Comment by detourdog
7 days ago
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.
I stopped working with windows after 3.11, NT4. I was referring to the transparency/layer aspects.