                      ResEdit can be very useful and it can be very
harmful. ALWAYS, and again, ALWAYS use a backup copy of the file you are hacking. One little mistake can wipe out the program and render it useless... sometimes along with your System. Be very careful and be sure that you know what you are doing at all times.

Apple Wizards isn't to blame for any problems caused by hacking into files. The hacks talked about are always tested to be safe before posting, but these tests were only performed on a minimal number of systems and may not include your specific system.

     John Long
       john@applewizards.net

   
                                            http://www.applewizards.net/