Use OS X Lion to Improve Your UI | Hacker News Reader

Use OS X Lion to Improve Your UI

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43 pointsblakeperdue14 comments

Lion looks a lot to me like a return to OS X's NextStep roots: spartan and understated with color used sparingly and mostly for emphasis.

And then there’s iCal and Address Book …

I’m mostly just happy that Apple’s apps I use most (Finder, Safari, Mail) have adopted a spartan look.

And Photobooth… Everything is so grey almost to the point of hurting usability (I still miss the coloured Finder folder icons) and out of nowhere you have the cartoonish apps such as iCal, AB and Photobooth. WTFmate indeed.

Photo Booth is a wacky and fun app and it’s tastefully done. It’s also an app people like to play with, it’s not something that’s used to get work done. I see no problem with it.

I absolutely do not believe that every app has to look the same. It’s ok for them to look different. It just (1) should be well done, (2) standard UI elements should be immediately recognizable and the look shouldn’t (3) create wrong expectations or (4) limit the UI in some way.

I personally don’t like the look of iCal and Address Book, I don’t know how others feel. (1) is certainly a very subjective point that can be endlessly argued about. It’s all about fashion.

iCal, Address Book and Photo Booth do very well on (2), but I think that iCal and Address Book do very poorly on (3) and (4).

Thankfully I never use Mail or iCal or Address Book.

The lack of visible scrollbars is really throwing me off sometimes. If content lines up right there is no visual indication that it extends beyond its frame. I think this is a step backward in usability.

NeXTSTEP wasn't spartan and understated because they wanted it like that. It was spartan and understated because the original NeXT hardware was (mostly) black and white until 1994. If you ran NeXTSTEP on a colour system it actually had quite a bit of colour. Certainly as much or more than its contemporaries (windows 3.1/NT, OS/2, Solaris and Irix).

I think this current obsession minimalism is just fashion for fashion sake.

> I think this current obsession minimalism is just fashion for fashion sake.

I've always thought it was an attempt for all the administrata (the OS, the required chrome of each app, etc.) to fade into the background, and leave the only bright-and-shiny things on the screen—the stuff that immediately draws your eyes—to be your own stuff: your projects, your content, the website you're reading, etc.

And this dawned on me as I typed this: Lion's Address Book and iCal are gaudy precisely because their content isn't freeform or style-able, and doesn't present an obvious metaphor on its own. Address Book is a list of restricted Key-value store documents. iCal is a grid onto which you may manipulate sliding, wrapped boxes. Without their chrome, you'd have little context to decide what to do with them. So, in these cases, the chrome is the content—and so it is embellished, rather than inconspicuous.

Buy it or not, but in the WWDC UI session they stated that they switched to monochrome sidebar icons so that the interface would emphasize the content, be it the Mail message, photos, or album art.

Actually, I'll buy that. They're bringing that physical minimalism into the software. Cool.

Now they need to sort out and rationalize the switchers. alt-tab, exposé or mission control? Pick one.

I've been using Lion for months, and the lack of contrast still throws me off when I'm trying to figure out which window has focus. They all look inactive all the time.

It's going to take some getting used to the low contrast for me. Window titles and source list items are much more subtle now, for better and worse. Overall I think I like it. The focus on content should be a good thing.

Right now I have a separate Lion partition so I'm switching back and forth. Once I go 100% Lion it'll be much easier to get used to it.

Copying the core aesthetics, while glaring over the details that actually make Lion look good.

Especially the progress bar: sure, it does look a bit like Lion's but it absolutely lacks the subtle colors and shades.

The white box shadow on the bottom of the button doesn't seem to match Lion's buttons. I think it's a little cleaner if it's removed or darkened a bit.

What is the value in aping a particular OS's look for your UI when chances are most of your users won't even be using that OS?

You know what other sites attempt to copy an OS's native controls? The ones displaying fake virus scans.

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