Pinstripe Exhaustion

I’ve s-o-o-o-o had it with Aqua’s pinstripes. The more brushed aluminum apps I see, the happier I am. In theory, Apple employees should be as tired of seeing pinstripes as we are right about now. So you can mark this as my prediction for X 10.3 : A new default appearance plus additional UI customization options. Yes, I know there are 3rd party hacks for this kind of thing…

n.b.: The difference between a simple wishlist item and a public prediction is quantified as:

pi / (foolhardiness x huevos)

Music: Lilys :: Strange Feelin’

18 Replies to “Pinstripe Exhaustion”

  1. i’ve noticed kung-log comes with a tool for switching to brushed aluminum. i also notice that with both kung-log in brushed mode and safari, the menus and dialog boxes are still pinstripe-y

    (btw, for some reason the remember info checkbox ain’t working for me)

  2. I think the Brushed Al is way more tacky than the pinstripes, but both have to go… I would be happier if the pinstripes would go away in favor of plain white.

  3. Well, what can I say, I suppose I like pimps more than robots.

    But yes, to each his own. Hard to imagine liking the gauche metal to the suave aluminium. ;c)

    That said, both are much better than the windows 9x gui, and Xp’s Luna makes me want to scratch my eyes out.

  4. Ah crap, I was trying to be cleaver and screwed up.

    I ment to say,

    Hard to imagine likeing the gauche metal to the suave pinstripes.

    Oh well. That just bombed. :cp

  5. I’m a little weary of the pinstripes, but I can’t say I’ve found SmoothStripes (as nice a job as the themer, Max, did with it) to be a lasting improvement. Too white, and too blank. The stripes do add something to hold the space.

    That said, I could definitely use less of them. Thank goodness they’re gone from the Dock, I have to say (current AHUI to the wind) Safari does look good and works well with textured windows.

    I have no idea where Apple is going with this. They’re clearly looking to refresh the OS, and provide differentation, but it’s also threatening to become a complete mess. I’ll be interested to see what direction 10.3 provides.

  6. Pinstripes are not so bad on a CRT monitor, but on an LCD (especially in the 12″ Powerbook’s) is a pain in the eyes. Is there a way to get rid of them, but without using themes that require to run as runtimes? thanks.

  7. Wow, I just installed the smooth pinstripes theme and used the ThemeChanger applescript app to change the theme. OSX is now _so much_ cleaner and easier on the eyes. Highly recommendend.

  8. mrgrape, if the stripes were pimpin’ stripes I’d probably be happy. But to me they just look like they’re trying to be “high quality bond paper” stripes or something, all evocative of a pretentious resume or some high falutin’ lawyer’s office.

    The aluminum is easy on the eyes for long periods, unobtrusive, and I think lettering stands out on it much nicer (see Safari’s toolbar).

  9. lookmark I have to say I agree about the smoothstrips alternative – looks too plain and far too white. I prefer the stripes to the plain white, which I would find too distracting.

  10. xian, re: not remembering your personal info: This is a Safari bug, unfortunately not fixed in the latest update. In my case, it remembers me on .cgi pages but not on .html or .php pages.

  11. Too bad the brushed aluminum brings my powerbookG4 to a crawl (even with a gig of ram)… I use Max’s opaque smooth-stripes theme to not only get rid of the stripes, but also the transparent menus which another cause of aqua slow-downs. WindowShade X takes care of the window drop-shadows… yes Virigina, Aqua sucks when you have 8mb of video ram.

  12. Shawn – too a crawl? Isn’t that being just a bit hyperbolic? In fact I haven’t noticed any performance differences on any machine b/w aluminum and pinstripes.

  13. Did you know that if you edit the nib files on apps that *don’t* have the brushed aluminum nibs, you can set them that way? I now have a version of terminal with the brushed aluminum look.

    I got the idea reading about how to make Safari “look like an aqua app” – ie with the stripes.

    grab your app – terminal in this case, and click on show package contents, then contents, then resources, then english.lproj. Click on the nib files in there until you find the one that does the part of the app you want. In this case term~.nib. Click on that nib file. When Interface builder comes up, click on the window, go to attributes and check the box marked “textured window” Save and exit out of interface builder. Crank up the app.

    Neat, eh? I’ll mention it here if it makes Terminal unstable to do this to it.

    -Jim

  14. So does anyone have the cojones to try this with finder? I don’t. :) I looked at *how* you’d do it, and there’s an attribute in the finder main nib called “metal” but… while I’m comfortable tweaking applications, I’m just not comfortable mucking about with Finder itself So if anyone else gives it a try, would you post about it here, please?

    -Jim

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