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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)."
Since iTunes 7 doesn't follow the rest of the Tiger application themes, this might have something to do with that theme. Maybe they're going to make all the apps consistent regardless of use? Or maybe they're going to introduce even more categories to use when designing the UI for your app so that you Windows themers can't copy the OS X theme? :P
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
Surely you mean iLuminous.
Anyway, how about a weekly round-up of Apple rumours rather than individual stories?
The new look will be translucent fur.
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You can't depend on your eyes, when your imagination is out of focus.
--Mark Twain
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.
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.
OS?
Enough with the technical terms, Pointdexter.
Just say its the clicky thing that lets you do stuff on the whatchamahoo.
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