Leopard's new look (continued)

Arguably, the new window appearance was also an arbitrary change. (Why dark gray? Why not standardize on the old "unified" appearance instead?) But in the grand scheme of things, the particular design chosen is not as important as the fact that a choice was made. Of course, it could have been an ugly choice (I don't think it is) or it could have suffered from terrible usability issues (I don't think it does), but at least the intent was a good one: to simplify.

The same cannot be said for a several other significant changes to the look of Leopard's interface. Their intent is unclear at best, they cause usability issues where none existed before, and many of them are visually unpleasing, if not downright ugly.

Folders

Let's start with the most iconic icon in the OS, the humble folder. Next to windows and standard controls, the folder icon is the most ubiquitous piece of reused art. A lot of people didn't like the folder icon introduced in Mac OS X 10.0 and carried through essentially unchanged to Tiger.

As the look of the OS moved away from 10.0's heavily pinstriped, ultra-bright-and-shiny look, the folder icon stayed stuck in the past. Some also complained that the isometric perspective didn't match Apple's icon design guidelines. But these are all trivial issues, and subjective ones at that. Most Mac users were not clamoring en masse for new folder icons.

I'm not opposed to a new folder icon design, of course. But the first rule of such an effort should be "don't make it worse." Unfortunately, that's exactly what Apple's done with the Leopard folder icon design.

The look isn't bad, right? It's still easily recognizable as a folder. It's even environmentally friendly; note the darker blue flecks that imply it's a recycled paper product. (Er, recycled pixels... or something.) The trouble starts when you see what the "special" folder icons look like (Applications, Documents, etc.)

The embossed look is attractive, but it's also incredibly low-contrast and pretty much impossible to make out at small sizes. I keep several special folders in my Dock, and I rely on being able to pick them out quickly, even at small sizes. Here's how they look in Tiger.

Now here they are in Leopard.

When it comes to at-a-glance identification, the difference is striking. I find myself literally squinting at the Leopard special folder icons, as if I'm constantly not seeing them clearly. You can find a more rigorous examination of the new folder icons at Indie HIG (a site whose mere existence is a blot on Apple's recent user interface record).

Poorly designed folder icons aren't the end of the world, but it's the context that's so maddening. Here's an interface element that maybe could have used some freshening up, but it was far from broken. Apple's gone and made it worse in a way that's obvious in seconds to anyone who's ever given any thought to interface design. It boggles the mind. The rumor is that Jobs likes them. Great.

The Dock

It gets worse. Next to go under the knife is the Dock. Now here's an interface element with some serious, long-standing issues, but remember we're only talking about appearances in this section. On that front, there's not much to complain about in Tiger, where the Dock is a minimalist translucent rectangle upon which icons are arrayed.

Hmm, how can we make this more "Leopard"? We'll have to decrease the usability in some obvious ways. I've got a few ideas there. Let's start by removing the uniform background, leaving the icons partially hanging over the desktop. That'll be sure to cause some visibility issues. Next, the already-small triangles that appear under running application icons can probably be further obscured. Let's replace those with fuzzy blue orbs. Also, if we can somehow make the Dock less space-efficient, that'd be a plus. But we also have to jazz it up, don't we?

I know! Let's make it pseudo-3D! And finally, the obligatory demo feature: reflections everywhere! Reflections on the fuzzy blue orbs, a reflection highlight line running across the whole Dock, and—the coupe de grâce—real-time reflections of any windows that move near the Dock! Behold, the Leopard Dock.

It's a cornucopia of Obviously Bad Ideas, again addressed more thoroughly by others. This is like the folder icon situation all over again, but even worse. It's an example of sacrificing usability for the sake of purely aesthetic changes that are far from universally loved (to put it mildly) in isolation, and inexcusable given the price paid for them.

Seriously, pseudo-3D? Really? If a compulsion for gaudiness must be quenched, at least try to confine such exercises to more obscure features. Don't scribble all over the second-most visible interface element in the entire OS like a nine year-old girl putting make-up on her dollie.

When the Dock is placed on the side, it regains its sanity, appearing with a uniform, flat background that encloses the icons entirely. There are no real-time reflections, and running applications are indicated by a small but high-contrast white dot.

This visual style never appeared in a developer seed of Leopard, indicating that it was added very late in the game. Perhaps it's meant as an apology, or an acknowledgement that the people most annoyed by the look of the horizontal Dock are also the most likely to have their Docks on the side. Either way, the presence of an alternate look is a tacit admission that the default design has problems.

If you want the alternate look when the Dock is on the bottom too, type the following commands at a Terminal prompt:

% defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES % killall Dock

There is actually one legitimate improvement in the appearance of the Leopard Dock. The text labels that appear when hovering over Dock icons are more readable, with light text on top of large, uniform, dark backgrounds.

Did I say "second-most visible interface element" earlier? Oh, you see it coming, don't you? What's the most visible interface element? What's on screen even more than the Dock? Your brain doesn't even want to go there, I know. "The menu bar? Surely they didn't... I mean, what's to change there?" Oh yes, buckle your straightjackets; we have now passed over to the other side.

The menu bar

Completing the troika of insane, unnecessary changes for the worse made to Mac OS X's most prominent interface elements is the Leopard menu bar which is, inexplicably, incomprehensibly translucent.

It's more of a "menu smear" than a menu bar, as if someone painted it onto the screen with Vaseline. (It's actually using Core Image to filter the background, if you care.)

It used to be worse, believe it or not. In prerelease versions of Leopard, the menu bar was even less opaque—comically so. But Apple gets zero points from me for lessening the degree of transparency. That'd be like congratulating someone for extinguishing the left half of his body after intentionally lighting himself on fire.

The rationale proffered by Apple for the use of translucency in the original Aqua design was that it denoted a transient element—pull-down menus and sheets, for example. Now it's being applied to the least transient element in the entire interface.

Leopard's new look has been compared to the Aero Glass look in Windows Vista. While I think there are few legitimate similarities, this comparison comes up as often as it does because the two designs share one prominent attribute: the gratuitous, inappropriate use of translucency to the detriment of usability.

Why, Apple? Why!? Was there something horribly wrong with the existing menu bar—something that could only be fixed by injuring its legibility? Like the folder icons and the Dock, it's not so much a fatal flaw in and of itself. It's what it implies about the situation at Apple that is so troubling. What in the holy hell has to happen in a meeting for this idea to get the green light? Is this the dark side of Steve Jobs's iron-fisted rule—that there's always a risk that an obviously ridiculous and horrible idea will be expressed in his presence and he'll (inexplicably) latch onto it and make it happen? Ugh, I don't even want to think about it.

In the meantime, there's sure to be a burgeoning market for hacks to restore blessed sanity to the menu bar. This is nothing new, really. Since the dawn of Mac OS X, third-party developers have been saving Apple's bacon by doing what Apple should have done itself. I already need several "hacks" to be happy in Tiger, but a hack for the menu bar? It's just getting ridiculous.

I guess I should try to say something nice about the Leopard menu bar too. Well, the new Spotlight icon fits in much better with the line-art theme used for other menu icons.

Leopard's menus also have a subtle change: rounded corners. Only the lower corners are rounded in drop-down menus, while all four corners are rounded in pop-up menus.

Although I'm a big fan of rounded corners (round rects forever!) I don't like them in this particular location; I think it makes drop-down menus in particular look less crisp. But at least the change has no detrimental effect on usability and isn't aggressively ugly.

The new menu highlight color is a deep, rich blue on an appropriately slatey gray, both with the obligatory gradients. They're certainly striking, but perhaps distractingly so. I know, I know, I'm never satisfied.

Leopard's visual scorecard

I'm going to stop here, not because there's nothing more to say about the new look in Leopard, but because the things I have covered span the range of quality. The new, standardized window style makes the biggest visual impact and is the best aspect of the new design. At the other end of the spectrum are the baffling alterations and adornments that make Leopard less usable and (in many cases) less pleasant to look at. There are small visual improvements in individual applications, but the overall look of the OS proper is foundering.

I was ready for an all-new look in Leopard; I was ready for Aqua's successor. That Leopard doesn't provide that is a disappointment, but hardly a sin. But a lower degree of difficulty should entail less risk. Viewed in that light, Leopard's graphical missteps are damning. If Apple is going to make mistakes, let them be made in service of a truly daring design. I'm willing to forgive, and even to look back fondly on the original Aqua UI for this reason. But to attempt a relatively tame evolution and then to willfully screw things up—things that were not broken before—that I do not forgive.