The new look of Mail 2.0

Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/mail.html



BuonRotto called this a while back and it is more apparent for every change made to the Mail 2.0-interface. Aqua and Brushed Metal is merging. The latest hint at this? Mail now sports buttons rather than mere icons in its toolbar.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 14
    hobbeshobbes Posts: 1,252member
    If "merge" you mean "merge in slo-mo over the course of two or three major OS upgrades" then yeah, guess so.



    Too bad in the meantime they don't look very good.



    C'mon guys, try again.
  • Reply 2 of 14
    aquaticaquatic Posts: 5,602member
    Ugh. Ugly. Already I think the Metaqua in Panther is gross. Damnit what is this obsession with metal!? It looks cold and unfriendly. Aqua is kind of glaring but at least I liked where it was headed in Jaguar. Man that Mail looks so weird. It looks like some Winamp skin.
  • Reply 3 of 14
    amorphamorph Posts: 7,112member
    That looks more to me like a merging of Aqua's overall design and Platinum's colors. It's clear, spacious and easy on my eyes.



    It's definitely a win to have buttons that look like buttons. Having icons just floating in space definitely looks cool, but IMHO if there's a conflict between clarity of purpose and looks in an interface, looks should lose. Buttons should be immediately identifiable as buttons.



    I noted a wildly different design for the new iLife. They're doing colored blobs bordered by thick, wobbly lines now. And the button appearance on the Apple site overall is beginning to adopt that general vocabulary, only with shades of grey and straight lines.
  • Reply 4 of 14
    hobbeshobbes Posts: 1,252member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Amorph

    That looks more to me like a merging of Aqua's overall design and Platinum's colors. It's clear, spacious and easy on my eyes.



    I think the "aluminum Aqua" -- Brushed Metal's lack of title bar divider + silver-white gradient -- looks great. But the buttons are surprisingly clunky. There's some more tweaking to do, IMO.



    Quote:

    It's definitely a win to have buttons that look like buttons. Having icons just floating in space definitely looks cool, but IMHO if there's a conflict between clarity of purpose and looks in an interface, looks should lose. Buttons should be immediately identifiable as buttons.



    Agreed, but you also want buttons that aren't clumsy-looking. (Remember the Public Beta? ) Here's my take on it: Aqua toolbar buttons are nice and big (but customizable), easy to hit, and look great. However, a drawback is that it's possible that they're not immediately recognizable as buttons. Upside: they all look the same way -- figure out one set, and it applies to just about every application with a Aqua toolbar.



    iTunes and Safari introduced the glossy button that was clearly a button, with a minimal dark gray shape showing the button's function. These work great, too, for slightly different reasons; they work esp well in applications with a small number of important controls (back, forward, create a new something, etc).



    Tiger's Mail meanwhile attempts to combine photorealistic Aqua icons inside glossy button shapes. It's a mish-mash, though; it works OK for the simple Reply and Forward buttons, but less well for Get Mail and New Message. The button shapes tend to overpower the icons they contain.



    Quote:

    I noted a wildly different design for the new iLife. They're doing colored blobs bordered by thick, wobbly lines now. And the button appearance on the Apple site overall is beginning to adopt that general vocabulary, only with shades of grey and straight lines. [/B]



    Well, the packaging design for iLife / iWork, anyway (which I also think is great-looking), not the UI for iLife itself, no? Apple.com is just an extension to market + sell these products, for the most part. It is an interesting new design direction for Apple, though.
  • Reply 5 of 14
    buonrottobuonrotto Posts: 6,368member
    Cold? You prefer the wood in Garageband perhaps to warm thing up?



    I do like the sans button look myself, but I can live with button profiles I guess. I mean, we've figured out that many well-designed web pages use images as links. Buttons seem a bit, I dunno, flagrant? Anyway, if we do go with buttons now in the toolbars, either the toolbar gets shorter or the buttons get taller because right now there's a good waste of space vertically. Also, the centered thing )except for the Spotlight field on the right) is anoying. Finally, the icons in the buttons are kind of squished in there right now. They need a bit of breathing room!
  • Reply 6 of 14
    Please write to apple and let them know that the buttons definitely need improvement.



    Personally, I like the rest of the GUI changes. But the buttons are cheesy. They look like something MS would have designed for their Mac software when OS X first came out.



    Here is the feedback link:

    http://www.apple.com/macosx/feedback/



    I know there is still a lot of time for things to change before it is developed, but all the more reason to let them know now before things are set in stone.
  • Reply 7 of 14
    i kinda like the look of it, except for the buttons.
  • Reply 8 of 14
    I like the grouping function of the buttons, and I like the usability benefit of it A) looking like a button, and B) clearly showing the size and extent of the clickable area.



    However, visually I think the single buttons look odd, and they overpower the current icons (Junk, New, Get Mail).



    Not too sure about the next row down in the searh interface: the choice of folder and fields to search and the save button. The drop-down looks like a button, the toggle buttons look like text and the action button looks squashed.
  • Reply 9 of 14
    amorphamorph Posts: 7,112member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by BuonRotto

    Finally, the icons in the buttons are kind of squished in there right now. They need a bit of breathing room!



    Now that I've had a more close-up look at the buttons, they do look too much like exhibits at a freak show.



    They definitely need to be let out of those claustrophobic little cells. That really doesn't work.
  • Reply 10 of 14
    The toolbar icons in the new Mail doesn't look that great.



    When are they going to update that fugly Mail icon?!? It looks terrible next to Safari, Address Book and ally my iApps in the Dock.
  • Reply 11 of 14
    aquaticaquatic Posts: 5,602member
    Quote:

    I like the grouping function of the buttons, and I like the usability benefit of it



    Yes this idea I like, too. It's in Safari. But why couldn't they make the buttons the full height. And not freakin ugly. Nice colorful pictures like before. Actually...why change? If it ain't broke don't fix it. Will the Aqua UI EVER be done?!
  • Reply 12 of 14
    Funny how you guys are concerned about

    ...er... buttons. Somehow i can understand

    this attitude. Guess this is not the most

    sophisticated job ever passed jobs sight.
  • Reply 13 of 14
    buonrottobuonrotto Posts: 6,368member
    If you watch the spotlight and QT movies in the same Tiger preview section on Apple.com, it looks to me that what we're seeing is some rather unpolished icons. The print icon is super-squished, and the ichat icon doesn't sport a button background. IMO, it just looks like it's a work in progress. I'm willing to withhold judgment until later since this kind of thing can be put off until almost last, and we have a lot of time between this build and Tiger's release which assumably will be towards June.
  • Reply 14 of 14
    Quote:

    Originally posted by BuonRotto

    I'm willing to withhold judgment until later since this kind of thing can be put off until almost last, and we have a lot of time between this build and Tiger's release which assumably will be towards June.



    I agree. Its not like the interface desn't change with every new build. It was funny though. At MWSF I ran into an Apple guy I had met at WWDC. I commented about the changes to the interface, specifically Mail and the new Spotlight icon. He laughed and said the CEO had just decided to make a few adjustments, and everyone was scrambling to get the build ready for the floor. I asked if the show build would be released to ADC members and he wasn't sure.
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