Mac OS X Yosemite Under the Magnifying Glass
The low readability/contrast in some places seems to be the main problem. Sad to see the old Finder logo go – the central curve ending outside the "box" was a nice touch.
The new dock reminded me of the old Powerbook G4 I had, with 10.2 installed. I still somewhat miss the whole "Aqua" interface sometimes – but maybe that's just nostalgia or I over the years it's become harder to surprise me with UI design.
I hate Helvetica Neue as a desktop font. I'm on an (non-retina screen) iMac and it just looks too thin at times, blurry.
Also, Id suggest waiting a couple days/weeks if you're a Chrome user. Just keeps crashing, every build, even Canary.
The new folder icons are extremely reminiscent of the old Oxygen icons included in KDE.
See: http://dl.maximumpc.com/galleries/linuxguide3/kde4-dolphin.p...
I think its good the search bar looks like a button. It makes it more clear that searching is an action. The user has to click on it to activate the textbox anyway, and once clicked it should be quite apparent that its a textbox.
Things that I've found annoying:
- The inconsistency between some icons (e.g. Finder vs. Trash).
- The inconsistency between icons and the overall UI (e.g. folder icons just look blurry, while other icons have sharp lines).
- Juxtaposed rounded buttons in the toolbar are weird.
- Aliasing on some UI elements (e.g. tooltips, slider, buttons, sidebar).
- Too low contrast on some UI elements (e.g., sidebar, traffic lights).
IMO Apple is struggling to make this new visual language coherent and polished, I guess it'll take more 2-3 iterations to get to the level of coherency Aqua achieved.
I miss Windows. You could change the UI fonts, and there's nothing I'd rather do than escape Helvetica Neue. It's a terrible, terrible font.
I'm really surprised at how similar their new checkboxes are to the ones I designed for my music player Bahamut[1] last year.
Which makes it kind of ironic and upsetting that the UI APIs they provide for writing Bahamut (AppKit) made it so incredibly difficult to make it look that way.
I started using Mac OS X at version 10.4, and over the years it's becoming really apparent when part of a style change is to appeal to perceived obsolescence.
When a reviewer says "this is definitely an improvement over the last version, which looked and felt awkward", I recall how in their review of the last version, they said the same thing.
Scary times when work that's still months away is already getting scrutinized like this.
> In particular, I like the new trash can icon. Craig Federighi made a note of the time they spent refining this particular icon and the effort definitely shows.
Was it lost on the author that Federighi's comment on the trashcan was made in jest?
The glassy translucency reminds me of Windows Vista's "Glass" theme. Are modern operating systems moving toward a solid, flat design language?
Has anybody gotten Continuity/Handoff to work? Or is it completely disabled in the betas?
What's weird with the alignment of the traffic light buttons?
I was looking forward to seeing some feature changes, but I could care less about anything this post raved/complained about. Prepare yourself for some serious bike shedding though.
> There are still many rough edges in the new OS ...
I hate to say it, but that blog post is mostly bike shedding. Do people really care that the toolbar icons aren't perfectly aligned, that the folder icons lack a little contrast and that the search bar looks like a button?
The "Applications" icon still looks like it was designed by a 8 year-old. There are some thing all the billions in the world can't fix I guess.
PS: This comment doesn't bring anything of value to the conversation but negativity and I am sorry for that, but it's been nagging at me for years.
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