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About OS X:
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Aqua Interface
Was the design driven by purely esthetic considerations? Hardly. The new Aqua interface keeps you informed of the activity status on your Mac with continuous visual feedback.
You'll love the liquid look of the Mac OS X interface. Fittingly enough, it's called Aqua. Named after a word that means water in many languages, Aqua brings your Mac to life with color, depth, translucence and fluid motion. The new controls resemble polished gems. Buttons indicate active or nonactive status by glowing and dimming, icons are crisply rendered, and drop shadows give windows greater depth.
The Interface Comes Alive
While you'll like the fact that we've added motion to buttons, the scroll bar and the progress indicator, we think you'll also appreciate how well these elements serve their purpose. Because while the Aqua interface is alive with motion and great to look at, it also provides important visual cues - focusing your attention, suggesting next actions, and making your responses much more intuitive.
It was the graphical user interface that utterly charmed so many people when the Mac was introduced in 1984. And icons were a big part of that appeal. Back then, however, icons were smaller and less sharply detailed, sized as they were for the low-resolution displays of the time.
An Icon Gets New Icons
Display sizes and resolution levels have increased dramatically since then, of course, as witness the stunningly sharp 1600x1024-pixel resolution Apple Cinema Display. Aqua takes advantage of these advances with support for icons ranging from small to large. These large (128x128 pixels), richly-colored and photorealistic icons are much more legible on today's higher resolution displays.
The result? Greater photo-quality detail, and better document previews in the Finder.
What's up, Dock?
You'll find the Mac OS X interface is designed according to a simple guiding principle: a place for everything and everything in its place.
Mac OS X makes desktop clutter a thing of the past with a nifty new feature called the Dock. The Dock sits at the bottom of your screen and holds folders, applications, documents, storage devices, minimized windows, QuickTime movies, digital images, links to websites, or just about anything else you'd like to keep handy for instant access.
The Dock displays an icon for each item you store there. And these icons don't just look good - they provide useful feedback about the applications and documents they represent. For example, the icon for Mail tells you if you have any new messages waiting to be read. Minimize a playing QuickTime movie and it continues playing in the Dock. If you store an image, the Dock shows it in preview mode, so you can tell what it is without opening it. And because you can minimize running applications into the Dock, a quick look at the bottom of the screen tells you what applications you're currently running. Switching between tasks is a snap: simply click the application or document icon you want to start using, and it becomes the new active task.
The Dock holds as many things as you want to keep there. As you add items, the Dock expands until it reaches the edge of the screen. Once it reaches that point, the icons in the Dock shrink proportionately to accommodate additional items. To make the smaller icons more legible, however, we've included a great new feature called magnification: just pass your mouse over the icons, and they magnify to your preset maximum resolution.
A Generational Shift
Your operating system can contribute to screen clutter by spawning multiple windows. Navigating deep structured file systems, for instance, involves opening more and more windows, obscuring your view of the desktop. Mac OS X eliminates the problem of multiplying windows by focusing many of its applications in a single window. Key system components like the new Finder, Mail and the System Preferences panel are presented in a single window. The result? A clean uncluttered look.
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