Even back as far as System 9 we were obsessed with theming our Macs. BBX Mercury was one the hottest themes by legendary designer Max Rudberg. System 9 also had a decent built-in theme engine with custom highlights, desktop pictures, and even sounds. In 2013 I started playing around with Flavours by Interacto. My goal was to design a theme geared to post production professionals who preferred a darker GUI as many came from a Discreet Flint/Flame/Inferno world, like myself, and knew how helpful it was to work within a GUI that isn’t bright white like After Effects, Commotion Pro, and even the early commercial version of Nuke. For a brief period I was on the Nuke beta team to provide feedback. Most of my suggestions revolved around the GUI which was bright white with floating palettes. Take a look at any compositing setup these days. Everyone has gone dark, preferably charcoal. While on the After Effects beta team for quite some time I remember when we got them to add the first version of darkening the GUI with direct slide ability for the user to adjust for personal taste. That first incarnation’s darkest tones weren’t even half as dark as the AE GUI is today.
It’s been 10 years since I first released my free Flavours Post Pro theme. Post Pro was bundled along with hundreds of other user themes in their final release of Flavours 2.0. Unfortunately Flavours only went as far as Mac OS X Mavericks. Moving past Mavericks Apple tightened up the core system files causing theming to be impossible. So, we waited, and waited, and eventually in 2018 Apple released Mojave with a true Dark Mode. The latest version in Sonoma makes me smile as it’s quite similar to the Post Pro theme I designed back in 2014.