Aqua-Soft ForumsOk walking past a computer shop earlier today I saw an imac running Aqua and I could resist to give it a try.
I had never used (even seen) "real" Mac OS X aqua before, but I run an XP desktop that is virtually identical (trancetracer.tripod.com). Here is my first impression.
Machine was a G4 800 256 Ram Geforce 2.
It was Aqua 10.1, but I couldn't believe it, the word that comes to mind is "instant". First I tried out the dock, thinking that OD 0.86 that I run, running at about 50-60 fps on my AquaXP was fast,... Man I couldn't believe it the real dock is just INSTANT. The moment your mouse goes over an icon, INSTANTLY it is big. I don't know if it ran at 120 fps or what. If Jeff is reading this, the magnification needs to be tenths of seconds faster!! It felt so nice! I actually switched my OD 0.86 from "smooth and quick" to "jumpy but very fast" to get a "real" aqua effect.
On OD 0.86 you can sort of see the icon get bigger, on real OS X it is much much faster, perhaps twice as fast.
The magnification effect itself did seem pretty accurate though (Mageffect 2). But what was different, is that on OD 0.86 when you quickly move the mouse left-right (if you have a high fps) you get a "water effect" on OD 0.86, like a ripple. The real Aqua did not have this effect, perhaps because the icons enlarge and get smaller quicker, like I said before.
Any way enough about the dock, now for the genie effect.
I don't know the first couple of times I did it it was nice, but it is nowhere near as instant as the dock. It takes about 0.7- 1.0 seconds to minimize a window, and sometimes v-sync tearing is visible. I would have thought the window would (should) minimize faster, (maybe 0.3 seconds) it would have been more usable. There was no option in the dock panel to turn off the genie effect. Just a setting to swap it with another effect that just shrinks the window size until it is 128 pixels, as it slides onto the dock.
Oddly there was no transparency setting option on the dock settings. But most weirdly, there was no "default" button. You can change the magnification size and dock size all you want but when you want the default size there isn't one!
On the subject of menu selections, (i.e. when you click an item it blinks 3 times before selecting), i thought when I first used the iblink program for XP, that man using a mac would be slow. But no way! you don't even notice the blinking, the menu is just instantly there. I guess the speed is the same as say windows Xp's "fade in" time. It felt rock solid.
Anyhow, the way that I would compare AquafiedXp and real OS X Aqua, is that there is just a "feel" difference, that you just cant emulate I guess. OS X felt like it was carved out of steel, the feedback you get is just instant, not neccesarily in terms of speed, but in terms of "doneness" if I can invent that word. I suspect that you can actually sense the differences betweeen the engines that render windows on windows XP and the engine that renders windows on OS X Aqua. There is something different, the OS X Aqua has a more solid feel.
But there are just too many differences, I mean click on system settings, and you don't get the control panel,.. click on Finder and you get some cool ****, not the search dialog! 
One thing though, as fast as everything was. Internet Explorer took about 3 times as long to open as on my AquaXP!
The operating system, seemed much more dynamic to me than I would have thought.
(PS:// One thing I have done to my AquaXP after using real aqua for the first time, is
1. set my od to "jumpy but very fast" (which allowed me to use GDI + Engine, which was nice)
and
2. (very important) Set my mouse pointer speed to only 1 notch from the right, i.e. made it much faster. (I have an intellimouse explorer (enhance precision set to on). These 2 things really helped alot in getting the "feel" right.
But the one thing we really really really need is the throbbing default menu buttons,.. it is what makes OS X Aqua seem alive most of all (...apart from the dock) how have we come so far without them? We really really need them,... but how?
