I've figured out which resources in SArtFile are used to draw the window frame in Finder, thanks to gavinstubbs09's posting of the Black OS X theme on his PowerPC Centre site. I decoded the SArtFile from that theme and compared it to the stock SArtFile and found the resources that were different. I also noticed a couple of color changes in Finder.rsrc that the theme used. Now I need to experiment a bit to see exactly how each resource changes the frame, because Leopard uses a primitive form of resolution independence where each resource can be used for multiple applications. Although using Extras.rsrc requires disabling CoreUI in Leopard, it still uses SArtFile for certain elements, such as Finder window frames, etc, and its a touchy bugger. I've been able to decode and successfully encode the file a few times now, so I'm hoping to have some results soon. I'm attempting to lighten up the window frame to match the current macOS shade.
Finding information about Leopard theming is a real SOB. I searched high and low, and almost every link I hit was broken, or the sites have gone down and had robots.txt on the server (macthemes2.net, for instance) so there was no archive left over. I did find a couple of chinese sites that had some good info, and there are various bits scattered here and there, but by the time Snow Leopard was launched, people had pretty much given up on Leopard, as SL was much easier to mod.
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I took about 5 or 10 minutes and threw together a quick application that lets you test out UI elements such as buttons, scroll bars, and checkboxes. Now we can track the UI element progress! Here's the download. Only works on Leopard and Snow Leopard (because of Rosetta). No Tiger support yet.
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If the files are compatible, then it shouldn't be hard to make a macOS theme for Tiger. As long as the Extras file and ThemePark is used and not artTools, then all that's left is the icons, dock, font, and foxboxes, right?
Theming Tiger will be academic compared to Leopard. There are a couple of elements that the Extras.rsrc doesn't theme compared to Shapeshifter, such as the Spotlight icon, but I know where that's stored. Shapeshifter, from what my research has uncovered, seems to overlay Extras.rsrc, as well as a couple of other resources, so if you open and save Extras.rsrc in Themepark, then move it to the system folder, it won't theme everything that isn't stored in Extras. To do what I did in the above original post, the Shapeshifter theme must be applied, and you have to open and resave Extras.rsrc since Shapeshifter only overlays the original rather than writing to it. I'm going to open up a few other resources (Finder.rsrc, for example) while Shapeshifter is running, save them, and move them to their proper places to see what effect they have as well.
Thanks for writing the app. It'll help tremendously.