Speaking of Leopard annoucements, MacRumors links to a bunch of new screenshots, which will probably have vanished by the time you get there: in short, they look just like “Uno shade,” only with sq… uh, sq… nah, I can’t say it. You know, the window corners, at the top? Well, they’re (almost) not rounded.

Past the initial shock, though, and assuming the screenshots are legit (which I’m willing to believe), that means two things: first, brushed metal is definitely out the window (at last); second, they’re still extensively working on the new Aqua theme — because there’s no chance in hell it’s going to stay that way. No. Chance. Hear me, Apple? I have no idea why one of your programmers would spend some time coding this new look, but it is not staying.

If you’re keeping score, it also looks like Leopard finally auto-generates thumbnail icons for document and image files.

[+8h] Another bunch of screenshots [via] has been posted afterwards, and they don’t have square corners (go figure — apparently making a Shift-4 screenshot of a window somehow unrounds the corners).

Interestingly, it appears that (as of this version at least) all windows are styled the same way: they get the UNO shade look when they’re active, and normal unified (or even paler than that) when they’re in the background. If it stays (and I hope it does), it’ll take a bit of time to get used to, but it’s a huge improvement on two growing flaws of the Aqua interface: the confusion as to which window is active (the distinction got ever more blurry since they removed 10.0’s title bar transparency), and the unjustifiable different looks of different apps.

The Mail capsules look ridiculous on the dark background, though, but I figure they’ve got to know that, and they’ll change them. Especially if the current trend in Apple design is to finally make all apps look similar again — could it be they’re on the right track? (Could it be they’re free to fix OS X inconsistencies because Steve is busy somewhere else?)