Tired of gray and light blue. Crystal Black lets you add a little color to your windows — colors of your own choice. You can also change the background color used for various areas of text in your apps. Any color you choose can incorporate transparency if you wish, whether a given app offers that option or not. New in Crystal Black 1. A Unified Interface Crystal Black applies an elegant, minimalist interface across all your apps. Keep it simple with Crystal Black's unified rendering of buttons, toolbars, tabs, boxes, scrollbars, and more. Enjoy dozens of custom modifications the theme provides for third-party applications, Apple apps, and system frameworks. Why should search boxes be the only text fields that get that smooth, rounded-corner look. Quit hunting for the text tools you need, which each app provides—or don't provide—in different menus. This function provides easy access to the installer for the. Use a simple menu item function to switch among the 10 stunningdesigned with Crystal Black users in mind. Always have ready access to the full power of the Cocoa text system, no matter what application you're working in. Pop in a ruler, table, list, etc. There are a few apps I've taught to behave a bit different than they're used to. By default, the toolbars of an application's Preferences window can't be customized. With Crystal Black, you can make toolbar items display large or small, with text or without, just as you can with all other toolbars. To provide the most consistent interface possible, the theme installs numerous custom graphics. The latest release version 1. It does not support earlier versions of Lion. Note: Always read the system requirements for particular releases of Crystal Black, since they only support certain versions of Lion. Or, in the case of Version 1. Crystal Black Theme You can download Crystal Black and use it freely for 15 days. Before starting your trial, take a look at the briefor refer to it during your trial if questions arise. Crystal Black can damage your system if not used properly. Crystal Black Freebies The Crystal Black Theme provides superior usability for its glossy black interface elements. The elements themselves are beautiful, but not practical without the underlying software that makes the theme work. Still, I released three standalone implementations of Crystal Black that work fine without the theme as a whole. You can download these from the Mars Themes page. The Clear Crystal Icon Set was designed for use with Crystal Black. You can download it from the Mars Themes page and use it freely, with or without Crystal Black. Note: This is an abbreviated version of the User's Guide. The complete version is available as a. Manage Graphics Lets you reinstall application graphics when needed — for example, when you install updates to iTunes or Safari. Osx dark theme Desktop Picture Gives you access to the included set of osx dark theme. Toggle Crystal Docs Icons Lets you install or uninstall thewhich was originally designed to complement the Crystal Osx dark theme theme. Reload Crystal Black Agent Can be used to force applications to reload Crystal Black. This function is designed for use on Lion and Mountain Lion, where it can be useful at times if applications aren't loading Crystal Black. Text Tools Provide quick access to commonly used panels and functions when working with text. The same tools can be accessed from a contextual menu. Options Panel Set custom colors. The two color wells let you customize the background of some text areas and for tables and outline views. This setting provides a contextual menu that lets you customize virtually all application toolbars, whether they offer the option or not. Show application's icon in menubar. Replace long application names with their icons in the app's menubar. Use window and view transparency. This option lets you choose between having semi-transparent windows and views, or making everything opaque. All of these are turned off by default: Mail By default, Mail splits the message viewer horizontally, with the preview area at the bottom. This option lets you override this. This option lets you see twice as many. Finder The first option lets you use transparent colors and images in the background of Finder's icon view. The other lets you hide the titles of images in icon view. It tries to ensure that pages are still readable and usable, but this is experimental, so send feedback for pages you find that don't work right. This tab lets you can maintain a list of applications that should not load Crystal Black. By disabling an app, Crystal Black still loads a minimal set of text-color instructions to maintain readable text contrast for buttons and other widgets. Do not attempt to uninstall Crystal Black manually. These defaults and files are restored by the uninstall program. You can also run the standalone application, CrystalBlackUninstaller. If you have the previous version of Crystal Black v. Crystal Black doesn't load into apps built with Apple's older Carbon frameworks. License Information You can use Crystal Black freely for 15 days. Crystal Black is Copyright 2010-2012, Leland Scott, Musings from Mars. osx dark theme Known Bugs Please report any bugs that you find, with as much detail as possible:. Carbon apps Text stays black on some kinds of buttons. Specific app incompatibilities: Springy crashes when closing a window in icon mode. On Lion, iTunes crashes when terminated. Some Apple status-bar items Any of the Apple menu extras e. Text rulers On Snow Leopard, Crystal Black's white tab widgets on the text editing ruler turn black when dragged. In addition, Finder's scrolling can be slow in list view when browsing very large folders. Slowness depends on which options you have selected for this view. Among the problems are that they cannot handle any functions that require authentication or involve changing Crystal Black preferences, so those functions are disabled in those apps. For More Information For more details about Crystal Black, refer towhich describes in detail the inner workings of the software. You can also by email. Removes Safari from the list of excluded apps on Mountain Lion, as the latest version of Safari seems compatible with Crystal Black. Separate free utilities are available for theming iTunes 10 and iTunes 11. Addresses osx dark theme bug that prevents users from moving the iTunes window. Users can now switch between the Black Gloss and Smooth Black styles. The menu extra graphics for TextExpander are removed, since that app gives the user a variety of options already. In addition, this version disables use of this function in the Finder, TextEdit, and Preview. This update includes several new features, as well as numerous enhancements and bug fixes. Also themes the canvas color and the color for selection and drag colors in table cells, and adds tab controls to cells' contextual menu. Users of older versions who want the Crystal Black skin can download the software and use that. Note: This works only on Snow Leopard. This update refines implementation of functions introduced in 1. This problem seems to have mostly affected Lion users. This update fixes a couple of bugs introduced in 1. This release contains a variety of enhancements, new features, and bug fixes. It does not support earlier versions of Lion. Crystal Black seems to slow my system down, and launching apps is slower. If your system seems sluggish when running Crystal Black, your Mac may not meet or exceed the minimum system requirements see that section. If your system meets the system requirements, it will still take a second or two for each window to be themed. However, subsequent windows will be themed pretty much instantly. I can't read the Apple statusbar clock text, because it's black. If you're using Snow Leopard, this is not a problem, but the solution doesn't work well on Lion. Any of the Apple menu extras e. The solution is to use some alternative, free menubar apps that provide the same information. You can find these by searching on or other sources. I usewhich has both a free and paid version. However, one free replacement that has osx dark theme reviews iswhich lets you change the text color. Why don't I see custom graphics for my applications, like Safari or iTunes. Crystal Black uses a Spotlight search to find your applications. Some of my menubar icons are black, and I can't read them against Crystal Black's menubar. In the current release, it provides white variants for 24 apps, and the upcoming release will boost that number to 30. But there are hundreds more that users may rely on. It may be that the white graphics for some items were not updated when you installed Crystal Black see question below about custom graphics. Crystal Black isn't loading into Googlebut it used to. I don't know what Google did to Chrome, but you're right. Chrome no longer loads either of the Mars Themes. If you're using Chrome, you may also have problems with black text showing up on black buttons. If you do, you may be able to fix this by loading a custom style sheet. In general, I don't think Google does a good job in supporting Chrome for the Mac. Use Safari instead — after all, Chrome borrowed Apple's open-source browser engine,to build the guts of Chrome. Some applications, like GarageBand, don't seem to get themed by Crystal Black. Why are so many functions in the Crystal Black menu disabled in TextEdit and Preview. For some reason, the Lion versions of these applications can't handle any tasks like these. Note: The problem doesn't affect users on Snow Leopard. After uninstalling Crystal Black, why do I still have the Clear Crystal icons installed on my Mac. You must uninstall the Clear Crystal icons before uninstalling Crystal Black. If you didn't, you can either reinstall Crystal Black and uninstall them, or you can download and use the free app from the MarsThemes website. Note: Starting with Crystal Black 1. If you use a lot of apps of this type, Crystal Black probably isn't going to work well for you. Applications built with non-native Mac software frameworks do not load Crystal Black at all, or don't load it properly. If you're using Apple's built-in statusbar items and can't read one of them, try searching for a free alternative. Many such apps exist and have more features to boot. For example, Osx dark theme iCal has a free version that lets you modify the text color of the clock display. Check the app's options to see if it provides any non-black, alternative menu icons. Many apps let you choose among several possible menubar icons. Examples are TextExpander, iStatMenus, YouControl Tunes, ClawMenu, Butler, and iKey. If you must use an app that doesn't run properly with Crystal Black loaded, try disabling Crystal Black for that ap p. When disabled or on Lionthough, it works just osx dark theme. To see if Crystal Black is causing any systemwide problems on your Mac, try turning it off before uninstalling Crystal Black. This action will relaunch the current app, but you'll need to log out and back in to unload Crystal Black from all the other applications you have running. You need to uninstall these before uninstalling Crystal Black; otherwise, they won't get uninstalled. Note that if this happens, you can use the free standalone utilities for this purpose, available on the MarsThemes website. Besides saving development time, this also means fewer graphics, less code, and less download time.
