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Apple's Illuminous (Aqua v2) to Compete with Aero

Posted by Hemos on from the the-rumour-mill-starts-twitching dept.

tovarish writes "According to Apple Gazette Apple will replace Aqua with a new name (and hopefully looks) called Illuminous. Is Jobs scared of Aero?, does it make sense to go for a new UI now?, has Aqua run out of steam? The answers will probably come later next month(year)."

9 of 377 comments (clear)

  1. scared? by toQDuj · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I've never really considered Steve Jobs to be fazed by anything really.

    He knows he has a decent group of followers, ever growing in these times, and he must bless his decision to stick with providing a complete solution instead of just an OS, every day.

    All in all, I don't think he should be scared of this, because it is not only about the looks of the interface. It also depends on whether operations will continue to produce the desired result fast and reliable. Mac OS has the advantage there.

    B.

    --
    Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
  2. Aqua (2001-???) by richdun · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Is Jobs scared of Aero?, does it make sense to go for a new UI now?, has Aqua run out of steam?

    How old is Aqua? Perhaps they're just wanting to update it to add new features, take advantage of dual/quad/bajillion core CPUs, etc., etc. A lot has happened since Aqua debuted, and Apple has rarely been one to simply sit on a good product and not try to continue to make it better/newer.

    1. Re:Aqua (2001-???) by Bastian · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Indeed, Aqua has been tweaked at least a little bit in every release of OS X since 10.1. As you mentioned, Quartz has gone through some major overhauls. Apple tweaking Aqua yet again is not news. It doesn't indicate a response to Aero, it just indicates that Apple is doing what Apple always does.

    2. Re:Aqua (2001-???) by squiggleslash · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I don't know about that, but I do know that Aqua has been undergoing a lot of "enhancements" that, over time, have detracted quite a bit from the look.

      Jaguar had the first "Brushed metal" windows. This looked "ok", but still a little strange. Panther then downplayed a lot of the pin-striped look, which helped make the UI a little less distracting, but at the same time also made the look rather less attractive. Tiger has gone further, with squared off windows and the (non-brushed) metal look.

      Each iteration has undermined the over-all elegance of the visuals (though in Jaguar's defense, they did make the buttons look more elegant.) That's not to say they weren't necessary, early Mac OS X was so full of stripes and other distractions that it was even more horrible to use than the poor graphics accelleration resulted in. But there's little doubt that a simple comparison of Jaguar, sans-metal, and Tiger, shows the former with a much more attractive looking (whether usable or not) UI than the latter.

      This rumour doesn't surprise me really. What'll be interesting is to see whether it's a complete break with Aqua, or just an upgrade. I seriously doubt this has anything to do with Aero though: Steve Jobs is going to be concerned with the look of Mac OS X regardless of whether they have ten competitors or none.

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
    3. Re:Aqua (2001-???) by WhiteWolf666 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Well, there are a series of serious problems with Finder.

      Serious Issues:
      1. No write access on remote FTP sites. That's pretty ugly. KDE/Gnome/Explorer can all do this, why not Finder? On OS X, default, to upload files to an FTP site you have to use the Terminal; and the way finder works it makes it look like a permissions issue rather than an inbuilt limitation.
      2. Nasty locking on loss of network shares. This can render your laptop unusable unless you are careful to eject all network shares each and every time you suspend. Loss of network connectivity should not cripple your desktop. KDE/Gnome/Explorer get around this by using multiple instances; a particular Konqueror window might freeze, but you don't loose everything.
      3. Locking issues on copying large numbers of files. This can slow Finder down to a crawl, even though everything else is perfectly responsive.
      Minor Issues:
      1. Copying a Folder to a directory with a Folder of the same name results in the existing contents of that Folder being overwritten, rather than the merged contents of the two Folders. This makes it annoying to move around large trees of files, if you like to "sync" things manually.
      2. No Packet CD-RW support. It's _really_ nice to have re-writable CDRWs that work like large floppy disks. Makes life easier. Not essential, though. More worrying is Finder's inability to not finalize a CD; sometimes I like to have multisession disks.
      3. Serious performance issues with using Spotlight in Finder Windows. I've got a Dual G5 2.7 Ghz, and a MacBook Pro. Why is Spotlight on these Finder windows so slow? Why do I have to type one character at a time, and then wait for the search? Why do I have to wait 5 seconds to backspace over my typos? It's not like I'm running the bottom of the barrel configurations here.
      4. Flaky MIME type recognition. No matter how many times I try to force ALL pdfs to open on Preview, I keep finding pdfs that open on Acrobat. Acrobat takes so long to open, so I really want that to be my secondary option; but no, it doesn't work like that.

      For the most part, these issues aren't that severe, and (except for the FTP issue) only affect power users like me. Most people don't know (or ceonceptualize) multisessions CDs, and most people don't use network shares that IT doesn't setup for you. Still, it's very annoying that these issues have persisted through 4 iterations of OS X, and I'd much rather see someone work these out then a new version of Aqua.

      Finder is stagnating, and it really is pretty crappy compared to some of the alternatives out there. KDE's Konqueror, with KIO-Slaves is _vastly_ superior.

      --
      WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
  3. Is Jobs scared of Aero? by pubjames · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Is Jobs scared of Aero?

    From what I can see, quite the opposite.

    Apple is I believe going to launch the next version of OSX at the same time as the public starts to get its hands on Vista. Vista is just catching up with OSX in terms of interface. It will really piss on Microsoft's fire if the "Joe Public" press review the next version of OSX at the same time as Vista and conclude that OSX is better - from a PR perspective that will be a disaster for Microsoft because it will make their claims about how Vista is the greatest OS ever much weaker. (Keep in mind that Microsoft has not yet started its marketing bandwagon rolling for Vista).

  4. Competing with XGL by miyako · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I realize that for the majority of the market, apple is competing with Vista and Aeroglass, but I think that Aqua also needs to start competing with XGL and Compiz/Beryl.
    The primary desktop in my house runs Linux, but I also have an iBook running Tiger. For a long time OS X was a lot prettier than either KDE or Gnome, and people were forever trying to emulate the Aqua look and feel on Linux. A lot of stuff like web browsing and stuff I used to do on my iBook, simply because the GUI was nicer to look at.
    Lately though, I'd say for the last year or 18 months, I've been running XGL and Beryl (and compiz before Beryl forked off) and I would say that my desktop now running XGL and Beryl looks much nicer than my iBook running Aqua.

    --
    Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
  5. Re:Please by ceoyoyo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I don't want anyone trying to implement a revolutionary new interface metaphor in my daily OS until someone demonstrates one that's actually useful in a research setting somewhere. It's easy to talk about abstracted views and bridging desktop and network applications, but what does that mean?

    As for gestures and speech, OS X has had speech from day one (I don't know anyone who uses it, except one guy who turned it on then tried to give a presentation that way -- hilarious). You can have gestures too, but they don't seem to be very practical. They usually get turned off after the initial wow factor wears off as well.

  6. Re:Aqua by Bastian · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Ah, I see what you're saying. I thought you meant menu changing within an application, not among them.

    I've encountered the same thing. I'd posit that it can be annoying to people who aren't used to it, but it's not necessarily a huge UI failing for OS X, and many people find it useful. Personally, I like that Mac OS makes a distinction between a window and an application; it allows me to declutter my workspace a bit by closing some windows without losing the ability to use their apps, and it allows me to close an app's last window without having to, say, wait for Word to take five eons to relaunch when I decide to open another document. It's not really an instance of Mac OS misbehaving so much as Mac OS not behaving the same way that Windows does - and I don't like the idea that every UI on the planet has to behave like Windows.

    I could see arguing that, if you close the last window of an app, OS X should automatically switch to the next application in the queue. I'd want to see it in practise, though, because I'm not sure whether it would really be more or less confusing to users.