Please read the snarky history of Halloween.

It is not about Satan, and was not made by Satanists.

Please people… This is extremely ignorant. Halloween was CREATED by the Christians as a way of taking over the original Pagan holiday.

A holiday devoted to honoring the dead!

Why? Because the end user should have control of the desktop. To change my theme without asking is invading my space and wasting my time when I want to put things back to normal.

Would I be offended by a halloween theme? Not really. I’d probably change it if I could. I would be bothered that the desinger of an application installed on my desktop thought they had the right to change my settings that I took the time to personalize.

They way I see it, the web is their space to do what they want with, my computer is my space to do what I want with. They don’t want me to change their web site, thus it’s illegal to to so, I don’t want them to change my computer.

In fact, somebody out there is probably offended by the use of purple in their default icon. Ah, how about people who suffer from tritanopia color blindness (can’t see blue or yellow). They could get offended that they can’t see the icon in it’s true color, and they can only see it in red. There’s no end to the offense anything can cause.

I can understand if they put an upside down crucifix, or a picture of satan or something. but a jack-o-latern used as a TextMate icon? Give me a break. These people have no lives.

I liked the theme, though the dock icon change confused me more than a few times when Cmd-Tabbing. I wish I could have the cobwebs on my empty workspace always, it’s a fun metaphor.

How can you honestly take something like that so seriously, I’d say you’re wound way too tight if you do.

So what could Macromates have done differently? Make the skin optional. Most of their users probably got a big kick out of it.

(What would be most important to me in TextMate is if they changed the stupid ‘Undo’ scheme to ‘block undos’.)