When I last looked at iThemeOS, a small program to customize the icons on your Mac, there were several things about it that were not as they should be and that made the program bothersome to use, if not a real chore. Since then, version 2.0 is out, and includes many changes to the program. While these changes might seem small at a first glance, and for some might even pass unnoticed, they are quite big.

What it does
iThemeOS is a customization application that lets you change those icons and backgrounds that you couldn't change under normal circumstances. This ranges from the icons for the trash to the little badge that is placed on the icons of aliases to indicate their nature, and with this release to any file whatsoever on your computer.

It is not a 'theme' application, and does not totally change the look of the windows and dialogue boxes.

Working with it
Working with iThemeOS is quite straightforward. Everything is quite well structured and - if you are unsure where to start from, or where something is located - the main window has descriptions that let you know everything you need.

Once you have located an icon that you want to change, simply click on the big button next to it and select a new icon. Here is one of the big changes from version 1.0. While previously, the application only worked with Apple Icon Image files, in this version you can choose absolutely any file or folder, and - if it has a custom icon - iThemeOS will extract it from that file. This makes it very easy to use, regardless of the way you have your custom icons stored. Despite this new capability, the old icon Converter is still there, and can be used to convert supported image files into Apple Icon Image files for later use.

New Options
Besides the ability to automatically extract icons from just about any file whatsoever, this version of the program also lets you customize the icon of any file or folder on your computer. While this might not seem like much of a big deal, since you can do this yourself by hand, it is a rather big deal when it comes to icon Themes.

The Themes are a collection of custom icons that you can open and apply with just one click. Sure you can have a custom icon for a certain application; however, you can download a theme that has a many custom icons for many applications, and that all look good together, instead of having to apply each one by hand, you can set them all at once. Not only is this practical when it comes to other people's icon themes, but also if you yourself have several themes that you change between, with this option you can potentially save yourself a lot of headaches.

This option is particularly interesting since there are now icon collections available from the developer's website.

Icon collections
With this version, the developer has also created a special section of the iThemeOS website dedicated to icon collections where you can find great icons. Although there is no mention of this as far as I have seen within the program or within the documentation, the web site is out there.

The icons present here vary in look and feel, but they are all great. Each collection has two preview icons that you can see on the site, and you can also visit the site of the icon creator to find more icons.

Once you find some icons that you like, simply download the disk image, mount it and you will find an iThemeOS theme file in there that you can simply open and load up all the icons inside. Unfortunately, there is currently no way to preview the icons before they are applied, or apply them selectively, but this will no doubt be addressed in a future version.

The Good

With this new version, changing icons is as easy as it can be with the automatic processing of any file, and the new ability to customize any icon whatsoever makes it so much easier to work with themes.

The Bad

There is still no way to preview a theme before applying it, and there isn't even a preview included with the themes you download from the official site, but this will undoubtedly change soon.

The Truth

iThemeOS is a lot more structured and flexible than other similar programs such as CandyBar; however, the fact that you cannot preview themes is a bit of a disadvantage.

Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge: