Blogging about Apple products? The free Tigerpress WordPress theme from Smashing Magazine may be just what you’ve been looking for.

Taking a page from the design of Mac OS 10.4, Tigerpress resembles many of the key characteristics of Apple’s previous operating system. From the use of many true Apple icons (though scaled down in size) to the background and colors used in the theme, Tigerpress is as close of a representation to the true Tiger operating system as we’ve seen to date.

While there are a few other Apple related WordPress themes out there, the flow and overall high amount of polish on the Tigerpress theme really set it apart from the crowd. Using it truly gives you the experience that you are browsing through files and folders using the Finder.

However, I find a couple of things with this release to be very strange. Firstly, does anyone else find it odd that, nearly a year after the release of Leopard, the designers chose to build a Tiger styled WordPress theme? And secondly, are there really that many Mac bloggers out there who could directly benefit from using a theme like this?

Click this link to download it. Or view a preview image of the theme.

Upstart Blogger, a site dedicated to helping new bloggers succeed, recently added a brand new theme to their roster or strikingly minimalist designs. This time around, the new Moleskine theme comes across as a bit more mainstream, lacking most of the stark and cold design elements featured in their other designs like the famous Futurosity.

The idea behind the theme was to come up with a design that looked like a Moleskine notebook. You know, those famous black notebooks made famous by such literary geniuses as Hemingway. And the theme accomplishes this feat well. As a subtle gradient takes you from top to bottom, the typography is elegant and well placed–harkening back to the days when people actually wrote instead of typed.

But all is not without its problems. While the theme works flawlessly for most cases, there are issues with the Tag Cloud. Namely, sometimes the font can get a little too large–oozing out beyond its boundaries and infringing on other widgets’ space.

Nonetheless, the simplistic design of Moleskine more than makes up for this truly minor flaw. And, like everything else at Upstart Blogger, the theme is completely free.

Check out the demo. Or go ahead and give it a download.

Blog Oh! Blog has announced their newest theme–DailyPress. While it probably doesn’t have anything to do with my local newspaper of the same name, the DailyPress theme looks as though its trying to bridge the gap between those news/magazine themes that we’ve been seeing a lot of lately and the traditional blog.

And it does a pretty good job of it.

The layout is streamlined and utilitarian with a definite focus on the post of the day and the homepage includes built in links for sharing the latest post across all sorts of mediums. However, I doubt the usefulness of this feature since most people link directly to a blog post and not to the homepage.

As for the rest of the theme, its all pretty standard affair. Three 125px ad spots, some snazzy JavaScript tabbing effects here and there, and all of the standard WordPress sidebar widgets.

And it’s all completely free. So take it for a test run or go ahead and download it.

WordPress is easily one of the best blogging engines around. It’s got thousands of plugins, nearly as many themes, and its easy enough for anyone to use. But, for some time now, there hasn’t been any place to find all of the newest themes in one centralized location. That’s all about to change with the creation of the Theme Directory at wordpress.org/extend/themes/.

Taking a page from the highly successful Plugin Directory, the Theme Directory lets you search and browse through themes with ease. There’s even a “Preview” button to view a live demo of the theme in action. Is it perfect? Not yet. Is there a lot of content at this point? Nope. But I’m sure it will start to grow quicker than anyone can possibly imagine in due time.

According to the WordPress development blog, it’s as easy for developers to include a theme in the directory as it is for users to download one.

We’ve gone through great lengths to make this as painless as possible for theme authors. You don’t need to know anything about Subversion (our back end magic takes care of all that for you), just login with your WordPress.org username and password and go to the upload page. From there you upload your regular theme zip file and we take care of the rest.

Once you upload your new theme we do a few automated checks for some of the requirements for each theme. If we find one that you missed we’ll provide you an error and description of what needs to be fixed. When a theme upload has been accepted we’ll send you an email and put it in the queue to be reviewed, to make sure we didn’t miss anything. After the theme has been approved you’ll get another email letting you know that the theme is now live.

It’s about time the world’s most popular blogging platform finally has a place where everyone can go to check out great themes. Though, it may soak up some of the traffic that theme authors were used to getting on their own websites.

[Via Weblog Tools Collection]

The IE6 dilemma.

I’m not a professional web designer/developer, nor do I claim to be. Everything I ever learned about XHTML, CSS, and PHP is completely self taught. This means I know how to code for browsers like Firefox, Safari, and even IE7–but the way IE6 works boggles my mind.

I was reading a fun little post yesterday about why people still use IE6. It was a clever read with some interesting insight, though not backed up by facts whatsoever. Totally the author’s opinions–and they were well grounded. However, I tend to think that most people use IE6 because they have to, they don’t know any better, and Microsoft as well as professional web designers are enabling IE6 users by continuing to code for the almost decade old browser.

Whatever the reason, I made up my mind once and for all when editing the new theme that I would not support IE6. If it worked, it worked–but if it didn’t, I don’t give a damn.

Guess what? It didn’t work. Surprise, surprise.

I’m actively alienating potential readers, and I don’t care. It feels good.

Now, I know that no self respecting professional designer would scrap IE6 support once and for all–though a few are–but what is your reasoning behind keeping the support in? Don’t you think that if more and more websites stopped supporting IE6 users, the visitors would eventually get the hint and upgrade?

Yesterday, I discussed some of the reasons behind changing Contented Niche’s theme. Today, I’m going to take a closer look at what some of those changes entailed. Think of it as a kind of guide for simple things to look for when modifying a free WordPress theme.

The Dreamworks Redux theme was pretty good at stock, but I prefer to take the semi-custom route with my blogs. To be quite honest, this site isn’t yet earning enough to warrant a custom theme, and taking the time to do a little design work is a nice aside from my day job.

In any event, it was the color palette that first drew me to this particular theme. It was a splendid mix of blues and greys–two of my favorite colors. I thought they just worked for a blog that will ultimately be about making your niche content. Not nearly as gothic or dreary as the previous theme I was using.

Immediately, I knew I wanted the theme to be three columns. The blog has to be ad supported in some fashion, and I needed that third column to display advertisements. Since the 125px square is all the rage right now, heading for roughly a 250px to 260px third column seemed like the natural thing to do. So I shrunk the size of the main column (where the post and page content is located) and added the third column. The range I was shooting for was much too large, however, so I had to scale it back for better usability on smaller screens. Obviously, the header, background, and footer needed to be widened, and that was accomplished in about ten minutes with Photoshop.

From there, it was all about minor cosmetic changes. I replaced the sidebar and footer headers with straight text instead of graphics–and I also improved the typography to match the flow of the theme. I scrapped the calendar icons on the left in favor of inline dates. And I borrowed the comment styles from Vinh Le’s site, the Blog Design Blog. I also made some changes to the comments, allowing them to alternate colors depending on the post count. Other minor changes were made throughout.

So what’s the lesson you should take home from this? Always make at least a few tweaks to whatever free theme you decide to use. If you have even the slightest skill with XHTML, PHP, and CSS, put what you know to work. There are countless resources on how to edit WordPress themes–so take advantage of them. I knew next to nothing about web design/development when I first started blogging last year, and now I’ve fully customized several themes and hope to release a few designs of my own by the end of the year. Practice makes perfect.

What are some changes you’ve made to free themes? Were they major or minor, and how long did they take?

But she’s so young.

Frequent visitors will notice that Contented Niche got a facelift today. I figured that if I was ever going to modify the theme for my blog, I’d better do it sooner rather than later. You run into all kinds of branding and confusion issues later if you change the theme once a blog is already truly popular–and I didn’t want to go through the headaches.

The previous theme was based on Charred by Jason of WPElements. It was a beautiful theme, truly. A bit dark at times, though, and I didn’t think it fit as well with the idea of my blog. Also, I was tired of battling it out with PNGs and IE 6. In any event–it wasn’t working out as smoothly as I hoped.

So now here we are. The new theme is a very heavily modified version of the Dreamworks Redux theme by Vinh of the Blog Design Blog. Thanks goes out to commenter Liam for introducing Vinh’s blog to me. I’d not heard of it before I checked out Liam’s site.

In any event, it was the colors and the typography that drew me to the Dreamworks Redux theme. Bold, beautiful, and a great starting point for what I hoped to achieve. I’m not a designer, after all, but I do know enough to be able to turn an existing theme into one that I find useful and attractive. While Dreamworks Redux is great in stock form, I think it truly shines now. But more on what exactly I did to edit the theme in another post.

There is, however, still more work to be done. I have yet to modify that big blank space in the header and I have some ads to put up here and there. Oh, and about that IE 6 support. Well, the site still looks like crap in Microsoft’s tired old browser–but at least it’s still functional.

So what do you think? Do you like the new theme or the old theme better?