Aqua X III Notes Jan 22

AquaX III Release Notes as of January 22, 2001. First and Foremost Thanks for downloading a copy of this Kaleidoscope scheme. I feel this is the most complete, most accurate, and most true-to-life representation of the OS X/Aqua User Interface available outside of the real thing. AquaX and AquaX II (the previous, most accurate Aqua representations available) were pulled from public distribu- tion at Apple Computer’s request on May 15, 2000. Since then, I have made small efforts to update this scheme — then Apple released the Public Beta of Mac OS X. This release resulted in hundreds of requests for an update to my Aqua scheme as well as hundreds of requests for the scheme to be emailed for personal use. All that was done, and I have been promising the new version of my scheme, AquaX III, for quite some time. Here it is. Requirements For Use 1) Mac OS 8.5 or higher 2) Kaleidoscope version 2.3 (or higher), available at: < http://www.kaleidoscope.net/ > 3) The AquaX III scheme le. THIS IS NOT A THEME! This is a Kaleidoscope scheme, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with Appearance Themes. Caveats: The Wrong and Why Since this is merely a representation or duplication of what the OS X user interface is like — made possible by Kaleidoscope — there are certain “items” in the scheme that cannot fully reproduce the actual, literal aspects of OS X/Aqua. For the most part, these errors are small and are nothing more than things to be noticed by those who are looking for them. Regardless, I wanted to list them here for you: Window Shadows OS X’s Quartz engine allows extensive use of real-time alpha-channel drop shadows on all controls, the most obvi- ous of which are the windows. Unfortunately, Kaleidoscope cannot duplicate this technology. This being the case, there are no drop shadows on any of AquaX III’s windows. The “old school” method of applying shadows to schemes was to add a 1-pixel border around the windows. Again, this was the OLD SCHOOL way to do it, and it (quite frankly) looks like crud. Not to mention that to simulate the 90° drop shadows of OS X, it would mean adding a border around all three sides, which would look even worse. For these reasons I have elected to add no drop shadows to AquaX III. Inactive Window Title Bars Window Title Bars take a 75% opactity when they go inactive in OS X resulting in the desktop (or windows directly behind) showing through. My previous versions of AquaX forced a 50% white-on-blue for inactive windows, but this looks bad on machines not using a blue desktop image. AquaX III now shows the inactive widgets and the inac- tive text color against a 75% blue background that subtly — yet effectively — shows a changed state. The inactive window effect is now almost identical to OS X as far as Kaleidoscope’s limitations will allow. Utility Windows OS X has two different window frames for titled and non-titled utility windows, as …