Mac Themes Garden is dedicated to showcasing schemes made for Kaleidoscope and celebrating the customization and expressiveness it enabled on Classic Mac OS.
Feed
The RSS feed lists new themes as they're being added to the site. You
can subscribe to it using your favorite RSS reader.
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How it was made
The schemes showcased were initially gathered by scraping the Kaleidoscope Scheme Archive from the Wayback Machine around 2018 for use with my bot on Bluesky, Mastodon and later Cohost (RIP), following in the tracks of the defunct @kaleidoscopemac account on Twitter.
A few years later, I grew frustrated with the fact that the only "evidence" of these schemes were .gif files from the early 2000s. That's when I started (and hope to finish soon...) the task of "recording" every Kaleidoscope scheme at my disposal.
"Recording"
What I call "recording" here involves taking "live" screenshots of the
themes being used on a Mac OS 9.2 installation running in UTM and combing through each archive to properly record every scheme's informations
(author and release year).
This process is, to put it bluntly, a bit bonkers because it's mostly manual,
but I feel it is worth it.
Elsewhere
As mentioned above, I run a bot on Mastodon and Bluesky that posts a scheme from the archive every hour.
- @macthemes.garden on Bluesky
- @macthemes@erambert.me on Mastodon
And you can find me on my own website: damien's zone.
Prior arts & credits
I would be remiss if I didn't mention Harry's own archive which I only found out after having started this whole endeavor.
Special thanks to:
- The Internet Archive and their Wayback Machine, without whom all of this site's content would have been lost to time.
- Shurey's KSA Sampler, to replicate the Kaleidoscope Schemes Archive window look.
- UTM, used to virtualize Mac OS 9 and capture "raw" screenshots.
- Macintosh Repository and Macintosh Garden, for preserving Macintosh software.
- My friends Sage and Ticky for providing feedback on the design of the website.
- Everyone who enjoys (and enjoyed) seeing these schemes on their Mastodon, Bluesky and Cohost feed.
- You! For reading :)
Buttons!
These are the buttons of people or websites that helped with the project. Feel free to link to Mac Themes Garden using the button on the right!
Stats
As of May 6, 2025, there are 3,942 themes from 868 authors, and 2,703 of these themes have been recorded completely with desktop screenshots.