OS X turning into XP

[spitty27]

OS X is starting to remind me a little of XP now how in 10.2 it fades in and out for logging in and out and when you change the resolution/colors also fades in and out...and whats this talk ive heard about a mouse shadow in 10.2? i dont have that...or is that gonna be in a future update..even MORE like xp. i dunno just felt like sharing that.

[Inline_guy]

All those things you mentioned are very cosmetic. None of them define XP to me, nor remind me of XP. No if OX went to a ugly green and blue interface, that hurt my eyes then I would agree and be distraught. But the changes you mentioned don't remind me of XP, and I think they help to make my user interface smoother.

Matthew

[Javintosh]

I use XP at work (along with 98/ME/NT/2K). This to me reflects classic XP:

I like to keep all my desktops as clean as possible. When I installed Acrobat on my XP box it put a shortcut on the desktop. It is the only shortcut on my desktop. I never use it, but I've been meaning to delete it...

One fine day, XP warns me that my desktop could use a little cleaning up. I was going to cancel the warning, but I thought, maybe this is the sort of thing that people who like XP think about when they talk about XP. SO I click on the icon and I get this wizard....

The wizard takes me throught 6 screen doing assorted things like putting up a looong explanation of what it is going to do, giving me a list of desktop icons and the last time I used them, etc., etc....

so I go through the wizard and click on all the screens and what do I end up with? A folder on my desktop with a name like "Cleaned up items from the desktop." This folder contains the acrobat shortcut I've been meaning to delete. *arrrgh!*

That really reflects what XP will be like... You kind of think why do I bother, but you do it any way and at the end just want to kick yourself for wasting time doing something that is supposed to help you but doesn't get you any further ahead than you were...

MacOSX is nothing like XP and it is certainly not heading in that stupid, you-are-too-mentally-deficient-to-even-know-when-you-should-delete-your-desktop-icons way.

[xaqintosh]

also, the drop shadow for the cursor shows up in my 800 iMac, but not my 350, so it must be a Quartz Extreme thing.

[Krevinek]

The shadow did show up on earlier Macs with early builds (WWDC), but they changed it a little. Having a QE capable card is now probably a requirement, since the compositing of the shadow can then be done in hardware. Do you honestly know how ugly the cursor would get if you used hardware to draw it and then software to draw the shadow? The cursor and shadow wouldn't keep up... Apple toyed with drawing the whole cursor in software for the WWDC build, but apparently decided against it.

[xaqintosh]

it should automatically detect if the computer has qe, and if it doesn't it should use the software, just to be consistent.

[Mac Write]

The drop shadow shows up for me. and I am on a Beige G3 266 Radeon Mac:Edition 32MBDDR.

[kommakazi]

I was just at the Apple Store at the Mall of America today, playing around with the new towers and I noticed it as well. It's a very subtle effect, doesn't stick out so far as the one in Win2k/XP. I like it better, the one in win2k/xp annoyed me, this is just a nice small touch for os x.