Mac users, and specially the user interface purists among them, have always had a problem with Apple employing various non-standard theme elements in different parts of Mac OS X. In Tiger, there used to be about seven different types of windows and several more styles for buttons and tabs and other user interface elements.
Apple was often on the receiving end of criticism from third party developers for breaking their own HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) and not having any consistency in UI design. With Leopard, Apple tried to put an end to some of those complaints by laying the much scorned brushed metal interface to rest and moving the whole OS to a more unified Aqua feel.
However, there are still a lot of elements in Leopard that remind you of the old bubbly Aqua UI, primary among which are the scrollbars and buttons. If you’re just as annoyed by these old school Aqua remnants as I am, you’ll be pleased to know that there exists a solution that fixes this problem—iLeopard.
Developed by Guillaume Campagna, iLeopard completes the transformation from Tiger to Leopard that Apple left midway and replaces all the Aqua elements of the user interface with the new dark gray unified interface that iTunes sports. The scrollbars, buttons, form elements, menu highlight color, login window, etc., all change to the new style, giving the OS a much more consistent and cleaner look.
Although there are some tiny bugs here and there, in the form of little artifacts around some buttons, it’s pretty stable and safe in general. I’ve had it installed for a week now, ever since v2.1 was released, and it has given me no problems so far. Would I recommend it? Highly so. Just download it already (direct link), it’s free. Be sure to read the ‘Read me’ file before proceeding with the installation—that’s what it’s there for.
Also, while you’re at it, you might also want to check out iChat Matte, a little plugin for iChat that turns those Aqua-like bubbles into those of the more subdued matte variety. It perfectly complements iLeopard.
The first iLeopard link heads to the wrong place (you're missing the 2 in the URL.)
Ah, thanks for pointing it out. It has been fixed now. :)
I can't really see why I'd use a hack which renders buggy controls in the pursuit of consistency. I agree that Aqua needs to go entirely, but given a choice between correctly rendered aqua and misrendered faux unified, I'll take Apple's UI widgets.
Working fine for me... no bugs so far!!
Pretty neat!
Eeeew! That looks disgusting man! Either because it is done by a third party (and not done right) or because it just plain looks disgusting. No wonder Apple left in that little bit of Aqua. The only thing I like in that is the Safari url bar.
iChat Matte of course rules!
Just install it and see. If you like iChat Matte and are using that custom Extras file to get iTunes-like scrollbars in the entire system, you're sure to like this. It's a completely reversible installation. Try it out.
@Tonio Loewald,
It does not render buggy controls all over the place. There are very minor issues with some buttons in remote places in the system, the priority setting in Transmission's file inspector, for instance. And even those should be fixed in a bug-fix release the developer plans to release shortly.
You mean iLeopard removes all pleasant aspects of Mac OSX once and for all and leaves nothing but a bland, grey interface? wow.
@ Dave
Those are exactly my sentiments on the matter! Apparently either the author of this article or someone at MacUser didn't like my first post on the subject as it was either removed or not approved for some reason.
But anyway if this comment isn't censored, I completely agree with you about iLeopard. That would definitely make the UI look VERY bland. It would be an overkill of grey. If someone is a UI "purist" they can simply use graphite if they don't like aqua. Simple.
Wow! This is what I have been wanting since I got leopard!
I can't see how so many of you don't like it :(
Sure there are a few bugs in it, but they are getting fixed, and the theme is getting moved to a new theming method which will make it even nicer :)
But yea I really like it, and as for "Call Me Yo Daddy" just changing the UI to "graphite" doesn't do much, it just changes all the blue stuff to gray, wow now thats a change lol, anyway I still think this is way better :)