Jaguar is brighter than Panther…

I know I’ve said this before, but I love Jaguar’s brighter interface. Panther has its speed and additional features going for it, but I feel like Apple went backwards in interface design and moved OS X more toward the dull look and feel of Windows with Panther. Often, when I use Panther, I use ShapeShifter and a Jaguar GUI theme to get me back to a Jaguar look; but it’s still not quite the same. You never quite step away entirely from Panther’s dirty look. There’s a lot about Jaguar that’s brighter, and it has a much better feel.

I’m writing this note using Jaguar. I have two hard disks mounted in my 2002 Quicksilver PowerMac, and I have Panther loaded on the boot disk and Jaguar loaded on my second. I can’t transition to Panther entirely—and actually don’t want to—because my CD/DVD labeling application won’t run under Panther. It’s the same situation I found myself in on the Windows’ side of things were I was forced to build a dual-boot system to be able to use my Visioneer PaperPort scanner, an old tool I still find immensely useful. Amazing how much some things change, they still remain the same.

After several years of paying for operating system upgrades, I’m at the point where I’m looking very critically at whether or not I will do the next. Frankly, I would have to have a very compelling reason to. Additionally, if I felt that Apple had wandered even farther away from the bright, colorful designs of OS X that helped draw me to it, I would have an even bigger uphill climb to make. The odds are I won’t do it, just like the odds are I won’t upgrade to Longhorn. It would probably take a new machine here to take me into a new OS, and that machine would probably be a G5. In any case, it’s more than likely a year away. Apple’s new OS probably is, too; and Longhorn is even further out than that; so, it’s not something to worry about.