UNO: Unifying the OS X Look
Have you ever noticed how inconsistent Mac applications look? With metal and aqua, cocoa and carbon, things just don't look the same. Some people don’t seem to mind this, but luckily for the rest of us, the folks at interacto.net have a great tool called UNO.
UNO means “as one in latin, and it brings the sunken unified look to all your windows. You can choose between OS X’s default theme (Aqua), UNO, UNO shade, or a mashup of the three. Here are some of my apps, both before and after.
Personally I prefer the UNO look; it's clean, pleasant and unobtrusive. The Metal look feels a little “rough and out of place, if you know what I mean. Although the latest Leopard developers' preview sports a unified look, Leopard will be shipping in spring/autumn, so you’ll just have to settle for UNO right now.
What’s more, UNO is absolutely free. Grab your copy at interacto.net.
You should have included a “normal” app in your screenshots, one that doesn’t already sport a pseudo-unified interface. Like Transmit, or FireFox. What UNO does to them is what I love the most — it gets rid of the line along the titlebar and makes them look truly unified like Safari and Finder.
Thanks for the info about Uno, but I really don’t see much of a dramatic difference here–a few slight changes in shades of gray. Even the Aqua lines on the app on the right are still there.
I’m guessing that the product does more, but the image used here doesn’t really show that. Here’s a case where a link to a larger image might have worked better, since in the larger image, there would be room to show more dramatic changes in appearance. The best thing MacApper can do is show people exactly what the key features of a product are, instead of giving a brief overview and providing a link for the reader to do his or her own research.
@Scott: Good point. Working within the confines of 520px screen shots is getting old fast. Watch for the next post to go off today to help address this with a variation of the Lightbox technique.
As for UNO…Thanks to Marvin for posting this as I would likely never have come across it. I agree that the effects are subtle but once you see it on screen it’s really quite nice. Here is the only screen shot I could find on their site, which shows the changes a bit better.
i love uno. downloaded it a while back and I like having a unified look in all my apps except for garage band.
I love me my ShapeShifter, bit expennsive of course, but as a fan of customizable intefaces it’s the best I could get out of my Mac in that respect. Didn’t know about Uno back when I bought it though, maybe I should check it out sometime.
@Scott & Miles: Yea, 520px is really constricting, it was hard trying to fit more than three windows together.
I wanted to review this myself, but I use this program now, its great. I have problems reading things in wikipedia now for some reason, but other than that, I love it. Everything looks great, and unified.
If you’re not a Shapeshifter user, this is really the only theme worth having. Getting rid of brushed metal is sweet!
I can’t quite bring myself to love Uno. I avoid ShapeShifter because it relies on APE to do its voodoo, and I don’t trust APE any more than I’d trust a politician who told me the sky is blue.
Uno just…I don’t know. When it’s active, stuff doesn’t seem quite right. I’m content to carry on with the default UI for everything until Apple decides to unify it themselves.
What I really want is Platinum. It was smooth, suave, sophisticated and MATURE. I’ve been playing with MacOS 9 under SheepShaver a lot this last week and it’s like seeing an old friend I didn’t even known I missed. I’m not saying Aqua doesn’t have some nice tricks up its sleeve, just that even after six years it feels pretty amateurish compared to what came before it.
I agree with Bruce on Platinum I loved and miss that UI.
But I’m curious about his distrust of APE. Does it phone home with info?
No, at least I don’t think it does. What bugs me about it is how it messes with the system. I’m trying to find a technical explanation online, but I’m coming up empty-handed. I’ve noticed that some speed issues were resolved by uninstalling APE, as well as some stability issues.