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Ever looked at FinalCut or Unreal Tournament and thought cool interface? Ever wanted to make your program or game look as good?

 

By using themes you can without any work! You can use Apple's wonderful Cocoa APIs, and Interface Builder just as you would building an Aqua application. You could even use Carbon.

How to

What you need
My supporting files
A theme

How to do it

• Creating the fake framework
  

  The HIToolbox framework in the supporting files is a fake. It consists solely of symbolic links to Apple's real framework. Now to create a themed framework, replace the Extras.rsrc file in the fake framework with your themed version of the same file.

  To create a theme you will need to use tools like ThemePark. To create a Extras.rsrc file for your framework see below.

• Adding the fake framework
  Add the framework to your application. Create a new "Copy Files" build phase, and ensure that it copies your framework into your resources.
• Using the framework
  To use the framework we make use of Unsanity's APELite code. You can use this for free, as long as you credit them. To start include the APELite.o object file in your project.

Then in your main file have something like this:

#import <Cocoa/Cocoa.h>
#import "APELite.h"
   
typedef CFBundleRef (*CFProcPtr)(CFStringRef ref);
CFProcPtr gOldRef = NULL;
CFBundleRef PatchCF(CFStringRef duration);

CFBundleRef PatchCF(CFStringRef ref)
{
    // slip in our own fake HIToolbox framework
    if(CFStringCompare(ref, CFSTR("com.apple.HIToolbox"), 0) == kCFCompareEqualTo)
    {
        CFBundleRef mainBundle = CFBundleGetMainBundle ();
        CFURLRef    url = CFBundleCopyResourceURL(mainBundle, CFSTR("HIToolbox"), CFSTR("framework"), NULL);

        return CFBundleCreate(NULL, url);
    }
	
    // call-through the original CFBundleGetBundleWithIdentifier()
    return gOldRef(ref);
}

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    gOldRef = APEPatchCreate(&CFBundleGetBundleWithIdentifier, &PatchCF);

    return NSApplicationMain(argc, argv);
}

This code patches the CFBundleGetBundleWithIdentifier function and replaces it with your own function PatchCF. The new function PatchCF then catches any attempt to load the HIToolbox framework and passes back your own fake framework.

Before and after shots of an old adventure game I wrote, using applewood2 guiKit by Andrew Leipurts to theme my game. Very little effort and a huge difference.

 

Often themes come packaged as GuiKits for ShapeShifter, without any direct access to Extras.rsrc. But you can access them with a little trouble.

• Get guiKitty from Unsanity here.
• Run your guiKit through it. You can get plenty of good themes from ResExcellence here.
• Using the Combine Resources with ResMerger script to combine it with Apple's Extras.rsrc. Don't worry it doesn't touch your files, the Extras.rsrc from the guiKit miss some resources for compression that you need to add back in.
• Now you have a workable Extras.rsrc to make your app look pretty.

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