Apple tweaks Dock menus in new Snow Leopard beta - Page 2

That slider is same as existing volume slider in iTunes.

Keep in mind that aqua controls in non-front-most windows are always grayed out instead of aqua.

Ahhh, I like that very much.

Does this respect your highlight preference? So if you highlight color is something else than blue, with the menu selection be that color?

Also, if you system appearance is graphite does that make a difference? Is the border graphite or remains blue?

Your Highlight Color setting wouldn't have an effect on contextual menus regardless, it's only for text. Your Appearance setting is the only one that would affect menus. Unfortunately that's as far as I can go because I don't have Snow Leopard. \

Anyone have an answer? I'd like to know too considering I generally prefer graphite, (though blue on translucent black looks pretty slick, I have to say).


Yeah, hopefully Apple will put indicators on either side of the Finder's thumbnail slider to help differentiate it from iTunes volume slider. It looks so much better than the original Aqua slider, IMO.

Is it in debug mode?

More interface tweaks are great!

PS: Can someone give a newbie Mac user a hand with a strange problem? Pleeeeease? http://forums.appleinsider.com/showthread.php?t=100394

I don't know. Perhaps a developer on here can answer that question. I am curious how I could determine that however. Any takers?

im not a developer, just wondering how hard could it be to change the ugly silver bar at the top of every window (pretty much the only thing i hate about mac os x) something which windows does better is the looks and visual effects (although requiring a good graphics card, i presume all nvidia cards can handle this), and would love to see tabs in finder... and another thing, dragging an application to the trash from the dock doesnt work... need to open finder to type in password... pain in the ass.. and stop asking for my password when i dont have one!! i woulld happily pay 80 quid if they fixed these and introduced new GUI, other than that love the new os

I love the silver bar on top .

Those white on black menus look hideous. I really hope that can be changed with a Preference setting. I thought this color scheme went out of style years ago when monochrome CRT monitors became obsolete.

That's not new. We've had "list" view since 10.2.


It's a cosmetic change (standardizing the look and feel of the Dock). You already have that style when viewing in "Fan" and Grid". It's the "List" view that is an odd ball at the moment.

Looks good by the way. I like it.

White text on black menus went out of style? So QuickLook, CoverFlow, Stacks, Leopard's Dock's app labels, iPhoto's face labeler, and Time Machine's interface are all in poor taste as well?

It's not like they're applying it to title bars (aside from QTX) or, god forbid, inverting text documents and web browsers.

This is a common misconception with developer builds of pre-release operating systems. There is no "debug mode". Every operating system release Apple has put out is created with a fixed version of the compiler determined way before the OS ships, using release build options (that is, -Os etc.) Debugging symbols are never left in released build trains. Teh snappy that happens in later builds is almost ALWAYS the result of optimizations done by tuning algorithms--determining what's slow and changing how it works so it's faster. There is no "compile with Debug options" switch that gets turned off when they release, nor is there some switch to "GCC with the fast options enabled".

That would be terrible software engineering, as the compiler, build tools, etc. are all under development while the operating system is under development, and therefore the operating system is generally built with the last released STABLE compiler. For example Clang (LLVM) is the "latest greatest" compiler from Apple, but right now very few applications in Mac OS X are built with it. At the beginning of the development cycle, the Clang/Xcode team worked with the Mac OS X developers to determine a small set of internal applications that could be compiled with Clang to stress test Clang itself. Similarly Xcode.app was the only 64-bi application in Leopard, so that the Cocoa team could find 64-bit bugs and defecencies during the Leopard development cycle.

Finally, leaving debugging options on is not an option because generally they bloat the executable size, which can impact too many other metrics. You don't want your final product to be 20-40% bigger then it actually needs to be when you are trying to get feedback on how fast the product installs, how much room it takes up and how fast it executes. Again there are exceptions--some things that are under rapid development get debug symbols left in, usually because a developer forgets to start stripping it. But generally most groups are stringent about removing debug symbols. (Anybody developer that's gotten a lot of ???? in their backtraces, or tried to trace through a function in an open source framework like CoreFoundation, knows these frameworks are stripped long before we get them on our computers).

HTH.

White text on black menus is a fashion statement, not much else.
Fashion and usability are different critters.

Think goatees or "bathing suits" that to the knee. Even netbooks.
Dopey fashions that think they pass for coolness.

Please use months rather than "summer" or "fall" to describe future events. At the very least disclose which hemisphere you are discussing so the rest of us will at least know you are wilfully ignorant.

Why wait?

Snow Leopard will be a $9.95 upgrade for everyone who bought a Mac after June 8th.

The $29.95 price tag will be for the rest of us - of course, even then, why wait?

Assuming she doesn't intend to use the Mac mini for her TV, what you should be doing is pressuring your friend to buy an iMac.

An iMac + $19 adapter + existing display = a fantastic setup.

Changes ≠ Overhaul. It's funny, I used to remember a time when people didn't giggle themselves silly whenever Apple decided "Hey this element is boring let's making it different from every other element in the UI!" And then folks wonder why OS X looks like such a mess of different styles.


Whenever any tiny change is discovered in SL there's always a horde going "AHA, THIS IS PROOF ILLUMINOUS/MARBLE IS COMING! I BET IT'S IN THE NEXT BUILD!" Although to be fair I'm mostly talking about shittier communities - I'm looking at you MacRumors. Even still, I've seen plenty of people whining here on AI about how Aqua is outdated, the worst part of OS X, et cetera.

I think we can all agree to hope that at least whenever they do get around to refreshing the UI - and hopefully finish CoreUI goddamn - they'll make things consistent.

(Sorry if these responses seem a bit curt, I'm angry with the topic in question, not you guys. You both make good points.)

huh? in what way was finder weak at file management? that's it's only purpose!

almost don't need finder for browsing? are you kidding me? how would you get a folder into the dock without the finder?

you really think windows visual effects are better? i think the mac's are better because they don't waste as many resources making everything look pretty, yet it still manages to look great. windows aero visual effects require 3D acceleration and don't look all that good to me. it's all opinion in the end, though.

the dock is a set of shortcuts, so it's equivalent to dragging a start menu item to the recycle bin to uninstall it - it just doesn't work that way.

mac os x asks you for passwords when modifying system critical folders - like system and applications. this is part of what makes mac os x a lot more secure than windows. even if you don't have a password, the computer is still looking for administrator permission to delete something important. it's far less annoying and more secure than windows vista (which nags you every time you want to change a simple control panel setting)

One thing that had particularly interested me about Snow Leopard was the changes to Quicktime. I had noticed performance improvements when I played HD H.264 flim clips on my Mac Mini 2009 with has the Geforce 9400M (the only graphics chip so far in SL to have H.264 acceleration in silicon). But what I was really interested in was what Quicktime 10 could do for lesser machines.

In addition to the Mac Mini, we have a 2007 15" Macbook Pro Santa Rosa with Geforce 8600 graphics, and a 2006 Blackbook (2 Ghz Core Duo, Intel graphics). Recently I was transferring some episodes of my son's favorite show (Mickey Mouse Clubhouse) off my Tivo Series 3 in preparation for a family trip. Disney Channel HD broadcasts the show in 720p and the resolution of my Blackbook is 1280x800. Although the Blackbook had no problems playing 720p movie clips from Apple's Quicktime movie preview site, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse never played well on this machine. The Core 2 Duo Macs in the house didn't have this problem.

In making the MP4 file, although I own Toast 9 which allows you to rip an episode from a Tivo legally for personal use, I decided to use iTivo and let Handbrake do the job. Using the Apple Universal setting, the movie was reencoded for 5.2 Mbit/sec quality and no change in resolution. If the Blackbook under Leopard 10.5.7 played the clip, it dropped a ton of frames and was completely unwatchable. Under the WWDC version of Snow Leopard, the results were pretty much the same. The recent 10A390 update didn't change much.

But the new 10A402 release changed all that and in the process, I finally realized why the clip was so difficult to play. Disney broadcasts the show in 720p/60fps, not the 30 fps that you typically see in iTunes or Apple.com clips. With having the stuff the pipe at twice the frame rate, I understood what the problem was now. But Snow Leopard 10A420 can now play the clip without dropping frames on this lesser Mac.

There is one catch: you must play it in full screen mode (command-F) in order to get proper performance. But it's still amazing that a 720p/60fps H.264 movie is running so well on 3 year old hardware. During playback, Activity Monitor shows about 50-60% utilization on both cores. I'll be revisiting Snow Leopard on my Mac Mini to see if performance on the Geforce 9400M graphics system has improved as well.

So QuickLook is less useful because its windows employ white text on translucent black?

How is this going to impact usability? How? This will be applied to contextual menus in the Dock and perhaps the Menu Bar and/or other menu items. You don't read contextual menus like you read a web page, text document, or PDF generally. What little impact inverting the colors of these menus will have on usability will be offset by their more HUD-like aesthetic that helps them disappear more.

I said white on black in general are a carryover from the monochrome CRT days if you're old enough to remember. Plus, if you studied Design you'd know that readability is IIMPROVED when black text is on a light-colored background. It's why we don't have newspapers or books printed white on black paper.

White on Black can look slick and cool for interfaces, but, it IS harder on the eyes. I prefer something easier on my eyes over looking cool. IMO.

Have to enthusiastically agree with you about MacRumors. Egad. It's become one flamefest after another, while Mods are booting longtime members off to make room for the screeching newbies.

Well, you seem to be in the minority here. I, for one, think it looks great and unifies (starts to anyway) the appearance between the OS and the apps, especially the pro apps.

Black text on a white background is better for "long" reading (ex. reading an article in a newspaper). For quick reading, white text on a black background is easier on the eyes (which is why you should use that combo for Keynote presentations (or PowerPoint if you still suffer with that horrid app)). It projects much better. I believe this is the reason why Apple is using this white text/black background combo for popup menus - similar to the HUD used in their apps.

Sorry for the third post here, but I forgot to say that a black background is the best for displaying images and videos - it makes the colors pop. Hence the changes to QuickTime X.

I was going to respond, but you've said what I was going to say, better.

Twice as many bits, takes twice as long :-)

With "jump menus", I was referring to the menus accessible by right-clicking the Dock icons, not Windows 7's jump lists. I did mean black text on platinum background though. My bad.



Huh? Current leopard menus have no (very little) translucency.



The fact that positive text is easier to read and the off-white background strain your eyes less than pure white?

Right. I don't see these new contextual Dock menus being more translucent than the current black/white ones, or not substantially so. The black background seems to balance out the translucency (again, if they're more translucent at all).


Sure, but we aren't going to be reading tiny contextual menus all day, we're going to be reading web pages, text documents, etc., none of which are being inverted.

From the perspective of someone running the new SL and leopard, there is a noticable translucency difference.

Does 10.6 display with gamma 2.2 now? Is 1.8 gamma history?
Does it show? Any experiences?

Snow Leopard's gamma is 2.2 as standard. It looks just like Leopard after you shift it's gamma manually, but yes, there is a significant difference. I much prefer the look of Snow Leopard overall as there is more "pop" to the colors.

Combined with the new Quicktime X, the new dock effects and exposè, and all the other alterations, I refuse to use my Leopard lappy till I switch it to SL. I much, much prefer Snow Leopard overall - color and all.

In short, you're interested in seeing what sort of software compression algorithms for accelerating H.264 are available in QuickTime X will be available to compensate for those that don't have native GPU h.264 hardware acceleration?

If you change your desktop picture, (Windows people call that "wallpaper"), you will see that the task bar, (Menu bar or something, in windows), is translucent, and will change with the color of your desktop. If you think widows colors and graphics look good, don't plan on a career in graphic design.

LOL! Agreed. The MS interfaces look a bit like something Mattel would design for a child's electronic toy.

Is it true that Apple has disabled the Hard Drive Icons from the Desktop by Default? I know some people don't care for it but this is actually something I still like to use. I can drag a file onto the disk icon and it springs open. I have to hold down the space bar to drag it over the finder icon and if I'm dragging from a CD of DVD with no sidebar (yes, I know you can expand the sidebar), I have to open another finder window before I drag. If the Hard drive Icon is there.. I can drag straight to it. It works perfectly. I think Apple needs to change the behavior of the finder Icon in the Dock before the disable the Hard Disk Icon from the Desktop completely.

I understand that you can turn this feature on, but I can't help but wonder if Apple is trying to ween us from this altogether.

At any rate, why fix something that's not broken? I think it's still better to have them there. The idea is the Desktop shows you what you have to work with. I also can't help but think this is a competition with Windows 7's empty desktop appearance but Windows has never been "Volume friendly browsing" and the Mac has.

Too funny! I've always laughed at Winblows defenders (which I think is actually an illness in the Psychiatric book of diagnoses - DSM-IV) who say that OS X looks like something Fisher-Price would have made. Look at XP and Shitsa for God's sake!!!

I completely agree with your critique of the Finder icon on the Dock and its lack of useful functionality, but I disagree with your statement about the "empty desktop appearance" of Winblows 7. Their ripoff of Dashboard is to load up the Desktop with even more icons. Have you EVER seen a Winblows user with an icon-free desktop. Me? Never.

Also, what is the deal with PC users always playing Solitaire on plane flights? Walk up and down the aisle on any plane flight and I guarantee you will see at least one of them playing Solitaire.