Forums | MacLife

I just want different colors. I tried putting a skin on with a third party utility but I just ended up dumping it because I didn't get that much use out of it.

OS 9 was not simple. There were too many places for something to be.

OS 9 is a more elegant UI in my opinion. OS X is still clunky and bloated in comparison. I don't like trying to get work done in X. I don't like all the zooming Windows-like behaviors. I loathe the 10.1 and 10.2 Finders.

Apple never took full advantage of it, though. The Apple Menu really was poorly used. It has plenty of potential, especially with Amico or BeHierchic.

Apple never bothered to produce an italic for Geneva 10, even though it is the default OS 9 Finder font. Very sloppy, Apple. Very sloppy indeed.

There were some mediocre design decisions made, like a folder called "Applications (Mac OS 9)." Yuck. Apple could have instead added that "(Mac OS 9)" part only when a user has X installed. Sherlock 2 is a bloated beast. The Keychain didn't have a good UI.

OS 9 is not perfect by any means. But, I still prefer using the OS 9 UI to the OS X UI. I hope 10.3 is improved, but it doesn't seem to be a vast improvement.

They renamed the applications folder in 9 and added the windows menu so people would have an easier time adapting to the new gui. I think that was a smart move. I also like the current Apple menu. It isn't loaded full of crap like in OS 9. It is even worse with the third party apple menu utilities.

My point is that you don't need to have the "(Mac OS 9)" label on the Applications folder unless OS X is installed.

It isn't loaded full of crap like in OS 9.

You haven't seen the potential of the Apple menu, apparently. With Amico, I have folders on the machines in a computer lab in the Apple menu. The folders are like this:

Instant Messaging
Web Page Design
Web Browsers
Page Layout (Print Publishing)
PDF Creation
Word Processing
Image Viewers
Audio/Video
Scanning

These are not the actual categories, and they're listed alphabetically. I have useful DAs and other things in the Apple menu as well. New users are not nearly as lost with this Apple menu. Instead of having to know what program does what, they can simply say "what do I want to do?" How many average people care to learn the specific names of every program on both platforms? Some people just want to get work done. They don't care to read all the latest news so they can know that "GoLive" is an Web Page Design program, or that "Safari" is a web browser.

The Apple menu offers a space-efficient place to store all types of shortcuts. It uses text names, rather than blurry icons, and it's alphabetical and hierarchical.

As I said, Apple never exploited the potential of the Apple menu. They just dumped a lot of random junk there. And, they never provided enhancements to make it easier for users to take advantage of it.

The Dock has problems:

#1. It uses blurry icons predominately.
#2. It is located as a strip along the edge of one side of the screen, rather than being an elegant click-down menu at the top of the screen.
#3. It's animated by default, and the icons are set to a huge size.
#4. It relies on slow mouse-overs, and users must hold the mouse down to get a folder's contents to be shown. It's too easy to simply open the folder by mistake.
#5. Unless you lock the Dock, it's too easy to move folders out.
#6. Folders are stored right next to the Trash can, which is cumbersome.
#7. Dock folder contents pop upward by default, which is cumbersome in comparison to the pop-down Apple menu stuff.

I could go on further, but this is enough already.

What about themes, with brushed metal in panther, im sure there will be a Jaguar theme at resexcellence.com

I wonder what color-blind or other visually-impaired people think ?   Changing icon-size, font-size and font-style helps them the most so far.

The brushed metal format in iPhoto and iTunes has a lot of fonts locked down.  It's annoying for me and I imagine it's crap for people like my brother's elderly parents-in-law.

Presumably, color also affects them. :humpfgrr:  :humpf:

i guess i just don't care.

all i know is every time i use 9 now i miss X badly.

Well, I don't really care all that much. I used a few skins in OS 9 days with SoundJam, but now, most of the time I run iTunes, I hide it and control from the dock. When I'm using a program like a browser that needs to be visible to use, I am concentrating on the content and not the looks. Sometimes the looks of skins seemed to get in the way of usability.

I like the IriX interface of SGI.

My scanner uses a port of the SUN interface and it's downright pretty.

I don't give a rat's ass. I never customized in 9, I don't have a yen to customize in X. I do see why people would want the option, tho.