Aqua: A Review and Retrospective

[aryayush]

Aqua: A Review and Retrospective

We at MacThemes love to shapeshift our computers with innovative designs and beautiful themes, but sometimes we just need to return to our interface roots. Mac OS X Leopard, released on the 26th to eager Mac users everywhere, looks to be the greatest version of Mac OS X released yet, with a brand new Aqua sitting on top of 300+ innovations. For a five year-old theme, Aqua has been given a significant facelift, and the myriad of revisions will leave the majority of Aqua aficionados very satisfied.


History of Aqua

Aqua was introduced in January of 2000, at the Macworld San Francisco Conference. Based around the idea of water, it was one of the core selling points of the then-upcoming Mac OS X, and introduced usability innovations such as window sheets, Quartz font rendering, and the Dock.

But of course, aesthetics played a huge role in this new interface as well. For those who remember the days of the classic Mac OS (specifically, Mac OS 8 and 9), the Platinum appearance ruled the Mac’s windows, buttons, and application styles; up until Aqua was introduced, the Mac UI looked like a sterile copy of Windows 95. Aqua’s pinstripe windows, marvelously photorealistic icons, and pulsating controls and widgets helped modernize an aging user interface, and wowed the audience with its transluency, special effects, and candy-like appearance.



Aqua slowly evolved throughout each revision of OS X, starting with 10.0 and stopping (for now) at 10.5. “Cheetah”, 10.0’s internal codename, was an Aqua wildchild, with strong drop shadows under text, heavy blue saturation on controls, and glowing buttons, checkboxes, and scrollbars galore. It was bright, graphically-intense, and, for the time being, it was Aqua. 10.1 (”Puma”) came along and helped settle down the menu bar shadows, and 10.2 “Jaguar”, released just a year and a half after 10.0, finally subdued Aqua’s lickable push buttons, checkboxes, and other system controls, as well as dampening the distinct pinstripes. During this time, Apple also quietly introduced the brushed metal appearance, which would remain unchanged for the next five years.

The following year, version 10.3 “Panther” provided the groundwork for Tiger’s aesthetics, subduing the already-faint pinstripes, establishing the inset titlebar buttons, and cleaning up whatever resources were left unchanged from the initial release of OS X, such as segment tabs. Brushed metal began to see a more frequent use in applications (and often broke the Human Interface Guidelines), and by the time we arrived at Tiger, we had our familiar Aqua paired with four different window styles (Aqua, Unified Light, Unified Dark, and Brushed Metal). Read more...

[Via MacThemes 2.0]

[nix]

nice to see how its evolved... its the best looking OS right now...