-KJ Posted January 24, 2009 Share Posted January 24, 2009 MS' standards are almost nonexistent. I won't mention Windows 7 because it is unreleased. Look at Vista instead. Consider applications in Vista. None of them works in the same way as any other. Only one of them (Notepad) uses the "native" built-in appearance (i.e. the one most easily available to third-party software). Many of them have features in common: opening and saving files, typing words, editing properties, and yet somehow they conspire to all do so differently. It is a total mess. These aren't just minor failures of consistency, either. The people responsible for these applications have deliberately chosen to give the platform's standard look and feel the finger. That's bad enough for standalone applications; it's even worse when some of those applications are part of the platform itself. There isn't even any kind of internal consistency. The Explorer Window and the IE window look, at first glance, to be similar; similar graphical style for the forward/back button, for example. But they're not. The spacing is different; the drop-down arrow in the IE window has more space around it than the counterpart in Explorer. Even when the same nonstandard concept is used, it's done differently. Windows Live Messenger, Internet Explorer, and Windows Media Player all have a "hidden" menu bar. The menu bar is still there, just not visible by default. And each one of them exposes its menu bar in a different way, doing essentially the same thing gratuitously differently. It might well be that getting rid of the menu bar is a good idea—but there's no justification at all for making them all similar-but-different. Taken alone, these are all fairly minor things. Put together, the interface is just completely shambolic. It looks amateurish. The quirks of each new interface have to be learned anew. This slap-dash approach to look-and-feel gives the impression of a platform that no one really cares about. That same contempt for norms and standards inflicts third-party applications. And, really, why shouldn't it? If Microsoft can't be bothered to make Windows applications that feel like Windows applications, why should anyone else go to the effort? And even if a developer does want to go to the effort, what's he meant to take his cues from? Should he copy IE? WMP? Explorer? Notepad? Office? Visual Studio? To add insult to injury, it's wasteful. Explorer and IE may look similar, but they're different codebases. The code to give that kind of no-menu window with an address bar and a search box and this and that, it's not shared between the two. It might have been at one time. But now it's not. So there's twice the development effort to create and maintain these applications. What could have been done once now has to be done twice. And again for Word, and Outlook, and Visual Studio, and Visio, and Expression Blend. Each time I have to learn a new UI, some team at Microsoft had to write a new UI and test a new UI and maintain a new UI. That's not a good use of their time, when they could have done it once. Mac OS X is by no means perfect in this regard, but it's nowhere near as bad. Applications like the Finder and iTunes establish certain norms and conventions, and third-party applications do a pretty good job of following these (or adapting them to new situations). There aren't OS X applications where the menu bar works totally differently. Apple hasn't produced a different UI style for each and every application. Sure, they do have more than one style—the "pro" apps (Aperture, FCP, etc.) use a darker scheme than normal apps—but there's still an order of magnitude more consistency and coherence on OS X than on Windows. Apple cares about appearances and Apple provides strong GUI models to copy. The result? Third parties produce good-looking applications that work like the OS they run on. And accordingly, users demand that their applications conform to the overall look and feel of the platform. Excellent post. I wish Microsoft would read this. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
giga Veteran Posted January 24, 2009 Veteran Share Posted January 24, 2009 It looks a lot like Windows Vista and WMP11. And people here would always point out how ugly that was. It is ugly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
.Neo Posted January 24, 2009 Share Posted January 24, 2009 Excellent post. I wish Microsoft would read this. You think Microsoft doesn't already know about this? :p Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ObiWanToby Posted January 24, 2009 Share Posted January 24, 2009 I wouldn't say Windows is ugly in general. But this "Marble" looks sweet, even if people are speculating. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
the evn show Posted January 24, 2009 Share Posted January 24, 2009 But even the early OS X was better than OS 9 and other iterations of the old "System" series. But that might not be saying much. ;) Finder in 9.2.2 kicked the living crap out of the OS X Finder until around 10.3. Even today Finder still lacks features that existed in Class Mac OS X (I miss folder tabs most of all). While many people agree that Finder hasn't been stunning software since the 69k to PowerPC transition, Mac OS X actually managed to make it worse for quite some time. You couldn't even burn CDs with Mac OS X until 10.1 which. "Wait. Rip. Wait. Mix. Wait. Reboot into OS 9. Burn. Wait. Reboot" was far more accurate but it just wasn't as catchy as "rip. mix. burn" I made a solid bitch-post in the "What do you think of Vista" from a developer looking for documentation & guidance perspective. I won't repost it here to save everyone from being crushed by walls of text. This is totally what Snow Leopard is going to look like: While not ugly it has a number of obvious issues even if you ignore the obvious incomplete state. Menu text has decreased in size which would make it unreadable given our push towards higher density display Apple menu icon is "gigantic" Extreme transparency on the menu bar completely falls apart with background images (note the critiscism of the 10.5 menu bar and multiply by ten). Application buttons have "Bad" text. You'd more likely see something like "Don't Install" and "Download and Install…" Whitespace is excessive - grouping between headers and side-bar elements falls apart White text on black backgrounds tend to glare, it's also considered difficult to read for most people. Status bar is oversized : it needs to support the 'one size down' system font label size. Foreground and background windows are completely indistinguishable. selected items reduce the contrast (white text on a light-blue/grey background). With some refinement you might have a very nice mock-up but as it sits, it's far from production-ready. This is the sort of thing I expect Apple to pay attention to when they design UIs. Lots of stuff looks pretty but it's a complete pain in the ass to use. I've been holding off of bad-mouthing the new Windows UI because I haven't really used a PC for the better part of a decade. I've played here and there but nothing beyond "Click world of warcraft, kill a dozen monsters" or "click steam -> click audio surf -> dick around for half an hour". I'm not sure how much of my frustration with Windows is due to bad UI design and how much of it is just a result of my own inexperience and becoming accustomed to Mac OS X and to a lesser extent BSD systems. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thealexweb Posted January 24, 2009 Share Posted January 24, 2009 Excellent post. I wish Microsoft would read this. You say Microsoft should read it but they are changing the Windows interface. The ribbon will be standardized in all (most) Windows 7 apps, see interview posted on Neowin a few weeks ago with Microsoft executive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
osirisX Posted January 24, 2009 Share Posted January 24, 2009 While not ugly it has a number of obvious issues even if you ignore the obvious incomplete state. Menu text has decreased in size which would make it unreadable given our push towards higher density display Apple menu icon is "gigantic" Extreme transparency on the menu bar completely falls apart with background images (note the critiscism of the 10.5 menu bar and multiply by ten). Application buttons have "Bad" text. You'd more likely see something like "Don't Install" and "Download and Install?" Whitespace is excessive - grouping between headers and side-bar elements falls apart White text on black backgrounds tend to glare, it's also considered difficult to read for most people. Status bar is oversized : it needs to support the 'one size down' system font label size. Foreground and background windows are completely indistinguishable. selected items reduce the contrast (white text on a light-blue/grey background). With some refinement you might have a very nice mock-up but as it sits, it's far from production-ready. Everyone has seemed to miss the point of my mockup. It's a joke to make fun of these silly rumours where Apple is going to redefine the look of OS X. If this was a serious mockup I would have spent a lot longer than 20 minutes on it and fixed all of those issues. This is what I came up with for the Illumnious rumours: As you can see, totally ridiculous. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LTD Posted January 25, 2009 Author Share Posted January 25, 2009 I've noticed that some people are convinced it'll take after the iMovie 08 interface . . . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Denholm Posted January 25, 2009 Share Posted January 25, 2009 ^ I hope your right LTD. It looks so clean and functional. An evolution of the current OS X UI. (Y) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LTD Posted January 25, 2009 Author Share Posted January 25, 2009 ^I hope your right LTD. It looks so clean and functional. An evolution of the current OS X UI. (Y) Well, for now it's all speculation, but whatever "marble" is, it'll be something new, at least. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reimroc Posted January 26, 2009 Share Posted January 26, 2009 I don't see why people think it's going to be nothing but glass and reflections. I think iTunes is the perfect example of "Marble". Much more sophisticated, IMO Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ADvert Posted February 1, 2009 Share Posted February 1, 2009 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LTD Posted February 1, 2009 Author Share Posted February 1, 2009 Hehe, not bad. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jase Posted February 1, 2009 Share Posted February 1, 2009 huh? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Quillz Posted February 5, 2009 Share Posted February 5, 2009 huh? Yeah, I don't get it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PL_ Veteran Posted February 5, 2009 Veteran Share Posted February 5, 2009 Yeah, I don't get it. The scroll bars ;) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Quillz Posted February 5, 2009 Share Posted February 5, 2009 The scroll bars ;) People have been changing Leopard's scroll bars since the early days of Leopard. That's not really a strong indicator that Apple will be introducing a new Aqua update again. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
.Neo Posted February 5, 2009 Share Posted February 5, 2009 What has that screen shot to do with this article? Basically everyone knows you can theme the OS yourself, but that's not the point here. There is also more to the interface than those scroll bars alone. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ADvert Posted February 5, 2009 Share Posted February 5, 2009 i think marble isn't something spectacular. it is polishing of the leopard gui and finally - removing the aqua buttons, scroolbars and other aqua elements because they don't fit in the current leopard style. as there aren't aqua elements anymore - they come with the new name. they will replace that aqua elements with itunes or imovie like buttons and scroolbars. it is nothing spectacular. remember they (apple) said that snow leopard won't have new features, but polished old features from leopard. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
suspiria Posted February 5, 2009 Share Posted February 5, 2009 It's definitely time for the original Aqua elements to be retired. The bright blue buttons, (the new) menu bar selects and scrollbars clash too much with the dark window chrome. Graphite works far better and feels more even in terms of balancing, to me at least. The iTunes scrollbars and buttons are alright, but an improvement over the blue stuff... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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