Brushed aside
My dislike for brushed metal, or ‘textured’, windows has been known for quite some time; and though I pine for Slava to finish updating Metallifizer for 10.3 I must accept that it may take forever. After all, Unsanity has a great many applications whose sole purpose is to hack the OS; when the OS changes significantly (as was the case between 10.2 and 10.3), the apps must move with it. Metallifizer (whose function is limited to de–metallifizing on my Mac) is a free app, so it stands to reason that the money spinners will be updated before the trinkets.
With that in mind I installed ShapeShifter today, thinking that perhaps Max Rudberg’s Aqua Extreme would hide the metal away. The preview screen on the aforementioned themer’s web site certainly indicated as much… so I was excited. As it turns out, I was wrong; or rather, the preview screen was wrong. Aqua Extreme doesn’t make the Finder look any more aqua, but it certainly isn’t quite brushed metal any more, either.
The result is actually quite startling; the Finder is still roughly the same shade of grey, still drags from all ‘metal’ surfaces, and still features the subtle radial–gradient ‘highlight’… but it’s no longer brushed. That peculiar horizontal streaking whose sole purpose in life is to add a little texture to the window have been canned, they’re out, they’re gone… and it looks quite refreshing. Could it be that all my complaints of this particular Apple UI travesty have been based on those brushings? Are they dirty looking? Is that why I don’t like them? Sure, these new ‘polished metal’ windows are still a little dark, a little heavy on the screen, but they aren’t such an offense to the eyes. They’re subtler, smoother, like the pinstripes in 10.3 are subtler than those in 10.2. Smooth like shaved legs, or like plastered walls next to bare brick. I like it.
Of course, since ShapeShifter is a twenty dollar hack that I would only ever use to do exactly what I just described, it won’t be outliving its trial period on my Mac. I don’t care much for theming in general (aside from making Jaguar look like Panther back in the day), so the cost is hardly justified. Metallifizer is in alpha testing right now, and is forecast for release this month, so I guess I’ll just wait. In the long run, although it’s obvious that Apple won’t just ditch metal windows, we can maybe hope that one day they’ll tone the texture down with a little polish.