With Leopard's forthcoming "Quick Look" feature in the Finder, Apple is leaping ahead of the file-previewing game by providing a separate, translucent preview window of amazing flexibility and beauty. Quick Look can preview movies at full size or even full screen. It can preview text, HTML, and PDF documents and even let you navigate them. If you select multiple files, Leopard provides an "expose"-like view that lets you navigate among them. Or, if the files are images, you can quickly go into slideshow mode. There's much more... but ain't that enough for now?

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With the recent launch of Windows Vista and its new Aero interface, everyone who knows of it is thinking about transparent/translucent windows. Indeed, folks who are into theming have known of Aero for years, since, well, it’s taken Microsoft years to get it to market.

Mac users have already enjoyed transparency in their applications for years now, though not as part of the window “trim.” (As I discuss briefly later on, Aqua doesn’t actually have much “trim”.) Rather, it’s just something we take for granted in applications like the Dock, Dashboard, and Expose, and QuickTime Player (which pops up throughout Mac OS X to present slideshows, image thumbnail views, and of course full-screen video), as well as in Apple’s growing use of “HUD” displays, which use a transparent black interface.

Then, of course, there are apps like Quicksilver, which has taken advantage of transparency in its Bezel interface for years, and more recently in its amazing, animated Cube interface, Growl, which uses Apple’s bezel framework in several styles, and numerous others like DropCopy (whose whole interface is transparent), QuartzClocks (which lets users adjust the transparency of your chosen clock), and AlarmClock (which again uses the bezel framework to great effect).

Nevertheless, when I first saw Mac themer/designer Ice Specter’s attempts to develop a transparent theme for Mac OS X that would duplicate the look of Aero, I was “hooked on transparency” in a big way. At the time, I didn’t realize that Ruler Aero, Ice Specter’s theme, was emulating the new Windows “look,” but it wouldn’t have mattered in any case. For one thing, as cool as Ruler Aero was, it wasn’t usable enough, and it had this disconcerting blend of transparent toolbars (in metal apps) and opaque ones (in everything else). It was a proof-of-concept, and a terrific one at that.

But from the get-go, what Ruler Aero made me lust after wasn’t Windows Vista Aero-style translucency, but rather totally transparent windows. In addition, I wanted a theme that would give me transparent toolbars in both metal apps like the Finder, QuickTime Player, and Safari and in regular Cocoa apps like Preview, Mail, Activity Monitor, Keynote, and Pages (in other words, in most of the apps I use).

However, after experimenting off and on for a couple of years to achieve the look I had in my head, I had pretty much given up. Every thread I followed in the theming forums concluded that transparency wasn’t possible in a Mac OS X theme except in the few places Ruler Aero had achieved it. I concluded that Apple had designed Mac OS X and Aqua so as to completely thwart all attempts at my transparency nirvana.

Then, quite by accident last month, I stumbled onto a setting in Apple’s Cocoa framework that finally unlocked the secret of transparency for Mac OS X’s toolbars. I’ve now finished applying that setting to a Mac OS X theme that enables totally see-through windows, and I’m calling it “Crystal Clear.”

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I swore recently that I’d adopt a kinder, gentler attitude toward Earth’s computing majority, which knows (and thinks it loves) Microsoft Windows and nothing else. After all, switching operating systems is no easy task, and merely pondering a switch no doubt evokes mostly fear in the gentle Windows folk of this world. Continuing to use Windows, therefore, in the face of overwhelming evidence that it’s bad for your health, isn’t a sign of weakness or weak-mindedness. It’s simply Human nature to loathe and fear change and to cling to the familiar and comfortable. Hence that wise adage, “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence,” and its close relative, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” All I can say is, Thank goodness I’m a Martian!

However, I never said I was going to be nice to narrow minded Windows bigots who pose as thought-leaders at the head of major technology news organizations. And so, with relish, let me dig in and deconstruct a writer whose ignorance, fear, and envy of Mac OS X have led him to write one of the most glaringly ridiculous and self-contradictory bits of Apple FUD I’ve read in months. The guy’s name is Peter Coffee, and you can tell by the photo that accompanies his latest opinion piece, Will Leopard Out-Vista Vista? that he’s bracing himself to be pounced on by guys like me on the Mac side of the fence. (By the way, it really is greener here, folks.)

MacDailyNews has already had a heaping helping of Coffee’s hide, but there’s plenty left for me.

Let me start by making quite clear my view of Windows-oriented technology writers like Coffee who presume to write about Mac OS X or to compare a Mac with a Windows PC: They shouldn’t. “And why the heck not?” You ask.

Well, here’s the thing. Guys like me who trash Windows for sport don’t do so out of ignorance of that operating system. After all, you can’t really turn 50 and be a professional techhie in this world without having had intimate knowledge of Windows over the course of its lifetime. Me, I started using Windows with version 2.0, and every employer I’ve worked for since then has made me use a Windows system. The only one I kind of liked was Windows NT 4.0, and that was only because it was so much better than the Windows 3.1 I had been using. So, you aren’t likely to find a technology writer who prefers the Mac who hasn’t also spent a lifetime working in Windows.

By contrast, guys like Coffee have no earthly idea what Mac OS X is all about. He thinks he knows about Macs by playing with the review copy he receives from the company, or from the few hours he spent back in 2001 with the first version of the operating system. Or from what he reads, or hears, from other technology writers like himself who have no idea what they’re talking about.

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