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macososx-snow-leopardmacos-catalinamacos-mojave

Does The OS X Leopard Aqua Theme Still Exist In Modern macOS Catalina?

If you get the free app "SmartCVS" for macOS, you'll notice that the entire application looks and feels like something you'd see on OS X Leopard. I've seen this behavior before with a "Charles Web Proxy" version I lost 2 years ago. But this SmartCVS App helped me finally find this "Classic Mode" behavior again. Can I do something like this if I use a very old version of Xcode and set some values in the info.plist?

How can this old OS X app do this? enter image description here

Look at the GUI, this is exactly how everything looked when OS X Leopard was released.

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This does not feel like an app with just some GUI customizations, this feels like there's some dormant "Aqua skeuomorphic mode" buried somewhere in the dependencies of macOS Catalina.

Solution

  • no. apple removed snow leopard's theme files completely in 10.10 yosemite. smartcvs is a java applet, and because of that, it can't directly access the macOS theme, so they just added it themselves and never bothered to update it for new versions of macOS

    edit (3/4/21): i did some research (googling file names in the app) and i found that it uses a library called "quaqua" to replicate the theme. it's included in the app, named "quaqua.jar".