over the years, the designers and programmers here on mars have come up with a slew of cool ideas, designs, and software. what started out as intrigue about the possibilities of changing the look and feel of the mac os x interface, turned into a raging passion. at the same time, our experience in web design and development made working on dashboard widgets and other html-based desktop apps a logical endeavor. while developing one theme in particular — then known simply as "crystal clear" — we discovered a way to incorporate transparency into mac windows. this work gradually led us up the rather steep learning curve for the main software architecture behind mac applications: cocoa. while learning cocoa, we've also dabbled a bit in applescript, unix shell scripts, and other languages... and this work produced some little apps as well. meanwhile, what started out as a design challenge did not diminish. some martians turned their talents to icon design, and others to developing images for decorating the desktop. what none of us anticipated was the strain that working with such teeny-tiny graphics would place on our eyes. martians have particularly keen vision, but the strength lies mostly in identifying distant objects — such as earth. by contrast, working on icons, buttons, and other widgets that can tweak the mac interface requires pixel-level attention. although design tools easily enable one to zoom in on such objects, one still needs to be able to take in the whole object at actual size. we can do it, but boy do we get headaches! most of the downloads on the marsthemes website can be used freely, but our two latest (and most complex) software tools — crystalclear interface and crystal black — require a license after the trial period.