Leopard stupidity
Leopard is pretty nice, there's a lot to like. But there are some really stupid things too, mostly visual and since I'm a visual kinda person I feel compelled to complain about them! There I've warned you, so if you feel like posting nasty comments feel free to go to hell. Btw, Apple please fix this stuff ne?
Got folders?
Two stacks in the dock, two totally different folders. Both with custom folder icons. Sadly they both contain generic folders. Which is which? Who knows. I have to smear fan their contents across my screen before I can find out.
Stars in their eyes
Where do the stars end and the status lights begin? I suppose it could be worse, no one buy Steve Jobs one of those infinity mirrors OK?
Inconsistent!
Did you know some sad sap at Apple actually invented their own button style just for the 'Choose Backup Disk' button in Time Machine? None of the 10 or so standard button schemes were quite right apparently. Do Apple's designers get paid by the pixel filled or something?
Are you blind?
In the accessibility control panel Apple thoughtfully made all the text huge and bold to help people with visual disabilities. In the Time Machine preference pane they randomly decided your sight might be going a bit so they stuck in a giant on/off button. I'm kind of disappointed you don't have to flip up a little protective cover over the button and turn a key to activate it though. There should be flashing lights and sirens too, you know, just so you're sure it's on.
Disclose me not
A visual bug in a standard system control, in a shipping version of Leopard, after over 2 years of development? Say it ain't so. The disclosure triangle should be white for the selected row by the way, as it is it's barely visible.
Shady sheets
Sheets now bizarrely get a shadow cast on them by the window title bar or toolbar. The window below (thankfully) does not however so it all looks a bit odd. The old style was sort of like having something posted through a letter box to you, the new style is like getting a note slipped under your door. Perhaps a future version will be like a note taped to a brick lobbed through your screen.
Capsule overdose
Capsule buttons are hideously ugly, I would go so far as to say I despise them. Not only do they look awful they're a usability joke too. At a glance which buttons here are enabled and disabled?
Help I can't see what I'm doing!
The Help viewer window now floats on top of everything else, too bad if you want to see the application window below.
Independence day?
Back since the Tiger days Apple has been telling us to get ready for resolution independence, heck it was supposed to be a Leopard feature right? Ok lets overlook that it's still not ready, but why the hell are they still using bitmap resources for all their custom UI? Oi Apple, you guys have read your own documentation right, you've heard of NSBezierPath right? It ain't that hard to make a roundrect or draw a curved line!
Ordeal of gloss
The shelf dock is pretty awful, but I've talked about that already. You'd need to have incredibly bad taste to actually think it looks aesthetically pleasing and you know that it will age about as well as the hockey-puck mouse and pinstripes. Wouldn't you? Ok just checking...
Grey on grey is the new colour!
I'm sort of torn, I want to like the new Leopard folder icons because truthfully I've never liked the old OS X folder style. But I really don't get the whole dark embossed emblem deal, it's unnecessarily hard to differentiate the icons now. I actually have to stop and think before I click, before it was practically unconscious because I'd just have to see the necessary colour and not do any higher level of thinking than that. Read Jef Raskin's 'The Humane Interface' Apple design team!
Honourable mention
You can't have a Leopard UI rant without mentioning the translucent, blurry menu bar. It's not as bad as it was in the earlier seeds, but it's still iffy on certain desktops. Just make the transparency a check box on/off option! Heck give us a giant Time Machine slider button if it will make you feel better.
That's all for now.
Update: Welcome Daring Fireball readers! For those people who basically skimmed the article and want to rant at me for dissing Apple, please understand I do like Leopard and think it has some wonderful features, this article is a light hearted poke at some of the daft and plain weird design decisions in Leopard. Comments are moderated so don't keep reposting, it won't make them appear any faster.
posted by Rory Prior @ 1:10 AM
51 comments
51 Comments:
Great post. The "Choose Backup Disk" button is pretty hilarious.
Excellent points. I filed a bug report on the Mail capsule toolbar icons this afternoon, it's ID #5563437. The image I attached to the bug report is here: http://donkeyentertainment.com/misc/CapsuleButtons.png
That Stacks thing reminds me of Office for Windows, when you have 5 filenames like "Document Rev1", "Document Rev2", etc, but because MS decided to truncate the recent file list at like 10 characters, you can't tell which one is which because they're all displayed as "Document Re...".
My complaint about Stacks is that, if you drop the Applications folder on the dock, and you pop it open, and click the Utilities folder, it opens up in Finder. It sort of defeats the purpose of having a stack. Showing the location in Finder is what Command + Click is for.
Anyways, hopefully Apple will listen to some of the feedback. It seems like they were changing things last minute (and it feels a little like 10.5.0 is not entirely out of beta... though that's no different than 10.4.0), so hopefully we won't have to wait until Leopard+1 for some of the UI tweaks.
And on the bright side, IMO it was at least 50 steps forward with the consistent UI and new controls compared to Tiger, so Leopard still comes out way ahead.
The new embossed folders are simply the most stupid thing Apple did in history.
EVERYONE use the finder and its folder. I'm litterraly lost now, I've switched to icon mode 64x64 to recognize the icons...
Bye Bye column mode, your icons are now to small for my eyes.
Hahahaha, Fantastic.
I access all my commonly used applications & files through a handful of folder hierarchies in the Dock which Stacks torpedoes rather neatly.
I raised a bug on this with Apple back in July & it was closed within 24 hours as a duplicate. So I would suspect a number of people have been complaining. However I get the feeling that Stacks is going to be one of those features that the Apple Orthodoxy is going to regard as heretical to dislike.
Until I can find a suitable Dock alternative I'm not moving to Leopard. Stacks is too annoying and there's nothing in Leopard that is sufficiently compelling for general day to day use that would offset the annoyance factor.
Good article. I agree on all of it. Darn funny too :)
Anyone noticed that the shelf dock has some graphical errors around the lower edges?
To fix your honorable mention:
http://www.eternalstorms.at/utilities/opaquemenubar/index.html
Haha. The thing that drives me crazy are the back/forward buttons in the Finder and the entire set of buttons in Safari. The back/forward ones are way too small for their frames, and none of the Safari ones fit with one another.
It's some linux-level shit right there.
Selection colors: menu selections are blue electric, while iTunes selections are in the usual "Tiger blue". Moreover, Mail's selected items in the sidebar are.. purple?
RSS Folders in mail are white. I don't know why..
In "Disclose me not", you say that the triangles should be white.
They are actually on my computer. What's weird with yours ?
louis: they are on mine too - but only in certain places like the Finder. The example is from *Xcode*.
All the transparent effect of the menus does it make the menu harder to read. However, it can't touch the Stack with the Grid option. You not only get a transparent window that lets your desktop picture/icons show through, but it also has a gradient background. HOW could Apple design such crap?
The arrows when browsing folders (re: "Disclose me not") are white when selected.
I think all your dislikes about the time machine preferences stem from the fact that it seems whoever designed that pane apparently forgot that they weren't working on the iPhone.
My first post, because Leopard is F-ING HORRENDOUS. Just as you said, the stacks are the most useless waste of space and feature-deletion ever attempted by Apple.
If they try to push this on us still in 10.5.1, goodbye Leopard. And that 10.5.1 update had better come within the week.
Just as you said, the menu bar is an utter joke. Does anyone know if the GUI designers at Apple have changed in some obscene way since Tiger was designed? This seriously can't be made from the same pairs of eyes.
I never thought I'd say this, but Steve Jobs must be getting too old and senile to be of any use. If he approved this crap, which is affirmative, there is something seriously wrong with his head. Some things in Leopard are so beyond the boundaries of a freshman Photoshop class where they just taught them how to use the bevel filter.
Much of the discussed stuff is not even subjective. it is just plain wrong. Only a massively corrupted brain could even start to dream up this crap, let alone pass it on to hundreds of thousands of users. OMFG Apple?!
The Finders' Smart Folder windows don't use the black-dot-in-the-red-lollypop to represent an unsaved state.
It's jarring to click on a bright red close button and be greeted with one of the new floating shadowed Save Sheets.
here's an odd one, the menu bar is far more transparent on my powerbook than on my iMac/intel
Your comment on the sheets makes no sense. If they're slipping from under the toolbar, there should be a shadow, so that is correct, and the sheet DOES cast a shadow on the window below, as you can see on your own screenshot. I have to agree on all the other items, though.
Well, since tastes are different I do agree on some of the points made, but not at all -- I like the new folder icons and I don't really have a problem seeing the difference between stacks either...and I even kind of like the capsule buttons...! ;)
But there's always room for improvement, that's for sure...
Anyway, since you did mention sheets, there is one thing that has had me confused even way before Leopard came along:
When you choose to delete all your trashed mails, the confirmation dialogue comes as a sheet...but when you choose to delete all your junk mails the confirmation dialogue (which has almost exactly the same text in it) comes as a pop-up window...!?! What's up with that...?! Am I missing something here...?
Maybe this is some kind of rule in the GUI guidelines as to what kind of messages are supposed to be sheets and which are pop-ups...but I really don't see what sense that makes in this case...
I think that the look of the Time Machine pane -- the toggle, the inconsistent button -- are simply clues that a new UI is coming soon but wasn't included in this build. Notice that the toggle switch uses Helvetica... then take a look at the fanned stack, which inexplicably also uses Helvetica.
Is this just another inconsistency, or the underpinnings of a more iPhone-ish/iPodish interface yet to debut?
While you make some good points in other areas, I have to voice my disagreement about the giant Time Machine toggle switch. It has a purpose exactly because it turns on and off such important functionality. Remember those huge Frankenstein switches in OpenStep? Not every preference needed to be a 48 pixel control when a 16 pixel checkbox would do, but it helps that the most important control is big and obvious. There may be a half dozen settings that can be configured or misconfigured, but that switch should tell you at a glance whether things are being backed up or not. I'd like to see this return to being a standard control. Is the Firewall on? How about the master control for turning on and off all iCal's notifications. Yeah, the space doesn't add functionality, but it does add clarity.
I'm still split on the change to the menu font.
When I first saw it on the WWDC build, I thought that something was wrong with my mini's video settings. It does look like it fixes a font problem that's been around since 10.0, and I imagine I'll get used to it, but for now the taller caps make Lucida Grande in menus appear far too tall and skinny.
Since it's such a great idea that menus are translucent, why not go all the way and have windows be translucent as well. That way we'd always be able to see our desktop picture.
Item 1: I totally agree with your post about custom icons missing from folders used as stacks. I've already started using pdf previews, at the top of the alphabet to get around all this. What makes it even more embarrassing for Apple is that they actually invented a great tool for solving this problem with the "Make Key Photo" feature in iPhoto. Just choose what file in the folder you want to use as its 'key' image.
Item 2: Lucky for me x2. Apple chose to allow my PB12" 867 into the Leopard club. (Not my main cpu but still fun to use.) The best part is that my Leopard menu bar is OPAQUE instead of transparent. I guess having a clunky old graphics card helps in some cases.
Here's another bad, alert the troops ;)
The path/breadcrumb in the Finder (a preference-enabled feature) does not allow clicking within the path to go to that point. Except when first switching views, i.e., when going from column to cover-flow, or visa-versa, you can get it to work once,and only once. Anyone have any other experience with this?
To leave a positive, the cover-flow finder is such a great time-saver for anyone w/ lots of files and little (human) memory.
My pet peeves are the 3D Dock and the sheets. Oh, and pressed buttons. Why is the blue so gray-looking now?
The menubar hasn't bothered me yet, though, but the desktops I've used so far haven't impacted readability. An opacity slider would not have killed Apple.
Can we get a blog that features solely on how bad Stacks are? We've lost major functionality here!
1. I open a stack and then have to mouse across the entire screen to click on the item I want. How does that save time from opening a Finder window?
2. I want to drill down a directory or two in a stack... Sorry not possible!
3. Icons stacked one of top of the other doesn't make them distinguishable from other stacks... Now I have to spend brain cycles locating which Stack I want to use...
4. No contextual list view? WTF?
I could go on and on and on...
This is clearly a feature that came down from the top. It's ridiculous how bad it is!
I just installed and I'm pretty much in agreement with most of what everyone is complaining about. In many aspects Leopard feels like a step backward. Stacks are completely worthless... I mean, how hard is it to create a folder somewhere and save things into it?
The other thing that bugs me that I haven't seen mentioned is the inconsistency with navigating files in Quick View with the arrow keys.
Grid view - you have to use the up/down keys when you get to the end of a row
List or detail view - up/down keys only
Column view - you can use left/right and up/down but when you reach the end of the file list pressing left takes you back a column
Cover flow - left/right only.
Why not just use the left and right keys and go in the direction the files are ordered? Why do you have to remember which keys to use depending on which view a particular folder is set?
It seems like Leopard was rushed out the door as many of these simple but incredibly frustrating issues have not been resolved.
My personal favorite is the aqua scroll bars that are still in safari and finder(maybe elsewhere), but are a nice blueish-gray in iTunes.
It's a little sad that Apple is slipping in their UI. Leopard is the first update that I kept finding myself saying "why did they do that" instead of "isn't that amazing?" They're still the best, but they are getting sloppy.
"Perhaps a future version will be like a note taped to a brick lobbed through your screen."
Cheers for that. I haven't laughed so hard in ages.
Am I the only one who can't stand the traffic lights? They are just too colorful, they looked much better in Tiger.
Personally, I like the new menu bar, but the translucency should be an option. I suspect long-time Mac users have more of a problem with it than semi-recent converts like myself.
The non-reflective dock (the one you get when you have the dock on the side) looks nice, I think.
Bloody marvelous laff on a Monday morning and bang on as well :)
Agree with that... nice post. Hope Apple is reading...
Cheers,
I completely agree about the transparent menu bar. Also, I use the default dock, and I have a ridiculously hard time figuring out which programs are open because of the stupid dots that are used to indicate an open app.
Anonymous:
1) You can open a finder window from a stack just Command-clicking it.
2) Basically, stacks are like the old contextual list view. So 1folder-1stack. You can even use arrows and letters to move inside a stack.
Well, what did you expect? They're trying to appeal to PC users now.
Mark my words: 10.6 will feature a "Start" menu as well as translucent, glazed BSODs. Dark gray on gray, inscrutable toolbars, illogical visual design, dweeby sci-fi themes--it's all downhill from here, friends.
A little nitpicky, but generally I do agree with a lot of the things you point out. Some of these things should have come out in usability testing.
Add to the "selection colors" list:
In stacks, grid view selections are grey and with a gradient, while in list view selections are blue.
They need to hire somebody to check usability and consistency :\
Sometimes I think Apple hired people fired from Microsoft for making Aero glass.
Why would anyone want hello-kitty pink menubar!?
Rory, you only touched the surface. There' so much more to complain about in Leopard's UI. Don't even get me started on the functional bugs.
I'm trying to forget about al of this because I don't want to darken my own day to day thinking in a negative way about anything, let alone Leopard. But I'm sure some venting will need to come out as I do more testing on it.
As it stands, definitely not a recommended install until 10.5.2 for the general public.
For anyone (like me) startled by the odd colours in the cloe/minimize window buttons, please take a look at the Displays Pref and select the COLOR tab.
When I did this the colours instantly shifted. It appears Leopard started off with a very strange colour profile that intensified the colours of those buttons as well as the blue highlight on menu items.
My next step is to export my profile from Tiger and restore it in Leopard to see exactly what the differences are in that respect. The correct profile was *not* listed after having migrated settings. Leopard was a clean install onto an external volume.
Note that if you let an external Leopard install see any of your old drives, it *will* destroy any existing Spotlight indexes on those drives. When you boot back to Tiger you'll have to disable and re-enable Spotlight on those drive to get it working again.
Hmmm, the menubar on my PowerBook is NOT transparent at all. It's pretty solid.
The Help viewer window now floats on top of everything else, too bad if you want to see the application window below
Or you could just shrink it, move it or minimize it.
I have to politely disagree with everyone complaining about this. I think this issue is being WAY overblown. Everyone's making it sound as if it's this impenetrable barrier to the application underneath. But other than the fact that it floats to the top, it behaves like a normal window.
If your premise is that you can't see the application underneath it because they must occupy the same space, then the old behavior is a pain in that you must constantly switch back and forth between the two. What good are instructions that disappear as soon as you try to use them? This way you can tuck the instructions in the corner as a tiny window and read them while you actually do the actions it describes.
Grover - the new help window floats above all other windows which means you have to drag it across the screen or as you say minimise it. How is that possibly better than just falling behind the current window when you click the application beneath or letting you use Command+tab or Exposé to switch between them? (neither Command+tab or Exposé work on the help window)
It is important to have some degree of inconsistency in the interface because this keeps this stimulates UI-development and makes it dynamic.
If everything has to be a 100 % unified this actually kills creativity.
If Apple had not developed som different looks for OS X over the years we would all be stuck en the orignal look of Aqua which was deeply flawed - too clear stripes and "over" transparency.
That said it is also good not to have to much inconsistency, and therefore I think Apple has done the right thing - unified a lot of elements, but still made some new "un-unified" interface developments.
Also i actually like the idea of a 3D-dock but the way Apple has implemented it is bad - it's too flashy and the shadows fall all wrong - especially if you have af light desktop image.
There's a big difference between a bit of visual inconsistency here and there and giant usability disasters like the stack icons in the dock and buttons where you can't tell if they're enabled or not until you click them.
I'm all for Aqua evolving and getting better, but there is no reason why it has to be done in this awkward piecemeal manner.
Excellent list of what is wrong with the new interface.
Another such issue, to me, is that when you drag the applications folder to the right side of the dock, it gets represented with a address book icon in front of a blue folder. Barely distinguishable from the address book icon. Place them on opposite sides of the stripe for easy comparison.
I like consistency in a UI but try 'thinking different'.
I have several remote controls for devices around the house. I identify them by look or feel. I could amalgamate them into one control but I would loose functionality.
I know it's not a direct comparison, but HCI is a complicated business
Most of these points have nothing what so ever to do with consistency. They have to do with usability and just common design sense. God forbid real world devices started mimicking some of Apple's interface design decisions of late :P
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