Leopardmania

Even I'll admit that some mac fans go way overboard. With Leopard (the next rev of OS X, shipping in October) Apple is adding Time Machine to do automatic backups. When searching through the backups it uses a space based user interface, kinda like a Star Trek wormhole as you travel back in time to find your file. I remember some people complaining that it was yet another Apple user interface that looked like no other. I've never been bothered by the fact that one app's background was shiny metal while another was duller. It all looked similar enough I could figure them all out. Yeah Time Machine is a bit crazy flashy but since you won't be using it often it's not that obnoxious and opening another dimension on your machine is kinda appropriate for what it's doing.

When Jobs first demo'ed Leopard he said he was leaving out some big features. When he got around to showing them it was a bit of a letdown, nothing all that interesting. Still people were really angry that the menubar was now translucent and the dock was 3D. Forgive me but I barely notice the difference.

Now I read that the latest developer build of Leopard has a new default desktop image and it's a space image. There's also a new welcome movie and it's also space based. Yes, a welcome movie.

Then I read Phill Ryu's blog post Where We're Going, We Don't Need Roads*. Or Aqua.. "We're witnessing Apple phasing out the aging, decorated, and beloved Aqua, in exchange for a new, hotter interface. Time Machine seems to be where the overall UI is going, with a theme of immersive interface design and space exploration visuals, and the glitz powered by Leopard's Core Animation technology. The mission is to reinvent the OS experience. Instead of a slightly prettier version of the standard desktop OS look, Time Machine and many of Leopard's upgrades reek of a new direction towards something completely different. Something visually intuitive, and unlike anything we've seen before."

Oh please. It's a new default desktop image and a welcome movie. As if no one has ever had a space image for a desktop image. Jobs in his presentation even said that no mac users use the default desktop, they use their own images. And as if space and wormholes are somehow more "intuitive".

It is true that Apple is pushing Core Animation effects into its apps and encouraging third party developers to do the same by making it so easy to do. But that's a far cry from scraping Aqua. With macs becoming more popular, I'd expect Apple to make them familiar to (but better than) the Windows machines they are coming from.