I must again give it to the Apple designers, they've done a fantastic job in creating Leopard's GUI. Where visuals between Windows versions are plagued with the throw it away and redesign from scratch syndrome (aka not inveneted here syndrome, if the lead UI designer changed between versions), Apple designers seem to follow the mantra of changing things just enough to make the visuals appear fresh and modern.
The devil is truly in the details. Leopards visual changes are so small, but yet make a huge difference. The OS just feels much more modern compared to Tiger, and all it took was some settle changes here and there instead of throwing out all the visuals out and designing from scratch. As a user I hugely appreciate this kind of design. I feel comfortable and familiar from the first second, yet still there is a welcome freshness to the UI.
There are however a few things which I would have liked to see implemented. I don't know why Apple has made the decision to implement a slight delay when highlighting menu items. It's been there since 10.0, but in my mind it downgrades precision when navigating a large menu. When quickly moving the mouse over, say, 20 menu items, only a few items are highlighted along the way. This makes my Mac feel slow. The other thing is that UI controls still lack any rollover indication. I don't want the Windows christmas tree treatment, but a small, settle highlight when rolling over controls would again add some precision to daily UI tasks.
Comments
From a visual design standpoint, I'm not sure about the whole "making the background windows lighter" decision. Brightness attracts the eye, and as such making the active window darker while surrounding it with brighter background windows doesn't really work for me.
If they really want to show off their graphics capabilities, I'd almost consider doing an alpha fade on the background windows, or perhaps blending a light gray color over them such that they dim slightly into the background.
Posted by: Michael Long | 29 Oct 2007 01:57:04
I think the word you're looking for is subtle not settle.
Posted by: Mike | 1 Dec 2007 07:41:49
I think the word you're looking for is subtle not settle.
Posted by: Mike | 1 Dec 2007 07:42:13
Yeah, subtle, not settle.
Posted by: Tuomas Artman | 2 Dec 2007 15:26:03
I'd be very careful with the highlighting when hovering. One of the reasons I feel so lost when using many Windows programs is that I can't seem to put my mouse anywhere withoug invoking some sort of tooltips etc clutter.
My main gripes about the Leopard basic interface is that some of the dialogs are still unoperable with the keyboard, the selections scheme with keyboard is still flawed, selection is not considered an action and can't be undone, windows can still be only resized from one corner and there is no centralized place for status reports (like eg. in the new Mail) in Finder.
Why selecting items with the keyboard is problematic:
http://daringfireball.net/2006/08/highly_selective
Posted by: PA | 9 Jan 2008 19:32:59
