I swear some people just are never satisfied. This really isn't about unsanity but the the whiny people who constantly complain about OS X.

When Aqua was first displayed there were people who were constantly whining about the loss of the platinum interface. "aqua sucks, bring back platinum. "OS X is cool but the gumdrops suck".

Now Apple is changing the Finder pretty much back to metal and I am sure it is the same whiny people screaming "Bring back aqua, metal sucks".

Sigh.

David: well, choice is good, isn't it? =)

Woah, that looks weird. Kind of like a pre-op transexual. :) I don't mind the metal thing so much. I like being able to drag windows around by other places than just the title bar. But I don't like how hard it is to tell if the window is in focus or not when they are metal.

I’m not sure if you could call the platinum interface 'metal' by any stretch of the imagination. It was just a very simple appearance- and a great many people liked it.

But as Slava said, it's nice to have choice. One of the first things I did after upgrading my Wintel box to XP was turn of the god-forsaken Fisher-Price interface, making it look more like Win98, but Apple hasn't been so forthcoming with customizability.

Someone should make a haxie to make themes apply for the current user only. :D

But Chris, FWIW, in XP's case, the "Luna" theme is just that. It's really just a theme over the standard Windows appearance. Not so for OS X. I use XP at work and don't mind the new appearance. That is, once I changed it to silver and shrunk the title bars to the smallest possible size. It's now quite liveable.

The new metal interface doesn't suck because it's ugly. It's not ugly, I think it looks nice. The problem is that it sucks from a usability perspective: it's hard to see the difference between active and non-active windows, clicking on the little close-resize-minimize-buttons on windows that are in the background brings the window to the foreground, and so on. What also sucks is that there are some windows that are metal while others aren't, without a clear rule.

If Apple fixed the usability problems and made *all* windows metal, I'd have no problem with that. As long as they don't, I rely on Unsanity. Fix Apple's fault and you get my money ;-)

Slava: Boy do I like *your* labels better than Panthers. Especially when the label color matches the highlight color.

I wonder if de-metalizing finder window would improve its responsiveness. I had an impression that that metal look slows down window resizing and whatnot especially on old machines with no Quartz extreme, when I tried similar untiltiy that de-metalizes Safari.

I don't like brushed metal, so if this can be done, then you will be my God.

You just saved themeing on Panther! Well maybe not totally but that was one of the bigger problems, good work.

this brushed metal interface sucks big time! please make the matallifizer work in 10.3! thanks a lot

David: Brushed metal looks *nothing* like Platinum.... neither does Aqua. Actually, the new revised darker grey "Aqua" in Panther looks more like Platinum than either of the other two. The problem is the lack of consistency in the GUI. The latest builds still show most of the "Aqua" windows as Aqua, and the "Brushed" windows as brushed. One Apple developer said that XP looks like a ex-Disney cartoonist on acid designed it. The current mix-mash GUI in Panther just makes it look like the developer was on a ten-day drunk.

I just can't believe Apple has messed with the look of OSX so much. Whether I like the new Panther look or not (which, for the record, I don't...), is not really the point. I just feel that Apple were steadily improving and tweaking OSX, and I thought it was getting nicer with every update. Switching from OS9 to X can be difficult enough for some, so Apple needs a consistency in its updates. But then they go and completely confuse everyone by adding kiddie-style colour bars and blocky dated boring GREY windows (don't try and jazz it up by calling it 'metal' - its just plain old GREY). It just seems bonkers to scrap a steadily improving design so early on.

I'm a graphic designer, and believe me, its ugly. Try highlighting all the folder icons in a window and once and tell me that ain't ugly! Lol. I can't believe Apple has done this. I've reinstalled 10.2.8 and I'm sticking with it until they get rid of those coloured headaches at least....

The problem isn't so much metal or aqua, per se, it's really Steve Jobs' insistence on controlling the user interface details, and the amount of time and energy wasted both inside apple and outside in the battle between Steve and the users.

Back somewhere around OS 8, Apple introduced interface theming... let it leak out... then pulled it back when Steve came on board. Theming was supplanted by branding: the look and feel of Apple's user interface wasn't for the user to touch, no, it was part of the brand identity... a sales tool, like the decal on the back of your car saying you got it from Crazy Eddie's Oldsmobile. Except that instead of a logo in the corner, Apple controlled everything down to the color of the paint: the modern equivalent of Henry Ford's "any color you like, so long as it's black".

Applications like Kaleidoscope provided hooks into Apple's underlying theme engine, and they worked well... but they shouldn't have been necessary.

With Mac OS X, branding went ballistic. Aqua was the new look and feel and you were gonna have all the CPU-sucking features of Aqua even if you preferred Platinum.

So when people complain about Metal being forced on them, the problem isn't as much as the fact that it's metal (though that's a problem), but that it's forced on us. And that Apple is wasting time and effort fiddling with eye candy while they have still got filesystem reliability problems (don't you love having to use an OS 9 disk utility to fix HFS+), missing drivers (they still don't have a standard UNIX tape driver, so you can't use any of the standard UNIX backup tools like Amanda), and so on...

And now it's a year and a half later... and Apple's added a new halfway cross between Metal and Aqua with the blended toolbars/title bars in Tiger...

And there's still no way to get rid of the metal in Finder. :(