Here's three things about Aqua that we absolutely love: 1) the "Genie effect"; 2) cursor magnification in the Dock; and 3) the way that just about everyone immediately registered an opinion about Aqua despite the fact that almost nobody had used it yet. Really, the phosphors on our monitor had barely faded from Steve's Expo webcast before some thirty-odd in-depth technical dissections of Aqua (complete with analyses of the political and moral ramifications of Apple's new user interface) sprung forth from the minds and fingers of people everywhere with even more time on their hands than we've got. And most of those articles-- which generally either praised Aqua as the Second Coming of the Mac, or trashed it as an abomination in the eyes of the Interface Gods-- were based on little more than Steve's hour-long canned demo of a pre-release operating system as witnessed in a smeary little QuickTime Player window. You can't buy press coverage that intense!

Things are a little different now, though. The Aqua articles of late are generally more well-informed, tempered with the passage of time and the fact that some people have actually gotten to use the darn thing. See, Apple shipped Mac OS X DP3 to developers some time ago, and it includes the first semi-public release of the Aqua interface-- which means all those arguments about how the Dock sucks actually have some real substance behind them. In particular, we heartily recommend the analysis of Mac OS X DP3 available at geek site Ars Technica, whose Trial By Water is well-reasoned, intelligent, smashingly thorough, and utterly perverse when it comes to testing Aqua's responses to silly stimuli. You just have to love any article in which the author's first impulse is to stick two thousand items into the Dock just to see what happens...

What happens, incidentally, made us laugh out loud: the icons shrink to 6x8 pixels in size, and the Dock displays only as many items as can fit in one row across the screen. You have to see the screenshot to appreciate the humor-- keep in mind that it's a full-size image, so what you see is literally what Ars Technica got. Granted, you can set the minimum icon size much larger than 6x8, but even at that ridiculously tiny size only the first 170 or so items still fit on the screen. Conclusion? The Dock needs work. It may be super in the eye candy department (and terrific as comic relief, as well), but it sure isn't going to replace our pop-up windows coupled with the Application Switcher. After all, even if we were to accept our fate and live in permanent squint mode, 170 items is just too few; we've got tons more than that in pop-ups. Hey Apple, is there any reason that a folder dropped into the Dock couldn't yield an icon that functions as a pop-up window when clicked? That'd sure put our minds at ease. In any case, Apple's got time yet to improve things, and we're reasonably confident that they wouldn't ship a final product as goofy as the current Dock. Right?