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Apple's Illuminous (Aqua v2) to Compete with Aero
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)."
Ok, can we do something about these headlines that do absolutely nothing to explain what they're talking about? It might as well have said "Apple's new FSM (formerly Buddha) to replace Jeebus", because that would have just as much sense. I know we're supposed to RTFA, but the headline is supposed to at least explain it enough that we WANT to.
How Jaded Are You?
What was that about MacOS being boring and unoriginal?
Seriously though.. I wouldn't be surprised if this was true. Leopard has a while to go and Apple will pull out "one more thing" before developement is done.
... Apple has rarely been one to simply sit on a good product and not try to continue to make it better/newer. This may or may not be a good thing. Apple is also one to sit on a bad product, and let it stagnate. The Finder desperately needs attention, and improvements to it could profoundly improve the MacOS experience. Darwin (the core of MacOS) is also a similar case. I think most would agree that Aqua is very good already, and as such, Apple should focus its efforts elsewhere. (In the case of Darwin, they should embrace a successful open source *nix instead of wasting their efforts. However, I think they will stick with Darwin so that they have the opportunity to force DRM down our throats.)Too many critical things have been ignored for far too long, while Apple implements features and eye-candy which often provide no utility. Features are not necessarily a bad thing, but Apple keeps on adding new ones without ever really finishing any of them. MacOS today is a mess, and has none of the consistency or polish that it once did. As a *nix, it is also half-baked, and severely lacking.
I keep telling myself, "I have had enough" with each release, but 10.5 may be the last. (Though, I hope not, since the Cocoa/NeXT dev model is excellent.) If Apple does not embrace a more OSS friendly (read: community friendly) development model though, I feel that they will relegate themselves to irrelevance. Similar things can be said about their hardware business--currently every computer they sell is priced outside of > 90% of the market. Not that they are not competitive on price; they simply ignore almost the entire market. This is not sustainable...