After all the skeptical comments I've made about the appearance of OS X's Aqua interface, I have... er, ahem... installed Chris Brandt's Aqua Icons 1.1 this week on my copy of iCab.

Now, I'm not terribly dissatisfied with the standard iCab icons, which I find tasteful and functional, but last week a friend of mine emailed me a screenshot illustrating something we were discussing regarding iCab settings, and I had to admit that Brandt's Aqua Icons, which my friend had installed, and which even show up in the Preferences dialogs, looked pretty nice.

In my last MV&R column I sort of damned with faint praise the custom interface button sets in Internet Explorer 5. It's nice to be able to customize the button bars, I guess, but I can't get excited by the look of IE 5, including its buttons -- standard or custom.

iCab's buttons are not draggable, but you have a lot more choices in appearance, thanks to a rich selection of nearly two dozen third-party developed button "skins" that are available for downlaod on the iCab Website.

These include:
• Grey Icons (and a full description about creating new icons for iCab)
• Voyager Icons (by Bob Temple)
• Functional Buttons (by Anil Purandare)
• Charcoal Icons (by Loizos Pavlides)
• QuickTime 4ish icons 1.1 (by Ryan Martinez)
• MacOS Xish icons 1.1.1 (by Ryan Martinez)
• MacOS Xish icons 1.2.1 French Blue variant edition (by Ryan Martinez)
• PlayStation Icons 1.1 (by Ryan Martinez)
• Platinum icons 2.0.1 (by Mariel Lohninger)
• GrayCab icons 1.1 (by Mariel Lohninger)
• NZ icons 1.0.8 (by Douglas Smither)
• Facelift icons (by Erik K. Veland)
• Mac OS like icons & cursors (by Raphael Ullmann)
• GreenTech icons 1.01 (by P.A. Buffo)
• Gummi icons 1.01 (by Tom Wimbish)
• Blueberry icons (by Tom Wimbish)
• Graphite icons (by Tom Wimbish)
• QTButton icons (by Tom Wimbish)
• New Age icons (by Chris Brandt)
• Sega Dreamcast icons (by Chris Brandt)
• Aqua icons (by Chris Brandt)
• Roam icons (by Eugenio Morassi)
• Cybie Icons V0.6 (by Mavelick & Layla)

If you're one of the folks who find the look of the standard iCab just a tad too austere for your tastes, go to the download page on iCab"s Website (scroll down) and check these out. You can also get alternate animations to replace the little iCab taxi, including the Cube by William MacKay, PurpleRain by Andrew Plotkin, and the Bouncing Ball (by Bruce McLaughlin. Alternate cursor icons are available as well.

To install the custom icons, simply download and copy the file "iCab Icons" into the iCab folder. You can switch among custom icon sets "on-the-fly". Just double-click on the preferred icons file and iCab will immediately use the icons from that file. You can also create your own Icons file for iCab. Just replace the icons you wish to modify in a copy of an existing "iCab Icons" file and remove all the others where iCab should use the default icons.

The icon set I chose was Chris Brandt's Aqua icons 1.0 which were of course inspired by the new Mac OS X interface. "I spent a lot of time on these icons and I hope that it shows," says Chris. It certainly does, Chris.

Chris has designed two other icon sets for iCab -- The New Age icons and the Dreamcast icons -- but says that these don't even come close to the Aqua set in quality. These are the first icons for iCab to use thousands of colors and they're fully theme-savvy.

So here I am with Aqua icons on my browser, and I really like them, which surprises me, because I have been underwhelmed by the appearance of screenshots of the prototype Mac OS Aqua interface. I think the difference is that the iCab Aqua icons are very small, and thus don't overwhelm you with their bright colors.

Actually, IE 5's icons are not much larger than iCab's, but they are not nearly as attractive as Chris Brandt's Aqua icons. The colors in IE 5 are disappointingly drab and dead by comparison, and you only get one color at a time.

Also, the rest of the iCab interface window remains restrained, even austere in appearance, which sets off the bright Aqua icons nicely, much as a plain, white or gray wall is ideal for hanging objects d'art. IE 5's window, on the other hand, is busy and cluttered by comparison.

One thing Chris Brandt's icons have done is made me more optimistic about the prospect of eventually looking at OS X Aqua every day. However, this is not a complete capitulation. I still have serious misgivings about the appearance of some of its elements. I hate the organic, rounded-off, chunky look of QuickTime 4 and I detest the Sherlock II style icon bars, (which, unlike the Aqua interface itself, I am first-hand familiar with on a daily basis, and they haven't grown on me) and too many things in the Aqua prototypes seem to be done too darn big, at least by default. The iCab Aqua icons are attractive because the colors are beautifully-done, but also because being so small they do not overwhelm you with an overbearing and distracting blast of color.

It has been argued that GUI elements need to be bigger because monitors are bigger now, so bigger icons are actually an advantage, as well as a whole bunch of other things that are being blown up like the System Font, the Small System Font, the title bars of windows, menu items, checkboxes, and so on. Note the 96 DPI font resolution default in IE 5. Proponents of this Fisher-Price school of GUI design argue that bigger icons et al. will be easier to see on 1600 x 1200 resolution monitors. True, but what about us folks (including all iBook users) who are limited to 800 x 600 resolutions on 12.1" displays?

Too much visual stimulation tires me out and jades my senses. I love the understated subtlety of the traditional Mac OS. Now when I've written stuff like this before, I've received disgusted retorts that if I like austerity so much, why don't I just get a DOS machine. The people who say this, if they're serious, simply don't get where I'm coming from. The traditional Mac desktop user interface is wonderful. I love the analogy of the mouse as an extension of your hand with which you can reach into cyberspace and "touch" the elements on your monitor. I dislike command lines. But I also dislike gratuitous glitz and flash. I don't want to "lick" my monitor.

Now, if Aqua turns out to support appearance skins, all will be well. Perhaps Chris Brandt, who is currently working on a Kaleidoscope theme that matches his Aqua icons, will design a nice skin for OS X with smaller, more tasteful, and more consistently sized elements than those incorporated in what some have unkindly but not inaccurately called Aqua's "Care Bears" theme.

However, it has also been suggested by apprehensive prognosticators that Apple may endeavor to make the standard Aqua theme permanent and unchangeable. The thinnest book in the world would contain what I know about programming, so I have no idea whether Apple could successfully make OS X "skin-proof" or not, but folks who are more knowledgeable about such matters than I seem to think that it's a possibility.

The problem with Aqua, AppleLust's Dave Schultz wrote a while back, is that: "It looks too simple and fanciful. It appears like something an AOL-using newbie would like. It just looks too playful. I mean really, gumdrop buttons? Fanciful windows? An almost playpen environment? It all adds up to one thing: Apple has become a consumer company. On the surface OS X appears very consumer-like; it doesn't look "professional."

Another response I've received when I've voiced my misgivings about Aqua is that I must be some sort of Luddite to be resisting a change that is at last going to give us preemptive multitasking, protected memory, multiprocessor support, and other cool things that will be afforded by OS X's NeXT/UNIX underpinnings and the new Quartz graphics engine. Nothing could be further from the truth, and I'm as enthusiastic about those improvements to the Mac OS experience as anyone. The point is that Aqua has nothing to do with them in a functional sense. Apple could just as easily have plunked a GUI that looked exactly like OS 9 on top of OS X.

Aqua is a radical departure from the elegant design principles that have helped make the classic Mac OS such a pleasure to use. Chris Brandt's lovely little iCab icon set has demonstrated that Aqua doesn't have to be ugly, and my mind is open, but I still have serious doubts about what seems to be change for the sake of novelty.

Charles W. Moore

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Friday, 25-Jul-2008 07:19:20 EDT