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Mac OS X Leopard UI Inconsistencies

Saturday, October 27th, 2007
at 4:53am

When I was asked by Jim Allchin to go through Vista betas with a fine-toothed comb, I did - and I knew my feedback would be sent to the proper teams. If I knew that the right person at Apple was listening, I’d likely compile a similar (lengthy) list of Leopard UI oversights, inconsistencies, and bugaboos - and would be more than happy to do so. As it stands, however…

The lead design team can’t seem to standardize on one type of toolbar icon or another - even in the same applications (like the Finder). The Preview and Mail apps have elongated “pill” icons, whereas the Finder has silver square / rectangular icons potentially intermixed with full color icons. This seems to be an issue throughout the entire OS. If they were trying to fix inconsistencies, toolbar icon uniformity seems like it would have been a great place to start.

While Apple has certainly given us a more consistent UI throughout Leopard’s apps (eliminating Brushed Metal once and for all), seems that element spacing wasn’t considered in the upgrade. The bottom corners of the iTunes window are sharper than the bottom corners of the Finder window. Moreover, the alternating line color height is not the same between Finder’s Cover Flow List view and a similar-styled List view in iTunes. Nor are the line colors matching between iTunes and the Finder.

The Finder should work more like the Mail application, automatically adjusting the horizontal spacing of fields to fit within the space allotted. The user should never see a horizontal scrollbar unless the browsing mechanism is horizontal by nature.

When the Finder or Mail windows are background windows, their Sidebars fade to a lighter shade of grey. Not so with iTunes or Preview (their Sidebars remain light blueish). Seems like a silly thing to notice, but it contributes to the “feel” that Apple was promising. If the colors change in some of Apple’s applications, why not in all of them? I’m just asking for argument’s sake - as I’m sure the answer is much like it would be were I to pose the same question to Microsoft Windows developers.

iTunes, to me, seems like a UI holdout - more than any other app on the system. For some reason, it still contains a classic B&W stopwatch cursor - as well as a preference pane that doesn’t sport the new look in its toolbar (with slick vertical fades flanking the selected section as you might find in Finder’s, Address Book’s, Mail’s, etc. preference panes). The scrollbars are a nice deep blue, but it’s the only app I can find that has ‘em.

I’m not sure which “status bar” UI is the standard to compare against, either. The iTunes status bar seems to be set at a different height than the Finder’s, and they’re both set at a different height with different icon size rules than iCal’s.

Despite numerous user interface inconsistencies, I’m still largely impressed with Leopard. OS X finally provides a much better experience for home users than does Microsoft Windows - starting with a lack of product activation all the way through to visual flourish that complements function. I’d agree that it’s an evolutionary increment for existing Mac users - but for current Windows users, it’s most certainly more than that.

Please be careful not to misconstrue my statements. It’s quite possible to love Microsoft but not one of their products. Microsoft is a different kind of company than Apple, mind you. Although both companies produce operating systems for regular ol’ users like you and me - and that’s just about where the similarity ends.

Initial Leopard reports have been overwhelmingly positive, with major upgrade hiccups potentially relegated to those who may have previously applied an unsupported system hack. You could’ve heard a pin drop in the live chat room earlier when we were stepping through OS X’s new features in real-time. You just can’t believe it until you see it, and you just can’t see it until you use it.

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15 Comments

Ian McLaughlin

October 27th, 2007
at 9:50am

I’m still a little bit confused about the way network drives are handled. I have a SMB share that I auto-mount with some AppleScript whenever I start up. There’s no icon for the drive on the desktop any more. It’s not in the finder either, but yet the path is still there and I can access the files. The finder shows the base machine on the left-hand side in the finder. If I click on it, I can see all of the shares on that device, including the one I’m connected to. Is anyone else seeing this changed behaviour? Am I doing something wrong?

ckrantz

October 27th, 2007
at 9:52am

What’s the hardware req if you don’t have the latest and greatest of mac computers? Would it work OK on an 512mb intel mini for instance?

One of many problems with vista was that you basically needed all new hardware.

I’m one of many doing the transfer to OSX from windows. When the last windows machine dies so does windows in my house.

UAE Tumblr

October 27th, 2007
at 10:53am

. You could’ve heard a pin drop in the live chat room earlier when we were stepping through OS X’s new features in real-time. You just can’t believe it until you see it, and you just can’t see it until you use it. [IMG] [IMG] [IMG] (viaMagnus’ shared items in Google Reader)

Mac OS X Leopard « Down Under Digital Goes to Mars

October 27th, 2007
at 10:58am

[...] Mac OS X Leopard UI Inconsistencies ~ Chris Pirillo [...]

freestylo.co.uk

October 27th, 2007
at 1:56pm

Chriscreated an interesting post today on Mac OS X Leopard UI Inconsistencies Here’s a short outline Mac OS X Leopard UI Inconsistencies When I was asked by Jim Allchin to go through Vista betas with a fine-toothed comb, I did - and I knew my feedback

jnicita

October 27th, 2007
at 8:49pm

to the user who cant find his network mappings on the desktop. Same thing to me, but all I did was goto finder, then preferences and general, and click the box show network servers on desktop. Checked it and all my mappings created via my auto logon appeared. Simple as that.

MyAppleMenu : Conversations In The Apple Community

October 28th, 2007
at 4:04am

Mac OS X Leopard UI Inconsistenciesby Chris Pirillo Despite numerous user interface inconsistencies, I’m still largely impressed with Leopard.

Bwana

October 28th, 2007
at 5:44am

[IMG Video thumbnail. Click to play] Click To Play iPhone/iPod Touch users click here iChat SinceChris Pirillogot his copy of Leopard installed, I convinced him to help me test out iChat theatre. We were both highly impressed with the Photo Booth effects, File sharing and more importantly, screen sharing. Although the video quality was not stellar, we both

Nick

October 28th, 2007
at 9:41am

“Would it work OK on an 512mb intel mini for instance?”

Sure. It works on any recent PPC Mac, so no Intel user is going to be unable to run it. It’s running fine for me on my G4 Mac Mini. I did up the RAM to 1 GB some time ago, though, and that’s just as well: IIRC, Leopard does require a minimum of 512 MB.

Good piece, Chris. Leopard is a very nice OS, but, though UI inconsistency is perhaps a minor thing, it has to be said that Leopard is still too inconsistent even though it is a step in the right direction.

I think the stopwatch is some horrible holdover from the awful old Mac OS. iTunes is definitely a port from the pre-Unix-based OS X and is written with the Carbon toolkit not the more modern Cocoa. However, iTunes doesn’t necessarily have the oldest UI in all respects. It has more frequent releases than other applications — perhaps because of its multiple and cross-platform functions — and it looks to me like Apple tries out new looks on it first. The rather subfusc scroll-bars appeared in iTunes first, but have now appeared in iPhoto. They may possibly be in the latest iterations in some of the other “i apps”, too. (I don’t know, because I haven’t installed them all.)

Making the toolbar-background consistent was good, but Apple should decide which scroll-bars they want, too, and standardize the toolbar button style, as well.

Neil Anderson

October 28th, 2007
at 9:48pm

Minimum system requirement for Leopard is G4 867MHz. RAM minimum 512MB. DVD drive and 9GB free disk space.

Clipotech

October 31st, 2007
at 12:56pm

The latest incarnation of OS X adds a new feature that widget fans will find useful: web widgets. Web widgets…Mac OS X Leopard UI Inconsistencies

Todd V

November 2nd, 2007
at 10:24pm

Yes. And how about adding a couple more:

(1) Saving dialog screens scrolling past the dock where you can no longer see the buttons. Try saving a script in Script Editor, for example, on a 13″ Macbook.

(2) Custom icons for folders that used to serve as reminders for you now no longer show in the dock — just a stack of the documents inside.

(3) How about advancing to the 22nd century by making the spacing of finder windows or saving files windows actually “auto configure” to the size of the file names in those folders? I’ve had a save-file-in-which-location-screen pop up in the center of my screen the size of a YouTube video. There is no screen size that small. It just makes more sense to auto-configure these things based on the user’s primary screen size or the length of the file names — rather than having to scroll the columns to the right — every time! — just to see the names of the files.

Just my two cents.

ex2bot

November 8th, 2007
at 11:06am

Todd V: With the save dialog, have you tried pressing the triangle button next to the “Save As:” text box? This should shrink the sheet (the save dialog). The next time you click this button, it should enlarge the sheet again but not so long that it is off the bottom of the screen.

As for your Finder window issue, I’m not sure this will help at all, but you can set custom grid spacing. Open the window you want to space differently, and press Command (Apple key) - J. This is not automatic, of course. But at least you can set frequently accessed windows.

Bot

The Mac Sucks - More Leopard Insecurity

June 11th, 2008
at 2:04am

[...] Pirillo points out a number of UI inconsistencies and issues in Leopard in his [...]

istartedsomething

August 10th, 2008
at 2:01pm

One of the first requests I received after launching the Windows UX Taskforce was “when can you make one for Mac OS X”. This came at a surprise to me because I didn’t know OS X had user experience flaws, butapparently it didand still do. Having said that today I’m proud to launch Aqua Taskforce, a taskforce site for Apple users to submit, vote and comment on OS X user experience quirks. Windows UX Taskforce has also been renamed to

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