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As of right now, to change your "theme" or Graphical User Interface (GUI)—you have to jailbreak your iOS device and download another third-party application. Almost every phone / Mobile OS I've ever used and almost every phone / Mobile OS I've ever heard of, seen, studied—has had the ability to change the look and feel of your general, overall experience—right from the settings menu, right out of the box.
Apple, is a "right out of the box" type of company, yet there are tons of things Apple has yet to implement. We all know that Apple loves to take It's sweet sweet time when implementing features, so they can make sure there's always going to be something to throw in the next version / release.
But, isn't it quite inconvenient for them knowing that they're lacking a "crucial for some" feature, that has been around since I bought my first little crappy Virgin Mobile cell phone back like 12 years ago..? Almost every device wether it be Mobile, or Desktop, has the ability to skin or "theme."
The ability was there (STILL by a third-party software developer) to skin their older Operating System "10.4 Mac OS X Tiger"—yet removed in the next release. No-one has made another attempt to update that application for newer Mac OS X versions either. It's a shame. The app was called "Shapeshifter" by Panic Software. No-one has even taken another crack at it I don't believe.
Right now on OS X, all I can do is:
- Change my highlights to different basic colors
- Switch between Graphite and Aqua schemes for only like two different tiny sections of my entire interface..
- Desktop photo... (haha)
- Change icons (but automatically only with "CandyBar")
Windows has always had the ability to skin. Since WIndows 1 or whatever it was, you've been able to select from a (even though most were crappy) huge range of different skins. Starting in Windows 7 they brought Aero, which in It's own right is amazing on It's own, and there's no real reason to want to skin the crap out of it like you did prior with "Windowblinds." Around the time of WIndows 7, they even started hosting their own theme site. Simple, but hell, they were themes! Even Google Chrome and all of the other browsers have themes now.
You could customize every aspect of the Graphical User Interface from the Start Button to small accents all around the UI. All the cool kids that were either hackers or gamers, always had a sick theme going on all over the place. Icons, and all.
If someone finds an app that has been hiding from me, that allows you to skin Mac OS X, please let me know.
My final thought on this.. Is that Apple has a lot of pride. They simply don't believe they need to do allow people to change it much. They don't want people with crappy themes to disgrace them quite yet. Think about it. They've been taking huge INFLUENCES from Jailbreakers.. half of the past 2 MAJOR RELEASES of iOS have been features that Jailbreakers already implemented, and that people already dreamed up and asked for. Not just visual either, real functionality. Sure, most of the awesome ones seemed obvious and crucial, but come on.
Eventually they will cave. They can't go forever without allowing some "Desktop Customization."
