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Comment by paxys

7 days ago

Some Windows Vista designer is shedding a tear right now. Got such a huge nostalgia hit watching the "liquid glass" demos during the keynote. Installing a leaked "Longhorn" OS on a PC back in 2005 and seeing all the translucent refractive glass really felt magical and futuristic. 20 years later, everything old is new again.

That's exactly what I thought. Look, they invented Windows Aero. Bet the John Gruber types who laughed at Aero and called it an Aqua ripoff are going full "two soyjaks pointing meme" over this.

  • Was Aero trying to look like Quartz? The big improvement I see is that the plumbing has better integration and with Continuity it's really impressive. Even if it looks like Aero the functionality the OS is providing is the real feature.

    • Aero wasn't trying to look like Aqua. Steve Jobs would have launched a devastating hypercombo of legal action if it were. But it was clearly a response to Aqua: use 3D acceleration to provide fancy effects and shiny widgets. The previous release, Windows XP, still did everything with lines, solid-fill rects, and blitted bitmaps and was starting to look long in the tooth compared to Mac OS X.

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