OK, this is a little distraction from foreignising translations. If you have a Mac and write Hebrew (or any right-to-left language) you’ll quickly discover that most of the word-processing software (i.e. from Apple or Microsoft) is not up to the task. One of the best solutions to this problem is to use Mellel which not only supports RTL languages extremely well, but also supports open-type fonts far more completely than most alternatives on the Mac.
Anyway, the point of this post is simply to note that Mellel retains a “brushed metal” look for its palettes which dates it to an earlier incarnation of Mac OS X. I’ve modified mine to make it fit (I think) better with Mac OS X 10.5, and I’m sharing the details here in case anyone else would be interested.
First, before and after shots. Here’s what the palettes look like “out of the box”:
And here is the updated version:
To achieve this, all you need to do is control- (or right-) click on the Mellel application icon and select “Show package contents” and then open the “Contents” and then “Resources” folders. Then copy the image files below into that folder, replacing the original versions (it’s a good idea to keep a copy of the originals). So here are the two images you need:
The files need to be named “titleBarH.png” and “titleBarN.png” in order to work correctly, so ensure that you’ve used those names.