Should the Aqua UI go?

Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
With Leopard's release, iTunes 8 UI Tweaks and Safari's UI enhancements, should the Aqua UI go or be made optional for a more refined look in OS X? The blue bars on Safari look out of place to me atleast.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 18
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by UTisNUM1 View Post


    With Leopard's release, iTunes 8 UI Tweaks and Safari's UI enhancements, should the Aqua UI go or be made optional for a more refined look in OS X? The blue bars on Safari look out of place to me atleast.



    It doesn't matter. Apple will continue to break its own guidelines.



    I've given up the fight for uniformity. The iLife team has a mind if its own. The iTunes team has a mind of its own. The Safari team has a mind of its own. Apple is totally disfunctional with regards to this subject and I doubt it will change anytime soon.
  • Reply 2 of 18
    mr. hmr. h Posts: 4,870member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by kim kap sol View Post


    It doesn't matter. Apple will continue to break its own guidelines.



    I've given up the fight for uniformity. The iLife team has a mind if its own. The iTunes team has a mind of its own. The Safari team has a mind of its own. Apple is totally disfunctional with regards to this subject and I doubt it will change anytime soon.



    Agreed. It's a nightmare and quite disheartening. The Cocoa APIs lack many of the newer interface elements so programmers have to create their own each time. So for example the sidebar of Mail looks and behaves differently from the sidebar of Finder, various buttons look different across apps etc. It's a jumbled mess and I wish Apple would sort it out.
  • Reply 3 of 18
    I would assume by now that they would fix the problem. First it was bright windows and then it was grey then a metal look and now a grey gradient with strips of blue all over the place. They should at least let people be able to customize the color of the bars anyway, that way most won't complain about the UI like myself.
  • Reply 4 of 18
    groveratgroverat Posts: 10,872member
    Complete uniformity is overrated.



    No need for UI dogmas, just do what works best.
  • Reply 5 of 18
    mr. hmr. h Posts: 4,870member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by groverat View Post


    Complete uniformity is overrated.



    I'd agree with that. That doesn't mean that uniformity is a bad thing and shouldn't be striven for. I'm pretty anal so I'd prefer it if, for example, the "+" buttons in iCal and iTunes looked the same as each other, but I recognise that from a functionality point of view, it's not important.



    Having said that, the different appearance of those buttons suggest that they haven't been provided within the cocoa frameworks and the application developers had to construct the button themselves. Isn't one of the main points of an OS to provide frameworks, APIs and the like in order to avoid duplicated work, allowing programmers to spend time on more important things than constructing a button?



    With other interface elements such as sidebars, consistency of appearance is very helpful in terms of learning an OS and getting an intuitive feel for how it works. Once you've seen and interacted with an interface element in one app, you should then know how to use the same interface element in another application. And again, there's the issue of wasted man hours duplicating work that should be provided by a framework/API.
  • Reply 6 of 18
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by groverat View Post


    Complete uniformity is overrated.



    No need for UI dogmas, just do what works best.



    Who gets to draw the line? There's got to be a limit somewhere or you end up with grotesque inconsistent UIs like on Windows.



    Has this developer crossed the line? http://www.macupdate.com/images/scre.../30534_scr.png (yes, this is a Mac app...or so I'm supposed to believe)



    edit: actually, I see now that he's updated his app to actually use a normal OS X window. I can assure you that a few days ago, this app had the Aqua-look with the window widgets on the right and the toolbar-toggle widget on the left...then it adopted the look seen in the screenshot.
  • Reply 7 of 18
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,310moderator
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by kim kap sol View Post


    yes, this is a Mac app...or so I'm supposed to believe



    Judging by the wx, they may have used wxwidgets for cross-platform compatibility. This means that you can write an interface on one platform and it will look/behave the same on all of them. Apple have no control over this. You can even write your entire interface in OpenGL - this is how Apple's own Shake program works. They didn't develop Shake of course and it was designed to run on Windows, Linux and OS X.



    As far as the OS itself goes, I think the internal APIs should be consistent. The apps don't all have to use those APIs though and it shouldn't be enforced if it uses up valuable time for little benefit.



    In 10.6, I want the interface to look like itunes does now. The scrollbar is hideously out of place just now. It looks like a giant slug stuck to the side of nice window pane.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Mr.H


    That doesn't mean that uniformity is a bad thing and shouldn't be strove for.



    Strove or striven?
  • Reply 8 of 18
    mr. hmr. h Posts: 4,870member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Marvin View Post


    Strove or striven?



    Oops. Thanks for the heads-up.
  • Reply 9 of 18
    irelandireland Posts: 17,798member
    Yes..
  • Reply 10 of 18
    groveratgroverat Posts: 10,872member
    kim kap sol:



    Quote:

    Who gets to draw the line?



    The users.



    Quote:

    There's got to be a limit somewhere or you end up with grotesque inconsistent UIs like on Windows.



    The UIs Microsoft creates are more uniform than the UIs Apple creates. That is a pretty silly argument for you to try and make.



    Quote:

    Has this developer crossed the line?



    If a 3rd party makes a crappy UI it will be rejected by the users. Why on earth would Apple want to force uniformity?
  • Reply 11 of 18
    mr. hmr. h Posts: 4,870member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by groverat View Post


    The users.



    If there's only one app that offers a desired functionality but it has a rubbish interface, the users don't have much choice, do they?



    Besides, we are talking about the OS and Apple's software here. Apple should be making efforts to ensure that elements that are common across their own applications at least behave, and preferably also look, the same way across all those apps.
  • Reply 12 of 18
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by groverat View Post


    kim kap sol:







    The users.



    Ok...I draw the line at total uniformity.



    Quote:

    The UIs Microsoft creates are more uniform than the UIs Apple creates. That is a pretty silly argument for you to try and make.



    Hehehe. Funny.



    Quote:

    If a 3rd party makes a crappy UI it will be rejected by the users. Why on earth would Apple want to force uniformity?



    I don't know...maybe so some of Apple's apps aren't rejected? As soon as one of Apple's apps starts to deviate significantly from its own guidelines, I reject it.



    I reject Safari 4's tab-on-top. Luckily there's a hidden plist option to revert to the old tabs so I can still use it instead of going straight to some third-party Webkit alternative.



    In the future, if Apple deviates too much from its guidelines, I may as well just use Windows 7 or Ubuntu because the thing I loved most about Mac -- uniformity -- will be gone.
  • Reply 13 of 18
    wplj42wplj42 Posts: 439member
    If Apple is going alter the look of Mac OS X, so it is more Windows friendly, then I might as well go back to Windows. I like Mac OS, in part, for the clean look. I am visually impaired and Mac OS looks better for me. I bought a Mac solely for the visual benefits and speech. Windows has tools that try to do the same thing, Mac is just better!!! Mess with a good thing, and I will go back to Windows. I have Windows 7 Beta running in Boot Camp and it would do in a pinch. Mac OS is nothing unless it remains different.
  • Reply 14 of 18
    SpamSandwichSpamSandwich Posts: 33,407member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by kim kap sol View Post


    Ok...I draw the line at total uniformity.







    Hehehe. Funny.







    I don't know...maybe so some of Apple's apps aren't rejected? As soon as one of Apple's apps starts to deviate significantly from its own guidelines, I reject it.



    I reject Safari 4's tab-on-top. Luckily there's a hidden plist option to revert to the old tabs so I can still use it instead of going straight to some third-party Webkit alternative.



    So I'm not the only one who thinks the Safari tabs were a hideous mistake?
  • Reply 15 of 18
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,310moderator
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by SpamSandwich View Post


    So I'm not the only one who thinks the Safari tabs were a hideous mistake?



    I actually like them. They make more logical sense than tabs below because the URL bar is an identifier for each tab and yet it's outside it. With tabs on top, the URL becomes part of the tab.



    Same deal with dragging windows into tabs and vice versa.



    Having the extra space is nice and it keeps the control bar at the top as minimal as possible.



    It does look odd when you see the leftmost tab's close button right next to the max/min/close buttons but I don't mind it.
  • Reply 16 of 18
    irelandireland Posts: 17,798member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by SpamSandwich View Post


    So I'm not the only one who thinks the Safari tabs were a hideous mistake?



    No, there's two of ye
  • Reply 17 of 18
    mr. hmr. h Posts: 4,870member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Ireland View Post


    No, there's two of ye



    There's a poll running over at MacOSXhints at the moment. It's much closer to a 50:50 split than I would have expected. (If you want to vote in the poll, go to the main page and scroll down. It's in the column on the right).
  • Reply 18 of 18
    groveratgroverat Posts: 10,872member
    Tabs above makes more sense in the context Chrome uses them in, which is each tab being sandboxed into its own process. It saves screen space, which is nice, but the fundamental problem of the browser is its lack of extensibility without hacking it.
Sign In or Register to comment.