Originally published at: AppBITS: RetroMac and Reframe Let You Theme Your Mac Like It’s 1999 - TidBITS
macOS 27 Golden Gate is here, but you say you really want Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard back on your Apple silicon Mac? That’s not possible, but with the free RetroMac app, you can theme parts of your Mac to look like the Snow Leopard days.
In fact, Snow Leopard is just the start—RetroMac also offers themes for System 6, Mac OS 9, the initial Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah, and Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. To remind yourself just how good we Mac users had it, there are also themes for various versions of Windows, not to mention OS/2. NeXTSTEP might be more interesting. Themes include period-accurate desktops, icons, window chrome, and pointers.
More functional are RetroMac’s Dock replacements, which swap the current Dock for something appropriate to the theme, such as Mac OS 9’s Control Strip or the Windows 95 taskbar. RetroMac also offers CRT shaders that make your lovely Retina display look like an ancient monitor. Your eyes won’t thank you, but if you’re into that kind of visual punishment, Retro TV mode lets you watch YouTube or streamed video through a little CRT TV window on your desktop. A $10 Pro upgrade provides many more CRT shaders along with simulated glitches and crashes.
RetroMac developer Maik Klotz has extended the time you can spend walking down memory lane with the release of Reframe, a full-fledged Web browser that lets you choose the window chrome of numerous old browsers. You can even set it to open URLs from the past using the Wayback Machine. Below, you’re looking at Safari 1.0 showing TidBITS from 2003, using the original Mac OS X theme. If you’re a glutton for punishment, you can make Reframe throttle your connection to modem speeds.
I can’t think of any practical reason to use RetroMac or Reframe, but the effort put into recreating these old interfaces is insanely great. Or perhaps just insane. Both apps are as much art projects as pieces of software. But I’ll stick with the present, thank you.
