Apple's Illuminous (Aqua v2) to Compete with Aero 377
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)."
scared? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Who's responding to who? (Score:4, Insightful)
Every screenshot I've seen of Aero looks remarkably...Aqua-ish. Not in the details, but I can't help thinking that someone at Microsoft took a look at Aqua, and decided that it was probably time to overhaul Windows' interface as well; not to mention doing the same sort of graphics-card offloading that Apple did with Quartz Extreme.
I suppose claiming that Apple's "Illuminous" is a response to Microsoft's Aero, and Aero is itself at least partially response to Aqua, are not necessarily mutually exclusive. It's sort of the way of these things to respond to each other, back and forth, over and over.
Re:Who's responding to who? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Who's responding to who? (Score:5, Interesting)
In other words, while MS has player catch up, Apple has had plenty of time to think on the "Next big thing". Why wouldn't they improve Aqua? They've the lead for years so if someone can do it, that's apple.
It's a interesting thing that they're doing it but saying that they're "scared" is stupid. It's microsoft who should be scared of needing to play catch up with the next Mac OS interfaces.
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Quick tip: next time shove the corncob up your ass lengthwise instead of sideways.
To the extent that your reply was itself anything but a string of unsupported insults, the remaining two words ('market share') don't automatically lend themselves to the intepretation you suggest in your second round of verbal diarrhea.
As for evidence that Apple's market share is growing in consumer space, Apple's market share numbers have been growing steadily for a couple of years. Granted they're still only around 4
Re:Who's responding to who? (Score:4, Insightful)
- Introduced a brand-new OS
- (as you mentioned) Accelerated their GUI
- Refreshed the look and feel several times
- Kept up with security patches (and no, not rushing just the DRM patches like Microsoft does)
- Migrated to a new platform (PPC -> x86) while maintaining backwards compatibility
- Introduced two new video NLE suites
- Introduced an office suite
- Introduced an IDE rivaling that of Microsoft's
- Introduced a new method of file browsing (love it or hate it, Finder is unique and interesting)
During that same time period, while Microsoft's upgrades to office suites have consisted largely of upgrading the GUI (ooooh, new screen-estate sucking toolbars renamed to Ribbons) while yanking key selling features (VBA).
Microsoft is innovating how, exactly?
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It helps (Score:3, Insightful)
So just like with the iMac craze a number of years back, updating the look and feel of an OS every now and then, is a good idea from a commercial point of view.
Re:It helps (Score:4, Insightful)
New Name (Score:4, Funny)
Or maybe Aquality.
Or Aquainess.
This could be the least content of any story I have read.
Re:New Name (Score:4, Funny)
This could be the least content of any story I have read.
You must be new here.
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Pinstripes (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, how I hope it's true...
Re:Pinstripes (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Pinstripes (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Pinstripes (Score:5, Interesting)
Nah, it'd look like this [blogspot.com]! : )
(Of course, a wallpaper showing the circuitry on the inside of my iMac would be really cool... I wish I could find one.)
Re:Pinstripes (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Pinstripes (Score:5, Funny)
The new look will be translucent fur.
* * * * *
You can't depend on your eyes, when your imagination is out of focus.
--Mark Twain
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J
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Brushed Metal is nonexistent in recent Leopard seeds. Even the WWDC build hinted at this with iChat now sporting the 'unified toolbar' look. Now iCal is the same way, and certain other apps are either unified or iLife-style unified.
There aren't any massive sweeping changes -- just an evolutionary move -- the kind where you can tell from a screenshot whether someone is running Leopard, Tiger, Panther, Jaguar, or Puma. Pinstripes are still there, but for fuck's sake they're like 90% white
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Aqua (2001-???) (Score:5, 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.
Re:Aqua (2001-???) (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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You weren't around in the 89-95 period then. Apple rested on it's System7 laurels as it was so far ahead for years. By about 98 even Widows had caught up. Just sayin'.
Re:Aqua (2001-???) (Score:4, Insightful)
Those of us who are not complete macintosh fanboys will have noticed that this is the time at which Apple dropped from having something like 11% market share to having about 3% market share. There were two reasons. One is that Apple computers were still running on 68k processors well into the age when the intel chips were whipping Motorola's ass. The other is that System 7 was a festering piece of shit. No Apple operating system has ever been as unreliable as System 7. While Windows was going towards protected mode all the time (NT did it already; ME doesn't use real mode, which is why compatibility was hurt; Windows 98 is MOSTLY 32 bit) Apple was still using their MMU (when present, which was not always) for virtual memory, and virtual memory alone. A lack of memory protection made MacOS as unreliable as AmigaDOS, with applications stepping on each other constantly. The difference is that AmigaDOS can be rebooted in just a few seconds, even from floppies.
If you remember Mac OS 7 with nostalgia then you clearly have some sort of memory disability.
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Re:Aqua (2001-???) (Score:4, Insightful)
Not to pick on you specifically, but just what is it people expect the Finder to do? Is it a performance issue, or just a dislike regarding the way the interface works?
I'd also question the need for Apple to embrace a more OSS-friendly dev model. They seem to be doing just fine the way they're going now, even better than they were when they released 10.1.
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Re:Aqua (2001-???) (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Aqua (2001-???) (Score:4, Informative)
If they could maintain maintain a competitive *nix, this wouldn't be as much of an issue. Look how much development goes into just the Linux kernel; Apple can't even hope to compete on a technical basis, and will only fall further and further behind. This means things like scalable SMP, efficient threading, network file systems, disk drivers (NCQ anyone?), networking, and many other technical things which while not sexy have a great impact on performance. This work simply isn't getting done. Their low-level OS effort would have a much greater benefit if expended on the GUI and interface instead; these are the areas which distinguish MacOS. Microsoft can't even competing with Linux in these areas, and Apple has but a small fraction of their resources.
As it is now, there are an immense amount of bugs, not to mention very poor performance, and it is basically impossible to even contribute fixes to Apple, which is very frustrating. Apple's uncooperative attitude is simply not productive.
Please (Score:3, Interesting)
Shut up already!
Re:Please (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
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Well, throwing it away completely would be a bad idea. There are many ideas there that work well and discarding them would be stupid. At the same time, I think it is long past time to do away with a hierarchical file system.
It's not that it shouldn't allow you to define hierarchies, but that shouldn't be
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I've used Spotlight once or twice, but only when I would normally have used Sherlock - when something accidentally got saved to some unknown place. I *like* my neatly-organized heirarchical folders, thank you very much. The reason the metaphor has lived for so long is that it's one that makes sense to many people. If they do try something "revolutionary", I hope
Is this the new theme for iTunes 7? (Score:5, Interesting)
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God, I hope so. I *hate* the inconsistencies.
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?
Vista is going all Aqua, so it makes perfect sense to upgrade OSX to a new look. Vista has many features first implemented in OS X; the new Leopard release of OS X will have a ton of stuff Vista lacks. The Aqua UI is the "old" look for the "
Aqua (Score:2, Insightful)
The single main menu at the top is a thing that you love or hate, but it can feel very strange to change the focus of the application to just access a menu. Yes, I'm aware of t
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You have to do this on Windows too, you know. Even though you can see the menu of another application, when you try to click on it the first time it focuses the app rather than accessing the menu. Now, some Unix window managers (with focus-follows-mouse), on the other hand...
Re:Aqua (Score:4, Insightful)
I do wish they'd have an option to duplicate the menu on multiple monitors, but other than that I like it MUCH better than every window having it's own menu.
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Did you actually try this before you posted that "fact?" Unless the app was specifically designed to capture the focus click (e.g., MS Office and Visual Studio, for reasons unknown), it will focus the window AND drop the menu with one click. That's the standard default behavior.
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I haven't actually had this problem. On virtually every Mac app I've used, the menubar is global for the whole application, so the only thing you're changing when you switch windows is the document you'll be modifying from that window. Big whoop, I can't think of a single case where the document I want to be working with has not been the document I'm c
Re:Aqua (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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The problem is, even though you clicked on the red circle on tool bar, it may not have closed the app you were working with. So even though all you see is your word processor, the tool bar is still from the app you meant to close.
This is wholly a matter of workflow. Windows users have this problem because on Windows closing a window is the same thing as quitting an application. The two have been tied. To me, that is a design flaw and I'll tell you why. I regularly run applications that have no Window and
Single menu conserves screen estate (Score:3, Insightful)
This is especially annoying with browser windows, which you tend to have a lot of. But many applications are prone to having multiple documents open at once and it helps there as well.
Another problem it helps solve is visual menu clutter - sometimes in Windows when I
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Well, that's really the debate, isn't it? Do you want to save a few pixels, or save a few mouse movements? Neither one is all that arduous really. My only problem is that I find it confusing to have to pick an application to get the menu right. If I have two versio
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I've never ever used my "pointer" at the logon screen. Simply type the first letter of the user name and hit return. If a password is required the text entry box appears, empty and focused. Enter password, hit return again, and you're logged in.
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I can login without touching my mouse... (Score:4, Insightful)
Hell even the single fact that when you are presented the logon screen, the pointer is on 10,10 and not at screencenter as on Windows, KDE or Gnome is an inconvenient. A little one but just a little thing here and a little thing there does a lot.
Why does this matter, when at the text login page, you can type your username, hit tab, enter your password, hit enter, and be looking at a desktop seconds later? And actually launch programs, not have those programs cancel mouse actions (I love how Windows repeatedly cancels menus you're trying to navigate. When the entire OS revolves around a giant heirarchial menu. For fuck's sake, a program loading itself into the toolbar causes this!)
In fact, I can then hit apple-space and type "Mail", use the down arrow and enter key to select it and launch Mail.app, and read+respond to email in my inbox. Still haven't touched my (multibutton) mouse. How about that...
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Well-thought criticism is frequently modded up, regardless of how cliched the "apple fanbois" are supposed to be here.
Running scared! (Score:5, Funny)
Faced with the prospect of being "boring and unoriginal" compared to OLPC vaporware, Steve has decided to one-up the "View Source" button and make XCode the new interface.
Re:Running scared! (Score:4, Funny)
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Too bad it would only work for Chess and WebKit!
Somehow, I doubt this .... (Score:2)
Subtle (and not-so-subtle) tweaks I can see, but actual honest-to-goodness UI replacement? That I doubt.
Now, the Finder on the other hand
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Illuminous (Score:5, Funny)
Anyway, how about a weekly round-up of Apple rumours rather than individual stories?
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Blind guess (Score:3, Interesting)
Apart from that, I do think it's time for Apple to revisit Aqua. Not for a pointless 'replace it with another theme to keep up with Aero' exercise, though. The OS X UI needs a more fundamental redesign, to improve the way we interact with our data. The Finder is one app in dire need of an update.
Is Jobs scared of Aero? (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
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And although Apple has moved on from the "Think Different" campaign, they still want to be easily distinguishable from Windows. I expect that this next update will have some significant functional UI changes, but even if they didn't have any of those ready to go, it'd probably benefi
Want Finder improvements (Score:5, Interesting)
One other thing I would love to see, related to AppleShare volumes: server side folder size calculation, since it would be easier to cache and reduce unecessary network traffic because the client wouldn't be interogating each and every file.
Re:Want Finder improvements (Score:5, Informative)
HTH
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Maybe this is better on 10.4 but I have 10.3 and it never updates the desktop unless it thinks I am watching. When I create a PDF with acrobat, which causes it to be saved on my desktop by default, it will not appear un
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Competing with XGL (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Competing with XGL (Score:4, Insightful)
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sure, is apple?
In case you need the answer spelled out for you, the answer is no. Let me give you some examples.
One quicky example of how Apple's logic is poor slapped me in the face when I turned on my system. Apple is constantly giving me offers to install an iSight update. I don't have an iSight. I tried to install it once
As a Vista user... (Score:3, Interesting)
There is no way we will be deploying either product to our users at the office anytime soon. It would kill the productivity of our company immediately. There are some cool IT management features in Vista, but the change in the interface negates all of them.
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OMFG!!! The interface changed!! You've got to feel a little for Microsoft sometimes. One of the few times they try to truly innovate and they get slammed because the interface actually changed. How can you innovate without changing interface at least some? If it's worse than the old interface, ok. But that's not even the complaint from a lot of people. They just don't like the f
Great... (Score:2)
What is wrong with Aqua? It still looks better than Aero, and much better than the Vista UI that people not running a $6k box. If it ain't broke... (yes, it is... but the cure is bringing all the iCrap software into one unified look, like UNO [interacto.net] does.)
From the Waste of CPU cycles Department. (Score:2)
More Eye Candy.
I need spinning cursors, zooming window boxes, document previews in every icon, 3D graphics on document to be printed on a 2D paper. All you software vendors do is force me to buy new hardware or you won't support me.
I remember a cartoon that was published in the paper when Windows95 came out, it was a guy tossing his computer out of a window and the caption w
DZ (Score:3, Funny)
No (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think Steve Jobs would want a word that in many people's mind would have connotations of ignorance.
Certainly not for leopard (Score:3, Insightful)
Major developers like Adobe and Microsoft may have even been working to this platform for longer.
So if there is a new UI coming, it won't be for 10.5
Illuminati to battle Aero? (Score:3, Funny)
It's simple, really (Score:3, Insightful)
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That, or you could read ANY article about Vista, there they talk about it like it's the best thing since sliced bread.
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Re:Aero? (Score:5, Funny)
Enough with the technical terms, Pointdexter.
Just say its the clicky thing that lets you do stuff on the whatchamahoo.
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The last thing Apple is afraid of is the abortion of interface design that is Aero and its five different menu styles and embarrassing shut down menu--only Microsoft could spread out "turn off computer" into nine or so redundant menu options.
Re:Aero? (Score:4, Funny)
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Hopefully Leopard will have a vector-based UI -- we already know it's going to have a resolution-independent one, and presumably the people at Apple are smart enough to realize that scaling bitmaps all the time would look horrible...
Scaling vectors may look unacceptable too... (Score:2)
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True, but who says the things will be presented at small sizes? The reason I'm most looking forward to resolution independence is that it'll allow practical use of higher DPI displays. For example, I'm planning to get a Thinkpad X60 Tablet in a couple of days, and one thing I'm really excited about is that I can order it with an SXGA+ (1400x1050) display instead of a normal XGA (1024x768) one like on my current laptop, even though they're both 12". I don't anticipate scaling things down too often, but I do
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Close: it's PDF for displays, which I think means it's a subset of Display Postscript.
But anyway, that doesn't matter -- all those little buttons (e.g. the close/minimize/zoom ones) and gradients are bitmaps regardless of the fact that they're arranged in a PDF-like way.
Re:Allow to keep the old too (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't care whether there's one theme or a million themes. What I want is for the user to be able to pick the them rather than the application designer so that everything will use the same one instead of being forced to see fifty different ones at once like Apple does now!
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Yes.
No.
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I think this is just an example of bad analysis. After all, we can only guess at the motivations of a decision of another unless that person(s) divulges their reasoning. And Apple is notorious at being secretive so we'll never really know why Apple is replacing Aqua.
My take on this is different.
*whoosh* (Score:4, Funny)
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