#FF00AA

This can’t be true?! Damn, it can’t be true?! In OS X.3, they managed to put brushed steel as far as on the Finder?! Their designers have really lost grip at this point, and they’re beyond the point of no return. I’ll summarize by quoting Daring Fireball: Metallic Finder Windows: Good god, shoot me.

And there’s also that Windows -explorer-like sidebar, which I’m sure everyone could have done without. Has the three-pane, NeXT-inherited finder window completely disappeared in the process? If the point of it all is to make OS X look more and more like Windows, well, thanks but no thanks, I’ll stay on Windows with the Stardock software.

A nice idea: integrating Secure Empty Trash (which rewrites seven times over deleted files so they’re unrecoverable) directly in the system is quite interesting. By the way, if it doesn’t exist as a freeware Windows extension, it could: all it’d take would be to add an item in the trash’s context menu. Neat;

Exposé is a nice use of Quartz, that Microsoft should use as inspiration for Longhorn (whose graphics engine copies Quartz, basically generalizing Windows 2000/XP’s layered windows concept to the whole system). Since all windows are in bitmaps, you can scale them down and arrange them temporarily on the screen any way you like without messing with the user’s desktop arrangement. Great idea.

On the other hand, I find it hard to believe they had to wait until OS X.3 to have a keyboard shortcut bringing the desktop forward. I never use the shortcut in Windows, but still. Well, I guess it’s a bit like the labels reappearing just about ten years after the switch from OS 9 from OS X…