When I bought my first Mac in 2006, Tiger was the current OS, and Aqua was paired with an aluminium finish. It looked amazing. It gave the Mac a fun look. I miss it. I blame Jony Ive for taking it away from us. Do you miss it?
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Do you miss Aqua UI?
- Thread starter Black_Mage
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Although I don't hate what we have today, I do miss the good old Aqua. It was really beautiful, not only the icons but also the scroll bars and other interface items.
Tar Sniffer
macrumors 6502
Yes, but I also wouldn’t want to return to such a ‘heavy’ interface,
It may have been taxing for the hardware during 10.1 but I remember my 2006 MacBook being able to handle it no problem. Apple Silicon would have no problems running that UI at least 60 FPS.
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maflynn
macrumors Broadwell
Yes, and in some ways when Liquid Glass was announced, I had thought Aqua was making a comeback in some form
Everything is now so white! We have these incredible displays with superb colour, and we're just using three light shades of off-white.
Liquid Glass controls would actually look better on top of a mid-grey surface.
And God forbid we had some coloured icons in the Sidebar...
Liquid Glass controls would actually look better on top of a mid-grey surface.
And God forbid we had some coloured icons in the Sidebar...
WarmWinterHat
Suspended
Fishrrman
macrumors Nehalem
It was around the time of Snow Leopard that I thought they had things "just right"...
turbineseaplane
macrumors Penryn
I miss contrast and legibility.
Everything is shades of white and white and more white now.
It's just not a very eye friendly OS these days.
Everything is shades of white and white and more white now.
It's just not a very eye friendly OS these days.
thejadedmonkey
macrumors G3
If I could run macOS 26 with the UI from Tiger or even Panther, I'd be so very happy.
The current abomination is just boring. It tries so hard not to be offensive to anyone, but by doing so means it doesn't make anyone happy either. It's the computing version of the 50 shades of automotive grey.
In this one instance, even Windows does it better.
The current abomination is just boring. It tries so hard not to be offensive to anyone, but by doing so means it doesn't make anyone happy either. It's the computing version of the 50 shades of automotive grey.
In this one instance, even Windows does it better.
boswald
macrumors 68030
I like the new interface in general, but Liquid Glass doesn't seem to be implemented throughout the whole system properly. It could be because I'm still new to the Mac interface or I'm just knit-picking, but I thought it would be a little more uniform. But I like the icons, the HD icons, and the transparent widgets.
Icon size was adjustable. Right-click and choose Show View Options in any Finder window.
CrabQueenInc
macrumors regular
I miss the colour icons in the sidebar. Distinguishing between folders was much easier and pleasant.
Yes, it's totally disgusting that Apple did this and keeps refusing to address user requests to at least give us an option to enable the normal icons in the sidebar.
There are at least two utilities that can enable the normal icons in the Finder (as you may know anyway): Total Finder and XtraFinder. I'm using both on two machines (I think they require disabling SIP, which doesn't bother me). They don't enable the normal icons in the Open/Save dialogs, though. On Intel Macs there was a utility that could do this, but it wasn't updated for Silicon, sadly.
What OS are you on? SIP has been largely superseded by the Secure System Volume and other protections.
the latest Tahoe. i take your word as I'm not following closely the status of the security protections. i know that disabling SIP was a requirement sometime ago. i don't know if anything has changed by now. all i know is that both Total Finder and XtraFinder do work for me. i think my SIP is disabled too. regardless, as long as the tools work i don't care if the SIP status affects it.
CrabQueenInc
macrumors regular
Luftkopf
macrumors 65816
If Apple went so badly backwards, that would have me questioning whether I want to keep using macOS!
Aqua was great back in the day, but now it just looks old. I hope that Liquid Glass gets more colour in the future, and the 'shades of white' fad passes, but let’s keep going forwards, and not try to keep living in the past!
Aqua was great back in the day, but now it just looks old. I hope that Liquid Glass gets more colour in the future, and the 'shades of white' fad passes, but let’s keep going forwards, and not try to keep living in the past!
Where did you get that screenshot? OS X never shipped with those folder icons, and the toolbar is not aligned and with the wrong style. That seems a third-party mod.
redheeler
macrumors G3
Going back to those old UI designs isn't the right move, but it'd be awesome to see a modern take on Aqua in the dark mode UI. Apple is so close with Liquid Glass. Add some color, a glossy sheen, and you're basically there; and it'd also solve the problem of Liquid Glass still looking kind of flat and ugly on solid color backgrounds.
redheeler
macrumors G3
Yeah, I can't stand light mode on MacOS for this reason. With more contrast like the pre-Yosemite UI, I might be tempted to use it more.
Tahoe doesn't seem to have improved things much either. The drop shadows and floating sidebar looks more like a beginner learning CSS for the first time and going crazy with drop shadow and border radius than it does a UI designed by a trillion dollar company.
Luftkopf
macrumors 65816
Colour, and reverting the corner radius and the chunkiness (probably) for (the rumoured) upcoming touch input, and I reckon it’s there. A bit more gloss wouldn’t go astray.