Mac OS X Yosemite Under the Magnifying Glass
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The new dock reminded me of the old Powerbook G4 I had, with 10.2 installed. I still somewhat miss the whole "Aqua" interface sometimes – but maybe that's just nostalgia or I over the years it's become harder to surprise me with UI design.
Hopefully they'll refine it a lot more before release; also, can't wait for Dark Mode to hit the beta.
Contrast is decreasing everywhere these days, and that trend is really causing me trouble. I hope they darken things a bit. Perhaps the light-on-dark mode will help with that?
Also, Id suggest waiting a couple days/weeks if you're a Chrome user. Just keeps crashing, every build, even Canary.
They should have used a Humanist sans-serif (https://typekit.com/lists/humanist-sans-serifs), of which Lucida is a good example.
UI fonts are not supposed to be used for large blocks of text. UI fonts are used for, well, basically “titles and signs”.
See: http://dl.maximumpc.com/galleries/linuxguide3/kde4-dolphin.p...
- The inconsistency between some icons (e.g. Finder vs. Trash).
- The inconsistency between icons and the overall UI (e.g. folder icons just look blurry, while other icons have sharp lines).
- Juxtaposed rounded buttons in the toolbar are weird.
- Aliasing on some UI elements (e.g. tooltips, slider, buttons, sidebar).
- Too low contrast on some UI elements (e.g., sidebar, traffic lights).
IMO Apple is struggling to make this new visual language coherent and polished, I guess it'll take more 2-3 iterations to get to the level of coherency Aqua achieved.
Which makes it kind of ironic and upsetting that the UI APIs they provide for writing Bahamut (AppKit) made it so incredibly difficult to make it look that way.
When a reviewer says "this is definitely an improvement over the last version, which looked and felt awkward", I recall how in their review of the last version, they said the same thing.
I fondly remember Ars Technica's review of Mac OS X Developer Preview 3, back in February 2000, where John Siracusa roasts the "lickable" new Aqua UI that's a complete mess:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2000/02/mac-os-x-dp3/
A good and honest critic is the artist's best friend, even it may sting for a moment.
Was it lost on the author that Federighi's comment on the trashcan was made in jest?
I have no doubt that they did spend what most companies would consider a ridiculous amount of time on it. And that's why it's funny.
If Apple didn’t really spend a lot of time on the trashcan then he was just dishonest, but not saying something in jest.
I hate to say it, but that blog post is mostly bike shedding. Do people really care that the toolbar icons aren't perfectly aligned, that the folder icons lack a little contrast and that the search bar looks like a button?
The article literally says that there a still many rough edges in OS X. I don’t see rough edges. There are small inconsistent details and extremely minor legibility problems. It’s not worth mentioning and Apple won’t listen anyway.
> I merely suggested that small problems add up to a less than optimal user experience.
I believe that this is only true if you delude yourself into thinking these minor inconsistencies and flaws matter.
There will always remain some "rough edges" because costs rise exponentially when approaching an optimal design. People have lifes, deadlines etc. and Apple is no exclusion to that. Of course they could find and fix these problems if the threw another $10MM at it, but they don’t because they’ve already reached 98% of optimal and the last 2% aren’t even worth thinking about. There are much bigger problems elsewhere (both from their perspective and from customer perspective).
PS: This comment doesn't bring anything of value to the conversation but negativity and I am sorry for that, but it's been nagging at me for years.