David Emery OnlineInsert Witty Tiger Reference Here
7 May 2005
So…
I’ve now been running Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger (mmm… snappy title) for a week now, and as you may have gathered from the rest of the ‘net it’s very nice.
I’m not using Spotlight much (I’m a Quicksilver guy; Finder works nicely enough for everything else) although it looks useful in the long term.
Dashboard I’ve taken to like a duck to water – it has just a bit more polish (and less CPU/memory usage) then Konfabulator, which I liked but could never stick with, and the Apple supplied widgets are really neat. I also want to have a go at making some widgets – being both a cocoa developer and a web developer, their looks like their could be real opportunities for doing cool stuff!
Also, I’m really liking the direction that Mail has taken in Tiger. As well as the added functionality, smart mail boxes, spotlight searching etc, I really like the new look, which surprised me, as it looked really nasty in the preview images. However, the new sidebar mailboxes, with their little progress icons, work really well, and the concept of putting the toolbar icons into buttons works really well from a usability perspective (toolbar icons look like file icons, even down to having their names underneath them, but behave completely differently).
My only real issue with the new look in Mail is that Apple didn’t standardise on the new look, leading to yet more fragmentation in the user experience. It would have been much better, at least in my eyes anyway, if Apple had made all NSToolbars have the unified appearance, and automatically gain the new Mail-style buttons for icon based toolbar items (to reduce backwards compatibility problems, they could do this only for programs linked against GCC 4). Obviously this should be (developer) optional, but they should have at least made the buttons available in Interface Builder.
This seems to be fairly systematic of the way Apple does things at the moment – releasing things into the wild first, and then sorting out the mess later (see also: Brushed metal, which has been applied at will to various applications by Apple, leading developers to do the same). I would imagine we will get an updated AHIG soon which will explain away the random use of the unified toolbar look (I’m guessing it’s supposed to be used for apps that use spotlight-style searching), but it would be much better if it had just been used constantly in the first place.
I’ve heard that the way they develop at Apple these days is that each team is allowed to do what they want – which is supposed to promote new and revolutionary ideas – and this gives us new interface developments such as the source pane view from iTunes, but has been going on so long now that the – one prized – interface constancy that we used to have is disappearing. However, we don’t want to go overboard with our moaning – all these current interface inconsistencies are generally cosmetic (brushed versus aqua versus ‘plastic’), as opposed to behavioural (some buttons needing a double click versus some needing a single click, for example) – indeed, the new style buttons make more sense, behaviourally.
In addition, I have a hunch that the user interface style of Mac OS X may be completely changed in the next version of the operating system (10.5?). 10.4 has a partially implemented version of resolution independence (accessible using Quartz Debug installed with the developer tools), which allows the user to scale up and down the user interface to more suit the size and resolution of their display. Apple have said this will be accessible for users in the next version, and this will require a complete remake of all the system graphic resources to make them look better when scaled up. Apple have two ways of doing this, either by keeping using bitmap graphics for UI elements, but storing multiple resolution versions, or they could move to a vector graphics system, which would be infinitely scalable, but a lots more work, both to implement and for the CPU (although, with Quartz 2D Extreme, another new technology in tiger, this work can be shunted off onto the graphics card. Coincidence?). Whichever they go for, it will mean that they will have to redo a whole load of the interface, so we may well see some major changes.
Here’s hoping they don’t just include another interface style…