Yosemite – Thoughts on blurriness and design ecosystems
blogs.atlassian.com
blogs.atlassian.com
I'm still waiting for my dream UI: no transparency, but everything other than the current window is slightly out of focus (even the dock or windows bar). When you move the mouse to a new window, it comes into focus. You could even do several levels of focus (if not in a full-screen app): less for visible windows more for background such as dock/windows bar and desktop. I haven't tested this in real life (mockup), so maybe it's been tried and rejected already.
Thankfully OS X's "press space to capture a window" has done a good job at just putting things on a white background. I'm hoping that the translucency in 10.10 works the same way, but if anybody's got the beta I'd love a confirmation!
I paid absolutely no attention to how "expensive" any of it was in terms of processing. I was interested in exploring possibilities. Some of the effects were pretty amazing, it seemed to me. Depth of field control particularly so.
At the time I couldn't drum up _any_ interest. Even as a purely intellectual curiosity. Several people were actually hostile to the whole concept.
In some tests I'd define a 3D camera with a specific depth of field that matched the distance to the object I wanted to be in focus. Say I had an array of view ports onto documents, processes, or images, the one selected would come forward to the focal distance and be in sharp focus. I tried using the effect both coupled and decoupled with actual distance. To me, simply blurring the element without having the effect being tied to distance did not seem nearly as effective. I also played around with having selected, but not active objects coming forward of focus.
I also did some tests with "constellations" of documents connected by lines. The lines could indicate a path, a hierarchy, connectiveness, or dependency. The browser would allow you to spin the viewpoint, zoom into and out of groupings. Depth of field here, as well as aerial perspective (greying and blueing far away objects) made for a very nice effect, and seriously improved navigational awareness.
These were all animations, not actual interactive demos. Very exploratory in nature. Never got enough interest to go deeper into it.
Try going full screen and back again quickly. Try flipping through view modes in finder. Try dragging the sidebar width on the inside edge of finder.
I'm on a Retina MBP. I installed it on a new partition.