"I like how when I boot up windows, everything is all blue, it makes me feel good, like I'm at my computer home. I don't get that with OS X, panther is all gray and metallic, it feels cold and impersonal"
That's a (more or less) direct quote from a long time PC using friend of mine, who recently, for the berklee school of music, had to get a 1 ghz TiBook, he pretty much only uses his Tibook now, and is very happy with it, but he still believes windows XP's UI to be superior to Panther's.
OS X used to be aqua, but it was never BLUE, aqua is related to water, water is not blue, it's clear, but it reflects the color of the sky making it blue, as in OS X, it was mostly clear, with translucent blue accents.
Now however, OS X, panther, is mostly all brushed metal(or in my case, smooth metal because I go a de-brushing program)
Aqua was a shoddy OS anyway, it had a lot of GREAT ideas, but 10.0 and 10.1 were BARELY workable, so Aqua fell into obscurity before most people(mac and windows users alike) got to sink their teeth in, because by the time jaguar came out, brushed metal was already starting to take over in all the iApps and beyond, now it is almost systemwide with Panthers new navigation system, the only remnants of aqua lie in the pin striped menu bar with the blue apple...oh what's that? you can change the overall appearance to 'graphite' now...there goes aqua.
Does anyone else think it's absolutely ludicrous that MS is taking so long on longhorn....oh wait...did I just answer my own question
seriously though, by the time it's released Apple will likely be on OS 10.5, sporting an even more refined look. will MS still be 'copying' apple so much? if their newest is going to be blue, indigo or whatever, it would be closer to just copying themselves, with XP's mostly blue UI, surely Apple will have no ties to aqua anymore by the time longhorn is released.
heck, for all we know, we might be getting wood panelling and deep gray for the next OS revision
My point is, that I don't really think MS is blindly copying apple, sure they may have initially copied them in some respects, many respects...etc. but Apple changes too much, they made colored computers trendy, then by the time everyone was making colored computers, there wasn't a color to be found on apple's line-up, but they still opened the door, now you still see colored computers, though far less than 3 years ago, they still exist, where they never would have had it not been for apple, but apple moved on.
I dunno, XP wasn't a terrible OS, once you got past all the security flaws, random errors, and what-not, it was more useable than most other versions of windows, If Longhorn is improved even 20% over XP, I'm sure it will be just fine.
To be fair to MS, they're doing a hell of a big overhaul to the underlying OS and filesystem. Presumably, a lot of Longhorn features will dpeend on the new filesystem, kernel and such so it's probably a procedural problem that keeps Longhorn's ship date slipping: they have to get the core right before the other stuff can be seriously attacked.
Even then, I would assume that Windows won't take much advantage of the new core system for another revision or two after that, much like Jaguar was the first OS X release to begin to use Quartz to its advantage.
Comments
That's a (more or less) direct quote from a long time PC using friend of mine, who recently, for the berklee school of music, had to get a 1 ghz TiBook, he pretty much only uses his Tibook now, and is very happy with it, but he still believes windows XP's UI to be superior to Panther's.
OS X used to be aqua, but it was never BLUE, aqua is related to water, water is not blue, it's clear, but it reflects the color of the sky making it blue, as in OS X, it was mostly clear, with translucent blue accents.
Now however, OS X, panther, is mostly all brushed metal(or in my case, smooth metal because I go a de-brushing program)
Aqua was a shoddy OS anyway, it had a lot of GREAT ideas, but 10.0 and 10.1 were BARELY workable, so Aqua fell into obscurity before most people(mac and windows users alike) got to sink their teeth in, because by the time jaguar came out, brushed metal was already starting to take over in all the iApps and beyond, now it is almost systemwide with Panthers new navigation system, the only remnants of aqua lie in the pin striped menu bar with the blue apple...oh what's that? you can change the overall appearance to 'graphite' now...there goes aqua.
Does anyone else think it's absolutely ludicrous that MS is taking so long on longhorn....oh wait...did I just answer my own question
seriously though, by the time it's released Apple will likely be on OS 10.5, sporting an even more refined look. will MS still be 'copying' apple so much? if their newest is going to be blue, indigo or whatever, it would be closer to just copying themselves, with XP's mostly blue UI, surely Apple will have no ties to aqua anymore by the time longhorn is released.
heck, for all we know, we might be getting wood panelling and deep gray for the next OS revision
My point is, that I don't really think MS is blindly copying apple, sure they may have initially copied them in some respects, many respects...etc. but Apple changes too much, they made colored computers trendy, then by the time everyone was making colored computers, there wasn't a color to be found on apple's line-up, but they still opened the door, now you still see colored computers, though far less than 3 years ago, they still exist, where they never would have had it not been for apple, but apple moved on.
I dunno, XP wasn't a terrible OS, once you got past all the security flaws, random errors, and what-not, it was more useable than most other versions of windows, If Longhorn is improved even 20% over XP, I'm sure it will be just fine.
Even then, I would assume that Windows won't take much advantage of the new core system for another revision or two after that, much like Jaguar was the first OS X release to begin to use Quartz to its advantage.