Eye Candy

January 6, 2006 - Posted by André Restivo- 0 Comments

Even though my first post about my new Powerbook wasn’t exactly a praising one, there are a good handful of things I just love in Mac OS X. One of them is the incredible amount of unobtruvise eye candy. I’ll just mention a few examples:

  • Exposé - The best invention since sliced bread. Not enough to stop missing linux virtual desktops but a genuine brilliant idea (quicktime video).
  • Desktop Manager - Mac OS X doesn’t come with virtual desktops by default but there are a couple of add-ons that help the common linux switcher feel right at home. Desktop Manager seems to be the best alternative so far and its transitions are just plain beautiful (quicktime video). Virtue seems to be a good alternative but unfortunately it doesn’t work in Tiger. Some things I miss are the ability to associate applications to a desktop or to have applications that show in every desktop and having different docks in each desktop.
  • Genie Effect - Just another example of the extreme care apple took with the visual aspect of Mac OS X. The Genie Effect is both nice and useless :-) When minimizing windows they appear to be sucked into a bottle just like the genie of Aladdin. If you press shift while minimizing you can see the effect in glorious slow motion (screenshot).