in contrast to some themes we reshare, this one could very easily have been created by Apple and released officially
the reason it wasn't is almost certainly that Apple from the Jaguar days saw the cyan buttons as part of its brand; letting users pick their own colors would dilute that brand
(you can tell it's Jaguar or something not long before or after Jaguar by the pinstripes, btw)
many people, including us, hailed the visual design of early OS X as stunning. we still think it's really very good indeed. even for a very good visual design though, the corporate incentives tug towards conformity and away from creative expression
it's just
worth noticing that, we think
i like this one a lot. always wished, at the time, that apple would've let me go with my favourite colour instead of cyan--this, after all, wasn't too far off from when you could pick yr own colours for things on Mac OS 9 much more easily, as well as things like the URL bar in IE5.
jaguar was the first time i didn't have to routinely run older programs in Classic (or, more annoyingly, reboot directly into 9.) i remember that era fondly, to the point where i'm beginning to think the Aqua look aged better than the brushed metal obsession that followed in Panther and Tiger.
