ChimerIcon - Icon and splash themes for Camino

Apr 08, '03 01:47:00AM

Contributed by: robg

ChimerIcon iconThe macosxhints Rating:
9 of 10
[0 to 10 lights; 10 = perfect!]

One of my biggest complaints about Camino (nee Chimera) was that I found the default theme icons in the toolbar hard to see against the pinstripe background. As of tonight, this is no longer a problem for me!

While perusing this month's Macworld, which has 75 reviews of free and low-cost software packages (humble aside: there are a few of my reviews scattered amongst the bunch, and there are some gems hidden in there, some of which will be appearing here as future PotWs, I would imagine), I stumbled across a review of ChimerIcon, which I had never heard of before. ChimerIcon (soon to be called CaminoIcon??) is a "theming" program for Camino that lets you very easily replace the splash screens and toolbar icons with any number of predefined sets ... or you can create you own theme.

Using ChimerIcon is about as easy as it can be. Just launch it, click on the Icon Themes tab, select a theme from the drop-down, and notice that the toolbar icons are now switched to those of the chosen theme. If you'd like to see all the buttons for a given theme, just click on Show Theme Icons button. If it appears the program is hung up and ignoring your input, it really isn't -- it takes it a while to display all the icons (even if you're not displaying the Show Theme Icons page, it still loads them all onto that page). Just give it a few seconds, and things will return to normal.

As long as Camino isn't running, you can then just click the Install button to put your chosen theme to work in Camino. I haven't had time to look at all 30-ish of the provided themes, but I quickly installed Orbit, my favorite Mozilla theme, and I'm now 100% happier about time spent in Camino (though I do want to browse the rest; some look quite cool). I'm not a huge fan of theming in general, but ChimerIcon is very well done, and makes it absolutely simple to give a new look to an excellent browser. The only reason it scores a 9 instead of a 10 is the slight slowdown when drawing the theme icons, but that's quibbling. ChimerIcon looks and feels professional, and the fact that it's free (including all the themes) is simply amazing.

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20030408013539811