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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Friday, October 03, 2003

Goodbye Aqua, Hello Platinum
This blog posting takes a nice look at Apple's quiet retreat from the useless, fluffy translucency effects in Mac OS X as the company revs up to "Panther" (v. 10.3). It mirrors what I've been saying all along, right down to the "gaudy" nature of OS X's overly sharp color contrast and silly translucent menus. "The upcoming 10.3 upgrade ... largely kills the striped look, removes many useless translucency effects (from eg. inactive window title bars) and generally adds darker tones of grey to the backgrounds of windows to make the overall contrast more tolerable. In other words, it adds a healthy dose of Platinum elements into the Aqua appearance. I'm glad this shift in focus — from PR-friendly eye-candy to better usability — is happening, although I'm not exactly pleased to see that it took Apple almost three years to realize that Aqua with it's translucency effects and overly sharp color contrast was too gaudy. The switch from Platinum to Aqua happened too abruptly and many of the changes brought into the Mac GUI — such as translucent menus or translucent Save boxes — were unjustified at the time, and still remain so. Many of the so-called improvements done to the [original OS X] GUI were changes for the sake of change. What little reasoning supported changes like translucency and pulsating buttons was strictly marketing-related. Eye-candy sells software (and hardware, since we're talking about an entire OS) [though it didn't work in the case of OS X, obviously. --Paul]. Luckily Apple has finally realized that while the scaling effects of the Dock or the translucency effects used in the window manager make for great technological demos, they do nothing to improve day-to-day work efficiency, and that usability should come first." Ah yes, there's the key: Usability sould come first. Repeat that a few times after me, and then start looking at the iterative, task-based UI in Windows XP for examples on getting it right.

[ Posted at 12:57 PM | Permalink ]