Disecting 'Gloomy' Unified in iTunes 7
You can tell summer is over with iTunes 7, everything is in drab stormy greys and grey-blues. Lets have a look at the UI and see what's good, bad and fugly about it.
The Good
Unified buttons and controlsI like the unified button style, its clean and simple. A modern Platinum if you will. The light color is ofset nicely by the dark grey of the window. They look like real world buttons and they depress nicely rather than just chaning colour. You can imagine the satisfying click of a microswitch when you press them.
OK so it's mostly eye candy, but it is very pretty eye candy and it does make skimming through your library very fast if you're familiar with the album art of the song you're after. They need to add this technology to iPhoto too.
iPod maintinance interfaceIt's simple, clean and attractive. It feels a bit webby, especially with those tabs and all that white space, but it does what it intends to well enough and a traditional UI wouldn't scale well in an application window like that. The 3D iPod rendering is a little un-Apple though.
Source list organisationIt's nice to see some direction from Apple when it comes to organising a source list, this is arguably a better design than putting in horizontal dividers (Finder) or just making some items un-movable (Mail).
The Bad
Graphite is the new blueRemember when graphite was the 'pro' color choice? It matched the then new and shiny PowerMac G4s and it was soothing on the eyes of graphic designers who would otherwise be distracted by those traffic light orbs in each window title bar. All Apple's pro apps (Final Cut etc) have used varying shades of graphite and bluey greys, and it seems they've finally started to infiltrate consumer level apps too. The thing is they look weird and out of place when they're not surround by other blue-grey toned elements.
Non-standard scroll barsThe scroll bars are bizare. With the dark unified look there has been a general rule up until now that controls are light coloured and they sit on a dark background. This is generally true of all traditional UI in iTunes 7 with the exception of the scrollbars which inverse this logic. The dark part should be the gutter with the light grey gradient as the drag handle as it is in Dashboard.
I mean what's up with that? There must be some rules about the use of capitalization in a GUI somewhere and if there isn't there should be.
The Fugly
Equalizer not quite finishedOops someone forgot to use a unified style checkbox and popup button in the equalizer.
These barely even look like buttons, they are dark and unfriendly looking. What was wrong with the nice unified bottom bar buttons we had before?
The icons which highlight to show state by turning blue change so subtly now that you could be forgiven for not noticing you had your songs set to repeat or shuffle.
Black glass selection indicator in the source listWas this just some vague head nod to the Vista UI? Why is it black? Has blue so fallen from grace now that we can't show any trace of it in a widget? If it has why aren't all table selection colours in iTunes black?
There is a strange and inconsistent use of matt and reflective surfaces in iTunes 7. It doesn't harm usability, but it's an attention to detail thing that you'd expect Apple to get right. All the controls with the exception of the source list selection are matt so why is it glossy in the source list?
No resize handle for the source listYep you've got a one pixel wide bar to grab to resize the source list, gone is the little grabber that used to exist which just about made this minimal splitview style OK.
Any color so long as its drabiTunes 7 features an astonishingly inconsistent color palette, with many versions of the grey unified gradients and different shades of graphite. Here is a partial color palette:
Cutting things down to one control color, one selection color etc. would make the UI look better and more consistent in my opinion, at the moment it's like each view was designed by a different artist following the brief of 'grey gradients are in, aqua blue is out'.
posted by Rory Prior @ 10:02 AM
20 comments
20 Comments:
A very nice analysis thank you!
One thing I think you missed is that in the Party Shuffle biazarrely you get the "glass look" for the song you have selected.
Yea I really dont like the new scroll bars. My Onyx preference for double arrow keys at each end doesnt work anymore. If they worked the same way I wouldnt mind, but I prefer double arrows at each end. Otherwise I like the changes.
The whole interface is more gloomy.... except for the icon, which is more aquafied and colorful than ever!
Here's a history of the icon:
http://macteens.com/gallery/displayimage.php?pos=-3582
Yeah the icon is very out of character with the rest of the application. But then again maybe that's the idea.
I think that it turned out really great. I think they UI is aesthetically more appealing, and I like the scroll bars. I hope that Leopard will follow these design cues.
I hate it. It looks like a X11-port or a Java Swing app. Even my Windows-using friends think it sucks. iTunes was already in danger of becoming bloated and now it's just a mess; it echoes Media Player 10. I really hope OS 10.5 doesn't look like this.
Also you didn't mention the Burn button; I really liked the atomic-pulsing animation of the icon. Now it's just a lame 'Burn Disk' button tucked away in the corner like an afterthought. WTF Apple?
Yeah I just noticed they removed the neat burn button. I hate to say it, but again it is in keeping with the very sober, dull look of iTunes 7. It's like they squeezed all the fun out of it.
I too think they have squeezed all the fun out of iTunes. I really hate the scroll bars. They look so un-Mac like. What happened to the 3D look? The scrollbars seem very flat and dull and almost blend into the rest of the app. This makes it much harded in my opinion to easily glance and identify the scrollbar while keeping my eyes on the true content. I find myself having to stop and concentrate on where the scrolbarts are and then redirect my concentration back to the actual content.
Great blog post! (I came to you via the RSS feed of insanelymac.com)
You forgot to mention the scrollbars in the coverflow window... even more different.
Well the cover flow one is different by necessity, a standard scrollbar would just have looked wrong there.
does anyone else think that with the iTunes look before and making the LCD-like screen a color screen (it would match their iPods now) it would look much sweeter?
I agree the LCD screen is pretty ugly and would look much better if it imitated a color iPod screen.
I have to admit, iTunes 7's look would feel strangely primitive as a system-wide UI. Drab gray with flat colors in some areas and weird black highlights in others.
Are they smoking crack at Apple? Now I'm really curious how they plan to respond to Vista's (admittedly inconsistent) visuals, if at all.
Nice critique, but here're a few points I think are worth considering:
You did point out the source-list-resizing issue--there's no indication that it's resizable. But this is but one of three pane-resizing schemes in iTunes 7! Go into Browse view, and notice the thick grey resizer bar, with circular central dimple. Hover over it and get a hand (as opposed to the column-resize cursor you get when resizing the source pane). Now try viewing a playlist in that new cover-flipper viewer view (the third one), and notice the pane resizer is not a bar, but three short-ish horizonal lines at the bottom of the shiny blackness (again, hovering gives you a hand cursor). Annoyingly inconsistent.
Next, another trio of inconsistency: visual toggle states. As you noted, the toggle buttons at the lower left (Shuffle, Repeat) highlight a bright blue. Now, logic would suggest that the Browse button (now at the lower right) would follow this same scheme. Not so--in fact there's no indication on the button that you're in Browse mode at all. Finally, the View mode buttons have a different look when activated (and, in my opinion, they're distractingly dark, considering one of them will *always* be activated).
I too lament the death of the radioactive Burn button.
The iTunes icon--I don't mind the color, but, as a musician, I can't stand the new shape of the notes!! They no longer look like notes--they're too circular. They're also too small in regard to the connecting bar on top. Also, the reflectivity now looks fake--a bit too shiny. Finally, what sort of perspective is that they've used on the background CD? It looks oddly skewed or squashed. All in all, I despise the new icon.
Also, I miss having a way to view *everything* in iTunes (previously the Library source)--now you have to view by type.
Finally, there's no Visualizer button. To be fair, I never use it, but it's still an odd omission, when the feature's still there.
Overall, the look is awfully drab, and not very Mac-ish, but it does have a nicely-polished look. I could swallow it a lot easier without the inconsistencies we've mentioned.
Then again, at least it's better than those horrid buttons in Tiger's Mail...
Seriously, though, it does bother me how inconsistent Apple has gotten with its own interface guidelines. Look at QuickTime Player, iTunes, Dashboard, Spotlight, and Mail, and look at all the application-specific interface concepts and widgets! And these are the standard parts of the OS. *Sigh*.
I think Apple is trying to appeal to more contemporary user. Not everyone that views an interface likes lots of color. The majority of users are into settle tones of blue and gray.
I'd like to see some evidence that they are and that isn't just another user interface fad. The whole dull grey gradient interface is very NeXT and that's a UI that was developed for black and white monitors and it's 20 odd years old, you'd think we'd have moved on a bit. But regardless of the color scheme, it's the gross inconsistencies that are the biggest worry. If you've ever used a bunch of different applications under Linux you'll see just how chaotic a user interface can be, we don't want the Mac going there.
I found your analysis rather insightful as are a few of the lengthier comments I read. I agree with pretty much all of it.
I think that a few ppl over at Apple need to be fired for this. In terms of technical features it is a big improvment, so that deserves props. However, I liked the previous style a lot better. I do however love the new icon. It is a welcome change since they hadn't changed it for a while.
I want them to put the equalizer button back in, I use it a lot.
Those inconsistancies in style show... gosh a high schooler could have done that.
I think that it's not 1-px but nearly 4-px for that vertical divider grab, but there really ought to be an indicator that it is even there. I don't think I ever use it though, but it's a nice overall look.
Adding duller blues is okay, but what's up with the charcoal crap. As mentioned in somebody elses comment they could put in an option to allow you to slect from a few different color skins, say if they wanted to match their iPod color.
I thought the little "burn icon" was really cool and they took it away. Booooo!
As a GUI programmer, I am horrified at this atrocity. As a mathematician, I wish everthing was scalable and you could make the cover/artwork viewer narrower (the angle and number of adjacent ones should change dynamically). As an educator, I know that dull sad colors like that increases depression and suicide rates significantly. As an engineer, I am pissed that iTunes takes 10 times more RAM and virtual memory as WMP by MS.
Okay I can go on and on, but I'll just get more furious. Instead I think I'll just go to bed, curl up into fetal position and cry about this. (Same with the lack of color 8GB nanos ><.)
I was getting bored of the shiny aqua look - specifically glowing aqua buttons and scrollbars and brushed metal, so the UI changes in iTunes were a welcome relief.
However barely a week later, I'm actually not enjoying using iTunes that much. As other posters have said, it's as if all the fun has been sucked out of it - there's not fun touches like the radioactive burn button, you know those things that make Apple software fun to use.
As I mentioned before, I was looking forward to the demise of the aqua look and something a bit more less 'Hey look! New GUI for the modern age' and something a bit more toned down. I think as we all now use our computers to view/edit videos, photos, web pages which are all very colourful, the last thing we need is a colourful GUI full of bright saturated colours competing with these.
But what Apple has done with iTunes, I'm hoping is not the way forward. As another poster has said, it's just drab and depressing. I can think of no worser insult than saying it looks like a Java Swing app!
Following the developer preview of Leopard I was quietly confident that Apple was holding back a fantastic GUI look & feel update to OS X - now I'm not so sure.
Apps seem to have arbitary styles applied to them for no real reason - design teams in different application groups don't really seem to talk to eachother as each seem to be different in some way and worst of all, there seems to be no Jonothan Ive for Mac OS X - no one who is head of software visual design so these beautifully designed boxes run software that visually is all over the place. It's like running a flea market in an Apple Store.
I really hope that Apple gets it together - but as a recent convert to the Mac from Windows I'm dismayed that as far as visual design and consistency goes with Mac Apps things are as nearly as bad as Windows... And that's bad.
mac no more!
how bland-I also miss the cool atomic burn button-it really is left as an after thought.
importing freezes 9 out of 10 times forcing me to force quit.
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