Shape Shifting!

You might think I'm writing about losing weight and firming up here; but since this is the Computer Blog, I'm writing about changing the appearance of my Mac's operating system. If you've read any of my earlier blogs, then you know that one of the few things I hate about Panther is the dull silver-grey menu bars that obliterated the white/grey stripes of Jaguar. I still use Jaguar via a Firewire boot drive on my Quicksilver Powermac and run it on my iBook and come back from it always amazed at how much happier I feel after using it compared to Panther. The more metallic, duller look of Panther almost overwhelms its better speed and feature set. Happier feelings were part of what brought me to the Mac. The changes to Panther's interface made me feel like I was sliding back into the same old, dark, depressive state I get into anytime I'm sitting at a Windows machine. I felt trapped between the bright fun of Jaguar and my desire for Panther's snappy, responsive feel.

Following intuiton, I did a search this morning for "Panther Jaguar interface" on Google and stumbled on a haxie at Unsanity.com named ShapeShifter as well as an OS X Jaguar Theme at ResExcellance.com made by MaarteenApple@Mad.Scientist.com. As we speak, I'm running ShapeShifter (which installs as a Preference Pane) with the Jaguar theme selected and loving it! My mind is still snapping to the fact that I'm running Panther and can let go of my negative feelings about it. This is going to be well worth the $20 it will cost to register Shape Shifter.

People always underestimate the importance of feelings about things and the emotional and mental attachments we make to them. It's often more important to well being and quality of life to let go of things that have negative connotations, no matter what the financial cost. Frankly, I had been thinking this morning of taking my Quicksilver back to Jaguar because of how I felt about Panther's color changes; but now I don't have to do that. I can have the best of both worlds, and I'm grateful to the folks out there who enabled it to happen.