[Guy Incognito]

Yes, it's that time again. The time you all have to hear Guy whine and moan and bitch. But you can all stay to listen and flame back if you disagree.

Anyways...Apple's brushed-metal apps all have very different buttons and widgets.

Take Safari for example. Safari's toolbar (fake toolbar) have sunken glass Aqua-style buttons...I think they look good. They fit in well with the sunken window traffic light widgets.

iMovie 3 has the same type of sunken glass buttons. So does iDVD 3.

But iPhoto 2 doesn't! It still has the brushed-metal buttons. iPhoto should also have gotten the 'sunken-glass-widgets-and-buttons' overhaul, no?

iCal also still has the protruding brushed-metal buttons in some cases. And protruding glass buttons as opposed to sunken glass buttons.

Then there's iTunes 3 which is still in a league of it's own using a semi-hacked brush-metal interface.

And then there's QuickTime Player...the big cheeze that started it all way back. Still uses it's own asstacular implementation which is by far the worse brushed-metal of all Apple apps.

Rumor has it (I heard this...) that the QT core has been rewritten in Obj-C. Maybe we'll finally see a rewrite of the Player...and it'll start using real brushed-metal.

Let's hope Apple finally settles on a look-n-feel and makes all brushed-metal apps look-n-feel the same.

Keynote's Aqua interface looks standard and great though on the movies...I think I'll buy it and check it out.

[Zimphire]

Apple has too many GUI ideas and uses them. This is a bad thing. They need to stick with one design and stay with it. I like brushed better than I do Aqua I will say.

[Guy Incognito]

Originally posted by Zimphire:
Apple has too many GUI ideas and uses them. This is a bad thing. They need to stick with one design and stay with it. I like brushed better than I do Aqua I will say.

I agree...I particularly like the new sunken-glass look apparent in Safari, iMovie 3 and iDVD 3. I hope Apple updates all the rest of the apps to use that look and then stop trying to recreate a new brushed-metal look.

I hope they settle on something fast.

[KidRed]

Wasn;t there an update for the sunken widgets recently for one of the iApps? It's possible the same may happen for iPhoto once Steve notices.

[Jasoco]

JUST WAIT A FEW MONTHS!

Older Metal apps still use the old way (Pre-Jaguar and its new Dev Tools) to draw metal. LET APPLE GET AROUND TO IT!

SHEESH!

[Millennium]

Originally posted by Jasoco:
Older Metal apps still use the old way (Pre-Jaguar and its new Dev Tools) to draw metal.

Exactly. There's a lot of code invested in the old-style Metal look (which, incidentally, means less bloat once that is fixed). Before that code can be excised, a lot of compatibility testing has to be done, to ensure that everything works and feels exactly as it did before, even though it looks a bit different.

As for QuickTime's core being rewritten in Objective-C, I doubt it. Objective-C is fast enough for GUI's, but for the core of a media player you need all the speed you can get, and you won't find that in Objective-C or even plain C. You'll find that in assembly language.

But that doesn't actually matter too much. It's been possible to create Nib-based Carbon apps since the very beginning (they'll even work on OS9, if you compile them as CFM apps), and Carbon/Nib apps can use Brushed Metal just like Cocoa apps can. This would probably take less effort than a full rewrite, and seems the more likely choice for Apple to take.

[oVeRmInD911]

Originally posted by Zimphire:
Apple has too many GUI ideas and uses them. This is a bad thing. They need to stick with one design and stay with it. I like brushed better than I do Aqua I will say.

I like your signature.

[Northform]

Writing code in assembly is a bad idea. There is no platform portability. Almost no one does it anymore because there is almost no benefit to it.

[nforcer]

Originally posted by Guy Incognito:
And then there's QuickTime Player...the big cheeze that started it all way back.

Actually, wasn't it Sherlock 1 or 2 that had the brushed metal virus first?

[clebin]

Originally posted by Guy Incognito:
Yes, it's that time again. The time you all have to hear Guy whine and moan and bitch.

I couldn't agree more. I was arguing the same in the main Safari thread. At first it was OK - iTunes and Quicktime work really well, I think. All video apps, like music apps, tend have really custom interfaces so you can forgive iMovie and iDVD for most things (I haven't used either enough to know about the specific points you mention). It's in the nature of what they do..

With iPhoto, iCal and iSync, it starts to get a bit much. I don't find iPhoto particularly intuitive, and there's all sorts of issues with how you select various things and use of Back-space to delete, rather than the traditional CMD-back space.

Safari's toolbar is about the worst because it has nothing new to offer and is far inferior to the standard toolbar. iSync's toolbar is different again - it's neither like Preferences, or the standard toolbar or Safari or any of the iApps, and it doesn't even look good (ok, that's subjective)

Mail and Safari don't even have standard Preferences windows. What's the story behind that? Even the Finder's Show Info is not Dock-aware.

Predictability and intuitiveness only happen if things have some measure of consistency, and sometimes you have make sacrifices to keep that consistency - for the greater good. I would've thought that that was something that 3rd parties might flaunt, but not Apple who are setting the guidelines. In fact, the only people unhappy with Cocoa's toolset seems to be Apple itself.

Chris

[Gul Banana]

Originally posted by Northform:
Writing code in assembly is a bad idea. There is no platform portability. Almost no one does it anymore because there is almost no benefit to it.

Rather than saying there is no benefit, say that the speed gain is unnecessary, given the enormous core frequencies of modern microprocessors. C is quite adequate for writing a media player these days. Heck, people have done it in Visual Basic. That's not to say that they SHOULD, but they have.

[Millennium]

Originally posted by Northform:
Writing code in assembly is a bad idea. There is no platform portability. Almost no one does it anymore because there is almost no benefit to it.

There's no platform portability, it is true. This is why most people who work in assembly language start by writing their code in plain C, compile that to assembly language instead of raw machine code, and then optimize that. This gives you a good "base" to start from, which should compile to assembly code across platforms (though the optimizations are platform-specific).

But to say there's "no benefit" to assembly language is absurd. Compilers have gotten much better in automatic optimization, in recent years. But there's still no substitute for a human programmer.

Originally posted by Gul Banana:
Rather than saying there is no benefit, say that the speed gain is unnecessary, given the enormous core frequencies of modern microprocessors. C is quite adequate for writing a media player these days. Heck, people have done it in Visual Basic. That's not to say that they SHOULD, but they have.

I wouldn't even go so far as to say that modern processors have obviated the need for assembly's speed benefits. I mean, if that were true, OSX would be -dare I say it- much snappier than it is now. Clearly there are still some speed benefits, so long as assembly language is applied judiciously.

Yes, some people have written media players in Visual Basic. However, those were only the interfaces. The core of the system (such as the codecs) were certainly not written in VB. There's where assembly language is particularly critical; interfaces don't need much processor speed anymore but the kind of number-crunching that goes on inside a codec certainly does.

[mattyd]

Originally posted by Guy Incognito:
Let's hope Apple finally settles on a look-n-feel and makes all brushed-metal apps look-n-feel the same.

and how about the fact the on apple's site, .mac uses the older style brushed metal like quicktime?