Brushed Metal and Friends
John Gruber posts about brushed metal in Mac OS X, mentioning the various problems with Apple’s current use of it and the fact that they’re not even consistent with themselves.
This is one of several things which have bothered me about Mac OS X for a while. John Gruber’s final point is:
To those of you who think this state of affairs is just fine, that there’s no problem with Mac OS X providing two disparate themes for developers to choose between based on whim, I ask this: If two themes are OK, why not three or four?
Ok, John, except you forgot about the pro apps—users of Apple’s professional applications are subject to yet another theme. In fact, I fairly regularly get software updates for the theme on its own. At least all of the pro apps are using the same theme engine—sometimes Carbon-based Brushed Metal apps don’t all get updated at the same time and things are even more of a mess.
Now with Tiger we won’t have just Aqua, Brushed Metal (in a few variants), and Pro Apps—we may also have Spotlight-style widgets in other applications. Wonderful.
This is one area I really hope Apple can pull together on and get things consistent again—consistency is supposed to be one of Apple’s core competencies.
No, not forgotten. I was just saving it for the next article. :^)
brushed metal sucks
By the way, John Gruber did post about the other themes. Just including this link for other people who should come upon this page.