When Apple previewed Mac OS X the new interface called Aqua was something that no one had seen in desktop computing. Aqua refreshed the aging Mac OS interface that remained mostly untouched since 1984 when the original Mac was released. The on screen elements might have been rehashed in each update over the 16 or so years, but the way you did business with Mac OS remained constant.

Aqua reignited the relationship you had with your computer. Every element was a pleasure to your eyes, even if sometimes it did not add to the user experience. Aqua made the Macintosh something nice to look at - after all, you spend a lot of time looking at interface elements. Aqua was tweaked, prodded and enhanced over the five Mac OS X releases to something that remained quite similar between 10.3 and 10.4. Apple also fell into the trap of having multiple interface looks and in the end couldn’t work out what suited best. The brushed metal of Safari, the milky interface of Mail in Tiger to the original ribbed save boxes. Aqua has had so much added to it that it’s sometimes a guess about which interface a developer will choose. It’s these problems that have developed that I believe is the end of Aqua as we know it.

Enter Mac OS X 10.5. Apple has been playing it’s cards close to their chest since Microsoft released information about Vista. Worried about their ideas being ripped off (as such is the case with some interface elements in Vista right now!), Apple announced that there are some features Apple were not comfortable about releasing 8 months ago, when Microsoft still had a good 4 months to finalise Vista.

I expect Apple to release more information about Leopard’s graphical user interface very soon. What should we expect? Only the walls of Infinite Loop will know for now.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 19th, 2007 at 5:21 pm and is filed under Untitled. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.