When Greg Landweber released Kaleidoscope 1.5, he started supporting third party color schemes. This made it possible for anybody to make their own schemes and change their MacOS interface completely. But, unfortunately, not all scheme designers were careful enough to make sure their schemes were bug free.

To help scheme authors create schemes that had less bugs and would run more smoothly, SchemeChecker was released in June 1997. The very first version enabled you to set the unset bits (resource flags) on resources that were misconfigured, and didn't provide many other options.

Since it initial release, a large number of useful features have been added to SchemeChecker. You can have SchemeChecker check your scheme for missing resources or use its reports to help you determine what resources may not be used at all.

Starting with version 1.4, SchemeChecker is fully compatible with the new, complex scheme format in Kaleidoscope 2.x schemes. SchemeChecker also allows schemes built for earlier versions of Kaleidoscope to contain the new Kaleidoscope 2.x resources, such as desktop patterns, window colors or cursors, as long as the resource IDs or functionality don't overlap.

SchemeChecker enables you to check all the schemes in any folder (including subfolders), just one scheme or several schemes which can be selected from a list. The results can easily be exported to a TEXT file which you can open in any text editor.

SchemeChecker is primarily a utility for scheme designers, but if you are experiencing strange, unexplained problems with your mac: freezes, crashes etc., and you have Kaleidoscope installed, running SchemeChecker on your favorite schemes can help you figure out what is causing the problems. If SchemeChecker reports any errors and you believe these errors are caused by the currently active scheme, you should save the report to disk and mail a copy to the scheme's author. You should not try to fix anything on your own unless you know what you are doing. Trying to fix any problems reported on your own may lead to even bigger problems.