While I will forever have a certain fondness for Aqua, I acknowledge its numbered days.
I think we should all recall that Aqua was designed to reflect the vibrant colors of the hardware it ran on. Those colors are long gone, yet Aqua remains.
I agree with others, however, that iTunes' interface is just too bland to adopt for the entire system, and will make it very cold and depressing to look at. Modest color, I believe is okay.
I actually like Vista's min/max/close controls: adjoining rectangles (instead of small, separated circles), colored glow (visual feedback) when being used and visually inert when not, and a larger (easier to click) close button (since it is the most commonly used).
The rest of Aero, however, (transparent title bars).......... yikes. I've slowly gotten used to it, but not because I like it.
1) Shapeshifter is a horrible hacky POS that no right thinking person should recommend to anyone (that they like.)
2) The link to the dishwashing advice is wrong!
If you are using actual soap (not detergent), the build-up of dirt and grease in the water has little to no effect on the cleanliness of the dishes as long as there are still suds in the water. The belief that is does is just a myth based on years and years of those Irish Spring commercials that talk about "soap scum." The big clue is that Irish Spring and soaps like it are detergents, not soaps.
As the man alludes to, this is an inevitability. Slowly but surely the 'charms' of Aqua have been eroded, and replaced bit by bit with what is frankly, Platinum, albeit updated. I for one welcome it. More compact and less obtrusive interface elements are the right thing to do - what you are doing, your context (writing, surfing etc), is far more important than the utility of the UI controls.
For a good while now iTunes, the Pro Apps, and others have invented UI elements that differ from the OS defaults for this reason. 10.5 saw alot of the vestiges of Aqua go, and alot of unification happen, and the elements remaining (buttons, scrollbars) now look very out of place.
'Lickable' was a nice idea to highlight the advancements of the display engine (because you -could-), but now they gotta go.
I hacked the iTunes scroll bars across my system about 12 months ago, I'm actually sick of them, and Aqua. I'm looking for a change. I want to see something slicker than both.
I personally prefer the matte look i.e no specular reflections vs the glossy appearance of the candy buttons as the former is less distracting.
The interface modifications are usually the last changes to be made to the OS. This could suggest that Snow Leopard is quite far along.
I hope they tone down the drop shadows a bit and use the black flat dock by default with a solid white menu bar. I'm not keen on the rounded menus but I could live with that.
I think we should all recall that Aqua was designed to reflect the vibrant colors of the hardware it ran on. Those colors are long gone, yet Aqua remains.
Good point, and looking at the new Macs and cinema displays they all have black borders, which forebodes a darkening of the interface.
I personally prefer the matte look i.e no specular reflections vs the glossy appearance of the candy buttons as the former is less distracting.
The interface modifications are usually the last changes to be made to the OS. This could suggest that Snow Leopard is quite far along.
I hope they tone down the drop shadows a bit and use the black flat dock by default with a solid white menu bar. I'm not keen on the rounded menus but I could live with that.
Try opening a stack of windows on top of each other in finder, the shadow stains deeper and deeper till it looks like a nasty stain on the interface.
This is not polishing, this is fiddling to avoid getting on with important matters such as making the interface actually productive. Steve makes all the big decisions, so all they can do is fiddle with the reflections and shadows anyway.
I've been using it a long time now and love it. Some comments that it ends up 'grey, boring, and drab' are partially correct, but its also a very soothing and NOT distracting theme. It gives your window CONTENT all your attention and focus, and leaves the widgets out where they belong (not my focus).
My gripe with the the present UI is that all apps look too similar. Very minimal and smooth. I am all for unified navigation and commands but I wouldn't mind some kind of distinguishing features on my apps. There is a stylistic obsession with uniformity going on. I am sure this will pass and because it is really tastefully done it is fine. But I remember way back when people used IE which came with a choice of different colors. It would look hideous now but it was fun to be able to select a color.
Personally, I have always liked the Aqua buttons and interface. It always seemed to draw my eye directly to what I needed to look at. However, as some have been saying, they disagree. What I think that Apple needs to do is take a page from CSS. They have Blue and Graphite. I see no reason why they can't expand upon that. Allow for Aqua Blue, Aqua Graphite, and Marble. Heck, maybe even allow for more items to appear. It seems to me that this has been a feature of OS X that has not been fully utilized, and this would help allow people indicidualize their machines to best suit them, while maintaining the unification of the overall feel of the OS.
here is the ideas that I had in mind. To be perfectly honest here, I am NOT an artist, so these are crude, but you'll get my idea.
To be perfectly honest here, I am NOT an artist, so these are crude, but you'll get my idea.
Get OUTTA here! You ARE an artist! That's like a post post modern masterpiece! A little Lichtenstein mixed with a dose of Warhol and a touch of inspirational Mondrian. I'll give you $739 000.-
Jep, it's ugly, partially. Hate the buttons and scrollbars.
Seems to come from the past.
Let's also hope the Apple gets rid of the 3D dock, which sucks, as well as the ugly transparent menu bar. Ow, and the "space themed background".
Why use it, if you don't like the user interface at all? I know the difference when I see the VISTA color smear that is called a user interface.
But maybe I see the flaw in your use of Leopards user interface. You should have changed the "space theme background image" (ugly, I agree with you on that) to an image of your own.
I love XMenu. The old drop down menus have not been surpassed for efficiency compared to the bloody Dock.
Hmm, I tried XMenu but it wasn't very useful to me since I've been tainted by Quicksilver, although I keep it around in case I find a future use for it, probably for projects. Deja Menu doesn't really have anything to do with Xmenu though, it's just a menu bar replacement that you launch with a hotkey and appears wherever the cursor is. Works like a charm, except the search box in the Help menu.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mdriftmeyer
As long as a new Preference allows me to move to a NeXTStep floating, tear-off menu system, I'd be ecstatic.
I found StepMenus but it's a PPC binary and doesn't appear to have been updated for quite some time so it's probably a timebomb for whenever Apple pulls Rosetta support, assuming it still works in Leopard. Don't know if you can tear off individual menus though.
Otherwise: Love to see systemwide dynamic lighting + shadows using a 3d vidcard to give it a more dimensional and live appearance. Pick a general point where the light would be coming from, & when you move a window, it would interact with the source and relative to its environment.
Totally agree. I can't stand the iTunes/Finder theme anymore - a step back IMO. iTunes just looks like they originally started in one theme, and then as the store and it's features expanded, they needed to quickly throw up some more colors and sections to add distinction. It just doesn't look natural and cutting edge. Very flat and blah colors. Folders in the Finder now with Leopard? C'mon.. B.O.R.I.N.G. Say what you want about Vista/Windows 7, the OS sucks functionally in comparison to OS X, but the UI theme looks more appealing.
Since most of Snow Leopard's improvements are "under the hood" this is one of the areas I'm sure Apple will focus on. Looking at all the recent UI choices Apple has made - MobleMe's interface, iTunes 8's Grid View elements, iLife '09's use of non-Aqua scroll bars (except for iWeb and iDVD, neither of which were featured at Apple's Macworld keynote) - it's pretty clear Aqua is in its final days.
With that said, I wonder if Apple will standardize on the new non-Aqua style for scroll bars? We have the iTunes/iPhoto blue, flat-matte style (which I like) and the iMovie/GarageBand black, slightly more rounded style (also nice). Maybe they'll let both exist: flat-matte for non-pro apps like iPhoto and iTunes, rounded black for more proish apps like iMovie and GarageBand.
Push buttons are likely to resemble those in MobileMe and/or the iTunes Store (go into your account info to see what I mean).
The bright traffic light window controls must loose their sheen and perhaps even their color scheme. That's surely a system-wide change we can count on, yet I have no clue what they'll replace it with.
Leopard's Dock is so pretty, I can't say I understand most of the criticism; Tiger's Dock was so subdued it was boring; looked like a piece of tape and those black triangle, bleh! The translucent Menu Bar doesn't bother me either. I hardly use it anyway.
1) Shapeshifter is a horrible hacky POS that no right thinking person should recommend to anyone (that they like.)
Do you want to back this up with anything? Myself and everyone I know that has been theming since '04/'05 has never had any problems related to Shapeshifter. Yes, APE has caused problems in the past for some people but that isn't anything to do with Shapeshifter. Jason Harris spent a great deal of time and care making sure SS didn't break things if it failed.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Magic_Al
I think I read that Leopard's UI is built differently than before, something to do with moving toward resolution-independence, and parts of it are "hard coded" rather than being simple bitmaps that can be swapped out.
Leopard's UI is a mess of CoreUI and bitmap images, this is why there's no theming for Leopard yet (although there are new applications coming out soon which will). For all of people's chiming that Apple does things elegantly, it's a stinky mess. The RSRC files are bloated with redundant elements which haven't been used since pre-10.2. Technically theming would be easier if Apple were to finish CoreUI and use vector elements for everything because you'd only need to change a few of the base textures and it would apply to them all. I presume this is what they'll do in 10.7, because we've heard nothing about it for 10.6. They'd also need to finish up with their XML jazz, at the moment some of the CoreUI elements are drawn "simply" as it were; You can change stroke, shadowing, tinting, texture fill, etc in Property List Edit or Text Edit in a readable format. Some others are more complicated (I assume made by the in-house UI Image/XML Creator they have a patent on) and would need to be reverse engineered to have any real chance of editing excessively.
---
I'll be terribly disappointed if they use the shit iTunes scrollbars, I'm all for moving to a matte look but they're just badly made.
I think Apple has done a great job with the UI over the years, getting more refined with each version. They have struck a pretty good balance between making the controls stand out without being distracting. Aqua was too bright at first. It was good to say goodbye to pinstripes and brushed aluminum. For a graphics oriented user who spends long hours squinting at the screen, and needs to make subtle distinctions of color, my present complaint is there is still too much naked white. It can be blinding, or at least distracting. I like the idea of making things darker & more subdued, like the Pro App interfaces. I like the new iTunes interface. If things get too subtle, though, you get a sea of grey, and nothing stands out. I am sure Apple will get it right.
The biggest change on the horizon, though, has to do with resolution-independence, which didn't make the cut for Leopard, but hopefully will be in Snow Leopard, though I'm not holding my breath. All interface elements will have to be scalable - no more bitmaps. This will really clean out the crud from a long way back. It will be zippier, too, with the UI fueled by Core Image & Grand Central. To please me, it could look something like a cross between Final Cut Pro & iTunes, and be a little darker than Leopard overall. I love the idea of dark menu bar with light text, because that removes another bright spot. But with an integrated, scalable UI, it seems Apple would have the opportunity to again allow users to choose colors, brightness or darkness, and do a little basic theming in a pref pane.
Comments
I think we should all recall that Aqua was designed to reflect the vibrant colors of the hardware it ran on. Those colors are long gone, yet Aqua remains.
I agree with others, however, that iTunes' interface is just too bland to adopt for the entire system, and will make it very cold and depressing to look at. Modest color, I believe is okay.
I actually like Vista's min/max/close controls: adjoining rectangles (instead of small, separated circles), colored glow (visual feedback) when being used and visually inert when not, and a larger (easier to click) close button (since it is the most commonly used).
The rest of Aero, however, (transparent title bars).......... yikes. I've slowly gotten used to it, but not because I like it.
-Clive
Oh and I thought you were going to give us a real solution.
Want a preview of OSX post Snow Leopard? The look will give new meaning to dull as…
1) Shapeshifter is a horrible hacky POS that no right thinking person should recommend to anyone (that they like.)
2) The link to the dishwashing advice is wrong!
If you are using actual soap (not detergent), the build-up of dirt and grease in the water has little to no effect on the cleanliness of the dishes as long as there are still suds in the water. The belief that is does is just a myth based on years and years of those Irish Spring commercials that talk about "soap scum." The big clue is that Irish Spring and soaps like it are detergents, not soaps.
For a good while now iTunes, the Pro Apps, and others have invented UI elements that differ from the OS defaults for this reason. 10.5 saw alot of the vestiges of Aqua go, and alot of unification happen, and the elements remaining (buttons, scrollbars) now look very out of place.
'Lickable' was a nice idea to highlight the advancements of the display engine (because you -could-), but now they gotta go.
I love XMenu. The old drop down menus have not been surpassed for efficiency compared to the bloody Dock.
As long as a new Preference allows me to move to a NeXTStep floating, tear-off menu system, I'd be ecstatic.
The interface modifications are usually the last changes to be made to the OS. This could suggest that Snow Leopard is quite far along.
I hope they tone down the drop shadows a bit and use the black flat dock by default with a solid white menu bar. I'm not keen on the rounded menus but I could live with that.
I think we should all recall that Aqua was designed to reflect the vibrant colors of the hardware it ran on. Those colors are long gone, yet Aqua remains.
Good point, and looking at the new Macs and cinema displays they all have black borders, which forebodes a darkening of the interface.
I personally prefer the matte look i.e no specular reflections vs the glossy appearance of the candy buttons as the former is less distracting.
The interface modifications are usually the last changes to be made to the OS. This could suggest that Snow Leopard is quite far along.
I hope they tone down the drop shadows a bit and use the black flat dock by default with a solid white menu bar. I'm not keen on the rounded menus but I could live with that.
Try opening a stack of windows on top of each other in finder, the shadow stains deeper and deeper till it looks like a nasty stain on the interface.
This is not polishing, this is fiddling to avoid getting on with important matters such as making the interface actually productive. Steve makes all the big decisions, so all they can do is fiddle with the reflections and shadows anyway.
http://macthemes2.net/forum/viewtopi...d=16788592&p=1
I've been using it a long time now and love it. Some comments that it ends up 'grey, boring, and drab' are partially correct, but its also a very soothing and NOT distracting theme. It gives your window CONTENT all your attention and focus, and leaves the widgets out where they belong (not my focus).
here is the ideas that I had in mind. To be perfectly honest here, I am NOT an artist, so these are crude, but you'll get my idea.
To be perfectly honest here, I am NOT an artist, so these are crude, but you'll get my idea.
Get OUTTA here! You ARE an artist! That's like a post post modern masterpiece! A little Lichtenstein mixed with a dose of Warhol and a touch of inspirational Mondrian. I'll give you $739 000.-
Charles Saatchi
Jep, it's ugly, partially. Hate the buttons and scrollbars.
Seems to come from the past.
Let's also hope the Apple gets rid of the 3D dock, which sucks, as well as the ugly transparent menu bar. Ow, and the "space themed background".
Why use it, if you don't like the user interface at all? I know the difference when I see the VISTA color smear that is called a user interface.
But maybe I see the flaw in your use of Leopards user interface. You should have changed the "space theme background image" (ugly, I agree with you on that) to an image of your own.
J.
I love XMenu. The old drop down menus have not been surpassed for efficiency compared to the bloody Dock.
Hmm, I tried XMenu but it wasn't very useful to me since I've been tainted by Quicksilver, although I keep it around in case I find a future use for it, probably for projects. Deja Menu doesn't really have anything to do with Xmenu though, it's just a menu bar replacement that you launch with a hotkey and appears wherever the cursor is. Works like a charm, except the search box in the Help menu.
As long as a new Preference allows me to move to a NeXTStep floating, tear-off menu system, I'd be ecstatic.
I found StepMenus but it's a PPC binary and doesn't appear to have been updated for quite some time so it's probably a timebomb for whenever Apple pulls Rosetta support, assuming it still works in Leopard. Don't know if you can tear off individual menus though.
Sebastian
-I agree. Itunes is flat.
Otherwise: Love to see systemwide dynamic lighting + shadows using a 3d vidcard to give it a more dimensional and live appearance. Pick a general point where the light would be coming from, & when you move a window, it would interact with the source and relative to its environment.
Totally agree. I can't stand the iTunes/Finder theme anymore - a step back IMO. iTunes just looks like they originally started in one theme, and then as the store and it's features expanded, they needed to quickly throw up some more colors and sections to add distinction. It just doesn't look natural and cutting edge. Very flat and blah colors. Folders in the Finder now with Leopard? C'mon.. B.O.R.I.N.G. Say what you want about Vista/Windows 7, the OS sucks functionally in comparison to OS X, but the UI theme looks more appealing.
With that said, I wonder if Apple will standardize on the new non-Aqua style for scroll bars? We have the iTunes/iPhoto blue, flat-matte style (which I like) and the iMovie/GarageBand black, slightly more rounded style (also nice). Maybe they'll let both exist: flat-matte for non-pro apps like iPhoto and iTunes, rounded black for more proish apps like iMovie and GarageBand.
Push buttons are likely to resemble those in MobileMe and/or the iTunes Store (go into your account info to see what I mean).
The bright traffic light window controls must loose their sheen and perhaps even their color scheme. That's surely a system-wide change we can count on, yet I have no clue what they'll replace it with.
Leopard's Dock is so pretty, I can't say I understand most of the criticism; Tiger's Dock was so subdued it was boring; looked like a piece of tape and those black triangle, bleh! The translucent Menu Bar doesn't bother me either. I hardly use it anyway.
Anyone else find it ironic, that we're more or less coming full circle to an updated version of the OS 8/9 theme.
Just like fashion then.
1) Shapeshifter is a horrible hacky POS that no right thinking person should recommend to anyone (that they like.)
Do you want to back this up with anything? Myself and everyone I know that has been theming since '04/'05 has never had any problems related to Shapeshifter. Yes, APE has caused problems in the past for some people but that isn't anything to do with Shapeshifter. Jason Harris spent a great deal of time and care making sure SS didn't break things if it failed.
I think I read that Leopard's UI is built differently than before, something to do with moving toward resolution-independence, and parts of it are "hard coded" rather than being simple bitmaps that can be swapped out.
Leopard's UI is a mess of CoreUI and bitmap images, this is why there's no theming for Leopard yet (although there are new applications coming out soon which will). For all of people's chiming that Apple does things elegantly, it's a stinky mess. The RSRC files are bloated with redundant elements which haven't been used since pre-10.2. Technically theming would be easier if Apple were to finish CoreUI and use vector elements for everything because you'd only need to change a few of the base textures and it would apply to them all. I presume this is what they'll do in 10.7, because we've heard nothing about it for 10.6. They'd also need to finish up with their XML jazz, at the moment some of the CoreUI elements are drawn "simply" as it were; You can change stroke, shadowing, tinting, texture fill, etc in Property List Edit or Text Edit in a readable format. Some others are more complicated (I assume made by the in-house UI Image/XML Creator they have a patent on) and would need to be reverse engineered to have any real chance of editing excessively.
---
I'll be terribly disappointed if they use the shit iTunes scrollbars, I'm all for moving to a matte look but they're just badly made.
The biggest change on the horizon, though, has to do with resolution-independence, which didn't make the cut for Leopard, but hopefully will be in Snow Leopard, though I'm not holding my breath. All interface elements will have to be scalable - no more bitmaps. This will really clean out the crud from a long way back. It will be zippier, too, with the UI fueled by Core Image & Grand Central. To please me, it could look something like a cross between Final Cut Pro & iTunes, and be a little darker than Leopard overall. I love the idea of dark menu bar with light text, because that removes another bright spot. But with an integrated, scalable UI, it seems Apple would have the opportunity to again allow users to choose colors, brightness or darkness, and do a little basic theming in a pref pane.