Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

There are people in this world who violently hate brushed metal. They bitch and gripe about it and take any opportunity they can to beat this tired, trivial topic to death yet again. If they took all the energy they consume actively hating brushed metal and invested it in more useful pursuits, we’d be curing cancer on Mars right now (and Earth). Personally, I’m indifferent to it. I don’t especially like it, but I don’t dislike it either. I’ve noticed that different apps use different variations of the brushed metal skin, but I don’t really care.

What I do like, however, is the unified theme that Apple introduced with Tiger. I like it so much, I downloaded Uno, a simple script installer that backs up the system graphics that make up Aqua and replaces them with graphics that turn just about every app into a smooth, simple, semi-white-to-light-gray gradient. Did I mention I like it?

I’ve showed this change to about a dozen people who are Mac users or who are more than passingly familiar with the OS X GUI. The group consists of an unscientific mix of persons who have either complained about brushed metal, or have never mentioned it. Here’s how every conversation has gone so far:

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Ok, time to brag some more…

Since yesterday, I’ve had two additional articles posted to AFP548.com. They’re reprints of articles that have appeared here before, but because AFP548 is also distributing them, a wider technical audience will see them.

Creating, mounting, and dismounting disk images from the command line

Setting Up the TFTP Server in Tiger

For those who don’t know, AFP548 is a site run by some of the best technical minds in the Mac community. They cover a variety of topics that concentrate primarily on OS X Server. I’m pleased to have my articles published there because it implies they have some kind of technical merit. The other good result is that, because of wider exposure to a more technical audience, more knowledgeable people are able to read what I’ve written and suggest improvements and corrections.

And finally, I didn’t mention it at the time, but AFP548 also posted Configuring Tiger’s syslogd to accept logs from external devices, which has also appeared on this blog before.