Inside OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: a Preview of how Apple plans to revamp the toolbar - Page 2

As a non-power user (or, whatever), I find nearly everything they've done in Lion to be a welcome treatment. The fluidity and intuitiveness with which I can apply my knowledge of one UI to the other surprises me, and I believe that the same must be true for the majority of users. The monochromatic greyscale is a non-issue, and my usage as a student/private consumer is in no way impacted by half of the things that are complained about here. -- My one and only gripe is the lack of a cmd key to create a duplicate version of a document in iWork. The whole versions thing is unintuitive and I've stumbled over it more than once. I love the premise and functionality, but the implementation lends to confusion.

I'm really happy to see (finally) Smart Toolbars. Unique sets of controls, relevant to the type of content.

This has been a long time coming. Almost 11 years of Mac OS X with fixed, yet customizable toolbars....about to come to end, as Smart Toolbars finally make their debut.

Hurrah.

Sure, but in some cases I forget that a jpg I just created in photoshop will open in preview on double click. Other times I want preview to open the jpg if photoshop is not already running because Preview opens much more quickly and I just want to view it not edit it. That is why I generally ignore setting rules for which app opens which type of document except for pdf which I generally use Acrobat Pro for although on occasion I want to open it in Illustrator. As I mentioned I have gotten in the habit of dragging a document to the dock app icon of my choice to open it. Another example is sometimes I want to open an html file in a browser and other times in a text editor. Another example is a mov just created in FCP will open in final cut however all other movies open in QT X although many times I want to open it in QT Pro since it has more export functions.

My problem is the inability for ANY image file created in Photoshop to be edited or saved with ANYTHING but Photoshop. You have to create a duplicate of it to do ANYTHING to it with Preview, et. al.

I'm sure that's Adobe's problem, not Apple's, but still.

How so? If Adobe can open/edit it, that wouldn't seem to be a problem for them.

You can use export for web in Photoshop. That should strip out the Photoshop specific data in the file.

BTW there must be something wrong with your photoshop, preview, or possibly your computer. I just tried it and I have no issues opening, editing or saving a PS created jpg with Preview.

I'm not sure if there is a more intuitive way to deal with this issue outside of what you are doing. I can't see how having anything but one default app to open a file type could work.

Perhaps you could create a daemon that would switch the system's default app for certain extensions when certain apps are open. It would just have to monitor when certain processes are started in stopped which doesn't seem too hard.

Probably has not used the customise option


On my copy of Preview, I have turned ON ALL of the customise options

( It's in View : Customise Toolbar ) for those that don't know where to look

I am presently reading with some HORROR, that Apple are removing these options in OS X Mountain Lion

-- Seems like a seriously BAD idea to me to remove customisation options
-- UNLESS they are offering Something Better

-- I don't want worse

Use FinderPop, create aliases of apps in their own folders, e.g. folder called Adobe CS3 and fill it with the app aliases. When you right-click on a file, you don't have to go to the "Open With.." option, simply select the Adobe app you wish to open the file with and ... that's it.

Shall we go all the way and add colour icons to the menu bar so it looks like the windows system try? I guess not considering everyone hates skypes colour menu bar icon.

If you look into usability studies you will find colour is only usefull for 3 to 4 icons that use different primary colours, like Apple's the traffic lights that oddly have been critisised or being "too" colourfull.

Monocrome icons are faster for the eye to process because the brain only has to think about shapes, when you add colour into the mix it is distracting, the brain actually want to select icons by colour because colour differences are rated as more important, that's ok but when you have icons using the same colour it becomes distracting. Imagine the letters on your ios keyboard in colour! If you look at the icons throught OS X you will find a lot of them are blue. If you have ever in a hurry pressed the wrong dock icon you may have selected it because it is the same colour as the one you were supposed to press.

It not just Apple that are taking this approach Goggle and Microsoft are also opting for monocrome icons. For those who want a colourfull OS I recommend XP, Vista, or even older verions of OS X which was heavilly critisised for being too colourfull and cartoon like and how OS9 was much better.

I seem to recall reading something a couple years back about Apple wanting developers to use blue app icons.

If they were all blue that wouldn't not be an issue as the brain would then switch to looking at the shapes. Apple could add colour to the background of the toolbar, they don't have to use grey, but greyscales is less distracting. People don't miss the aqua blue scroll bars for this very reason.

Apple added the graphite option probably because of criticism about the OS looking too colourfull.

I'm using a MacBook Pro, so I have a trackpad, but I can't imagine anything much simpler than a two fingered tap on a file icon, a quick sideways move through "Open With" and onto a list of possible applications. I guess eliminating the "Open With" bit would save a millisecond?

Between that and setting a default application per file type, I really don't know how much more flexible or fine grained Apple could make it, short of the OS reading your mind and opening each file in the application you were thinking of.

monochrome icons are faster because the brain only has to think about shape, yet colour differences are rated as more important to the brain? Do you realize you are hardly making any sense? Do you also realize the vast negative response of a huge number of apple's user base for the monochrome os sidebars and icons? Are these people all in denial or have nothing better to do, than post feedback after feedback on how sh*t this new direction is in terms of their everyday usability of the os?

And what's with the keyboard analogy? Of course keyboards are meant to be monochrome since you are aiming for optimal letter reading/spotting via contrast as with books, what that go to do with anything? Keyboards are also meant to be used in blind typing.

What you say about the also hardly makes sense, there's a reason why the icons there are colorful and that is so they can be quickly distinguished from one another of course. And apple has taken criticism for opting for too much of blue in some very core icons such as the finder, mail, safari and itunes, but that's not to say because similarly coloured icons can be confused sometimes that the alternative of no colour at all would be better.....

Ugh.

That always mystifies me about the jailbreaking crowd. The ones that don't pirate (and the ones that do pirate) throw these HIDEOUS themes onto their phones

And when the themes aren't mind-numbingly garish, they're ALWAYS monochrome. Every icon looks exactly like every other icon. What's the point of that?! How are you supposed to find anything?

I mean, look at this. I've changed icons, yeah. I like the ones I've changed better than the stock icons, otherwise I wouldn't have changed them. But they remain visually distinct and I can pick out exactly what I'm after in a fraction of a second.

What macadam212 states is sound but there is a limit and caveats. Just like serif fonts being widely considered easier to read for body text than san-serif fonts there are other factors to consider. I think it makes sense that Apple is making the Too Bar icons (which are small) monochrome and app icons (which are large, up to 512px) coloured and detailed.

Overall it's more important that the icons, whether multicolored, the same basic color, or monochrome be easily discernible from other icons. on top of that Apple has to consider the needs of the general user over some few that would take advantage of certain features. For example, I used to have only FavIcons in my Bookmark Bar in Firefox. No text, just the icon. These were very tiny and not very detailed so having many colors (along with knowing exactly where I had placed them) made having about 40 in a row an easy way to quickly switch bookmarks. I'd say that was a fringe case and would not expect Apple to do that with Safari as it would be hinder, not help.

I definitely agree with you about the 3rd-party themes. There is no balance, just one extreme to the other.

PS: For my Mac background I've been using a 1px x 1px black BMP as far back as you could alter the desktop background. I use my Desktop as a Springboard for launching files so I want the most contrast as possible and no shifting coloring patterns that could camouflage text of Desktop items. Oddly enough it wasn't until Lion that I could finally do away with 1px x 1px bitmap image in favour of the system settings which not offer the color palette to change to any solid color you wish, not just the 10 options OS X offers. The color palette existed for backgrounds before this but only for the border around an image that didn't take up the whole screen. This always struck me as an odd omission.

You've manged to both miss my point and make my point, the keyboard analogy is the same thinking behind monocrome icons. Let me make my point to you again, colour is only usefull if each icon is a different colour, and for it to be really effective the colours should be primary, to be even more effective the colour should relate to the action i.e red for stop.

I'm not saying people are denial if they miss colour, they probably don't understand the reasoning behind it. I think the problem with the sidebar icons is that they are not dark enough, a bit more contrast would help.

I think you are missing another key element in your argument about app icons, which is size. These icons are ually displayed bigger which helps so you don't need to take out colour here. Also I've already stated the traffic light icons work so I'm not trying to remove all colour from the OS.

I like your iTunes icon, simply beautiful.

I agree 100% with all who have expressed the problems of the forced use of autosave+versions in Preview.

Because of this, I had to install Skim, and I use it as my default viewer in Lion. I prefer Preview, and I miss it, but I just can't use it because of versions+autosave.

Please Apple, make this a preference setting, adjustable by the user. Otherwise, as I said in another thread, I've serious doubts I'll consider upgrading to ML, because I won't pay for an OS in which all the standard bundled tools have autosave+versions as a forced behavior.

You can easily change the default application for any filetype.

- Get Info
- Open with
- Change All

Color is only useful if each icon is a different color? And to be really effective they need to be primary colors?

This is just completely ludicrous. Human eyes and brains are quite good at using color to quickly and accurately identify or categorize things. In fact, that is the reason why animals have evolved to poses color vision. The colors need not be primary for us to make use of the color cues. Note that it is easier to find a car in a parking lot if you know its color. This true even though other cars are the same color. The same is true for finding a particular person in a crowd. It is easier if you know what color of shirt they're wearing.

So what is apple up to? Apple is prioritizing style over usability when it comes to some aspects of GUI design. This enrages HCI purists but enthralls fashion conscious users. Is it the right tradeoff? That's up to each person to decide based upon their own needs and preferences.

Oh yeah, this is jogging some memories. If memory serves... it was around the time that OS X was rolled out and aqua guidelines were being scrutinized.

Off the top of my head, this involved: light source origin, perspective of 3d icons, and utility icons were supposed to be devoid of color.

Address book for instance, why did they rape that so badly. Icalender was much worse to use.
iPad launcher.... Who uses that...the operating system trying to figure out for me if I want to modify a file or keep an old one... now that makes me nervous. Instalation. Oh I can't now install to all my computers from the same image like before (family licence) i can do the I.nstallation but need to do it from the Internet (dogslow) or install snow leopard.... All upgrades then lion!?!? WTF


On the good side I can't think of other positive things than the redone vnc server and the window size adjustment change.

When will they make me only use full screen mode in applications like on the iPad.

Agreed.

I'd like to see more of it all around OS X. But just light hints. Subtle, like you are saying.

Tallest, those are nice icons. Mac users have always been so, so good at designing icons and other OS tweaks. All I can say is, I hope it's easy to customize the GUI in Mountain Lion.

I used to use Unsanity's GUI mod. It caused crashing so I removed it long ago. Maybe they will have a new market, revamp it and have it stable under 10.8, and maybe I'll have to give it another spin...