A theme provides a group of multi-media resources for enhancing displays in a graphical user interface to an operating system of a computer according to a topic of the theme. The theme's resources are periodically updated by retrieving updating resources from a remote computer at which the updating resources are stored by a theme provider, so as to provide continually updating enhancements to the graphical user interface display consistent with the theme's topic. The theme's resources can include hypertext templates which define the graphical user interface displays as hypertext pages, allowing the theme to provide a wide variety of enhancements to the displays including text, graphics, hyperlinks, and software components, among others. The theme also enhances a graphical user interface with a view port that plays live or locally cached information from the Internet in each of a plurality of categories, by adding a category for the theme so as to play information from the theme's provider in the view port.