[TheSpaz]

Got random complaints about Tiger? Post 'em here and we can have a discussion.

I guess I'll start this off. Why is there a glossy menubar, while everything else stays the same? Also, the new Apple logo sucks (That's the nastiest blue ever).

[Hi I'm Ben]

I like tiger. I like the blue and I think address book looks nice.

[MetalSnake]

Tiger sucks because it takes too long till it�s released, I want it NOW! Everything else seems to be very cool or wait...the price isn�t announced yet, is it?

[olorin15]

i think we need an "official: people who whine about tiger suck" thread ...

[Macanoid]

Could agree more. Personally I think Tiger is quit revolutionary already. Spotlight in itself will radically change the way we work. Can't wait for it.

[furryrabidbunny]

Originally posted by Hi I'm Ben:
I like tiger. I like the blue and I think address book looks nice.

where have you seen address book?

[Hi I'm Ben]

Originally posted by furryrabidbunny:
where have you seen address book?

i meant to say mail.app =).

[TheSpaz]

I was kinda talking about GUI because this is a GUI forum. Plus, I hate Mail.app's new buttons... ugh... nasty.

[Hi I'm Ben]

I think it looks better than 10.3. Not that it matters since I'll apply a theme to it anyway.

Maybe you'd like the look of XP better.

[BlueIce]

I still don't see what is so fugly about Mail or the blue used for the Apple or Searchlight menu item. That blue reminds me a lot of the Label-Os blue and I don't hear people complaining about that theme. I think Tiger is looking really good and the best improvements to the OS are under the hood anyway, in my opinion. The only thing Apple could do would be to make the OS GUI completely themeable, but since that is highly unlikely to happen as long as Jobs is in control, I'll settle for the fine product that OS X is.

[olorin15]

Originally posted by BlueIce:
I still don't see what is so fugly about Mail or the blue used for the Apple or Searchlight menu item. That blue reminds me a lot of the Label-Os blue and I don't hear people complaining about that theme. I think Tiger is looking really good and the best improvements to the OS are under the hood anyway, in my opinion. The only thing Apple could do would be to make the OS GUI completely themeable, but since that is highly unlikely to happen as long as Jobs is in control, I'll settle for the fine product that OS X is.

there's nothing wrong with apple's gui - there's something wrong with the people here. we have too many artists here, who have a very large ego, and want to make it known. apple has more techies than artists - hence the clash of values. me being a techie, i like where apple is going. but the artsies feel their artistic sense has suffered an insult every time apple goes against their expectations. that's it.

[sushiism]

but the mail app tool bar ugh its so amateur and linuxy

[Rafiki]

Whatever. Let's wait until it gets released before we bash, eh? The released builds are just developer builds, not even betas. A lot can change in the final version.

[olorin15]

Originally posted by sushiism:
but the mail app tool bar ugh its so amateur and linuxy

exactly the attitude i was talking about ... face it - apple is a company of geeks, not artsies, and geeks happen to like "linuxy" look.

[Bi@tch]

Originally posted by olorin15:
exactly the attitude i was talking about ... face it - apple is a company of geeks, not artsies, and geeks happen to like "linuxy" look.

Is your Mac beige?

[crooner]

Let�s cut to the chase and ask the important question...

Jason,
do you have a developer�s copy of Tiger to work with so you will have SS 3.0 ready to go within a reasonable time period after Tiger's release?
Don't get me wrong here... I�m not asking this in a whiny, beeotch manner.

Quite the contrary. Just curious to know if you have the tools you need to allow us to get to theming with Tiger. My hunch is that you're already hard at work.


Any info is appreciated.

[revmitcz]

Jesus. there's some angry bitches in here. I say bitches cause whenever someone dares to say something against a minor GUI decision Apple has made, I've seen "perhaps you'd prefer XP!" or "is your Mac beige?!" Calm the hell down, weirdos.

That having been said - I support anything that moves Apple away from the "drawer" idea. Wasted screen real estate with an animated drawer metaphor that isn't part of the windw because it extends and hides, meanwhile isn't a separately floating window because it's taking up part of your horizontal space when extended? Bad idea. So, as long as Mail doesn't use that drawer ever again, I might actually consider using the damned thing. Buttons? Eh.. whatever. I'm sure someone'll theme 'em anyway, regardless. It's hard-coded GUI behaviors like the "drawer" that I see a serious problem with.

[smoke-tetsu]

Even if it's true that apple has more engineers\geeks than artists they still tend to come out with better looking stuff than things that truly are only designed by an engineer. If you think Tiger looks like only an engineer designed the interface I don't think you have seen a interface only designed by an engineer. I know some that don't place the look of their software as a priority where with apple it seems to be as high a priority as the functionality. I hardly think that it was designed the same way as a garden variety linux distribution. And believe it or not, that's a good thing.

[solitere]

Originally posted by olorin15:
i think we need an "official: people who whine about tiger suck" thread ...

amen...

[smeger]

Well, I'm gonna go ahead and jump onto the "Tiger sucks" bandwagon here. Don't get me wrong - there's some seriously cool stuff in Tiger. CoreImage looks absolutely wonderful - Apple has managed to blend theoretical computer science concepts with real-world requirements in such a way as to create something that's really compelling to both end-users and programmers, and will provide plenty of scalability for the future. I'm not-kidding-around excited about CoreImage. CoreData rox the casbah, hard. Spotlight isn't cool to me because I've been predicting it since OS X 10.0, so I'm already used to it, but they did it well, and they did it right. Dashboard is quite groovy, but I don't care much about it. But the tech behind it seems solid, and it should create a lot of interesting new stuff.

But, Apple, god damn it!!! Why do you bother to create interface specifications if you don't follow them in your own apps!!?? NSToolbarItem provides buttons and popup menus for any application to use. What's so special about Mail.app that you need to break your own damned spec!?

Annoyed...

[demograph68]

Originally posted by smeger:
But, Apple, god damn it!!! Why do you bother to create interface specifications if you don't follow them in your own apps!!?? NSToolbarItem provides buttons and popup menus for any application to use. What's so special about Mail.app that you need to break your own damned spec!?

Annoyed...

So am I. Be cool my brotha!

[nooon]

I think the new GUI looks messy. Milk mixed with Aqua mixed with Plastic. Whatever happened to consistency? (and yeah, the new Mail.app toolbar looks ugly as hell)

[Fonzie]

I don't think it has do with Apple having more techies than artists. I reckon it's because the artists have lost their touch. If I were them I would have gotten rid of the brushed metal on day one for instance.

I agree that the Mail.app looks awful with it's toolbar buttons. I suspect someone from Apple is looking over this right now and being very aware of the problem at hand.

[badidea]

Would you guys please provide pictures of what you are talking about?
I don't have a copy of Tiger running (it hasn't been released yet)!!

[dajk]

Originally posted by badidea:
Would you guys please provide pictures of what you are talking about?
I don't have a copy of Tiger running (it hasn't been released yet)!!

www.apple.com/macosx/

[Ji Eun]

1024x768

[Bi@tch]

Originally posted by revmitcz:
Jesus. there's some angry bitches in here. I say bitches cause whenever someone dares to say something against a minor GUI decision Apple has made, I've seen "perhaps you'd prefer XP!" or "is your Mac beige?!" Calm the hell down, weirdos.

What I meant was that Apple is one company that's obviously not run exclusivly by geeks. After all, good case design is what brought Apple back into the media's attention and the iPod is popular because it has a good interface that I'm sure wasn't interirely created by geeks. Consistency and good design is why people use Macs, period.

Now, why is the new mail interface bad?

First of all it's not consistent with anything currently implemented in the system. I think that they might implement it everywhere however. I will explain why below.

Seconds, did you see all that wasted space around the buttons. Did you notice how the left part of the toolbar is left blank? I understand it was made that way so the buttons can be aligned with the content section, but common, couldn't they find a better solution? And because of this, the icons are now way too small.

Finally, what about that blue behind the mailboy section? What is that? I thought blue backgrounds was reserved for selected objets. Also, if the background is blue and the buttons are grey, what theme is selected? Graphite or blue?

I think I can however understand why they decided to use buttons. Now that the toolbar is connected to the title bar, there is no way the user can know where exactly to click to drag the window.

[underwood]

mail.app looks like shiet. stupid buttons for the toolbar, redundant if you ask me.

that apple icon looks like it's from 10.1 or something. where's the pinstripe? are they stripping it out completely?

smoothstripe+plastic+milk+metal+aqua, ughhhh.

[siMac]

Originally posted by olorin15:
there's nothing wrong with apple's gui - there's something wrong with the people here. we have too many artists here, who have a very large ego, and want to make it known. apple has more techies than artists - hence the clash of values. me being a techie, i like where apple is going. but the artsies feel their artistic sense has suffered an insult every time apple goes against their expectations. that's it.

So now we're not allowed to discuss user interfaces in the GUI forum? Perhaps if you want to avoid 'artsies' talking about their OS's appearance you should avoid this forum.

Here.

[badidea]

Originally posted by dajk:
www.apple.com/macosx/

Originally posted by Ji Eun:
1024x768

Thanks!

Mail looks awful!!

[TheSpaz]

I like consistency and I like most of Apples choices reguarding Mac OS X and such, but I just don't understand some of the things they do with the GUI. I mean look...

-Brushed Metal
-Aqua
-Plastic
-Pro-Apps
-Stripes
-No Stripes (title bars)
-And Scroll Bars and Progress bars that are 5 years old!
-Not to mention the Panther Labels look like a Photoshop newbie made them.
-The new Tiger Apple Logo doesn't have any style left to it.
-Some things are raised, some things are sunken
-Enormous stupid drop shadows on all the windows. (At least they could lessen them a little)
-Some things are transparent (menus) in Panther and some things are opaque (title bars)
-Not to mention when you make a window semi-transparent in Panther it looks nasty cause you can see the stupid shadow behind it. UNLIKE JAGUAR.
-Column view lost the BOTTOM SCROLL WELL! I used to love it cause I could line up my icons and they wouldn't get cut off when the scroll bar appeared.
-The Finder is Metal (which sucks cause metal is getting big and boring)
-The App switcher is HUGE! Why can't we reduce this or customize it?

Anything else? Oh yes... how could I forget...

-Alias icons are blurry when they have that stupid arrow attached to them. (Unless of course you are using 128 bit size.
-Fonts are way too big
-The Dock could use some new features... hasn't been much improved since 10.0.

Sometimes I think Apple is TOOO SIMPLE. They don't give you much of a choice about things. Like... I use Mail.app at work (using Jaguar) and there's no option anywhere that lets you send Windows Friendly Attachments... they finally got it right in Panther... but, why keep it out so that people HAVE to update. Why not just write the App and if they add something... download an update... geeze... do I gotta upgrade to Panther because now iChat can do profiles? Was it that hard to program that it took them 3 years to figure it out? I'm going off on a tangent now... sorry...

But, I am a little annoyed by Apple's GUI decisions. And I'm also annoyed how slow this webpage is acting cause of the stupid Instant Smilies animating. It's really hard to type like this.

Jason is 100% right about everything he said.

[sushiism]

Originally posted by olorin15:
there's nothing wrong with apple's gui - there's something wrong with the people here. we have too many artists here, who have a very large ego, and want to make it known. apple has more techies than artists - hence the clash of values. me being a techie, i like where apple is going. but the artsies feel their artistic sense has suffered an insult every time apple goes against their expectations. that's it.

Well that was a very naive and subjective post if I ever saw one.

[furryrabidbunny]

I think that the new apple in the menu bar is a step back... it looks just like it did when steve showed off mac os x for the first time... when it sat in the middle. I also don't understand what they did to the spotlight search bar... instead of being aqua, they used this strange soft blue aqua... sorta like what microsoft's word icon looks like.

[ender2002]

there is still pleanty of room for change. i mean, months worth of changes...

everyone should just take a chill pill

[Anubis IV]

I'm not an artist, and I doubt I'll ever make any attempt to claim to be one, but I do have to agree with a couple of the opinions here regarding the GUI. The new gummy buttons in Mail look like a major step backwards to me. For some reason it just screams 10.1 to me. Dunno why exactly. That shade of blue that they're using for Spotlight reminds me of XP for some reason. Really though, those are my biggest GUI gripes.

The only other thing I don't like is the inconsistency so many people have mentioned, but in all honesty, if no one had mentioned it here, I probably would've happily gone along in bliss without ever realizing that the GUI was becoming confused. I'm willing to bet that a lot of other people are in that boat with me as well. Most people will never really realize that the GUI is becoming confused. It'd never occur to them. It's like when I hang a picture in my house, and I do my best job to make it straight, and gosh darn it, I think I have it perfectly straight. And people will walk by that picture for days or weeks without touching it since it looks straight to them as well. Finally though, someone who actually knows what they're talking about will come along and correct it since I didn't have it straight. Well, I think that the people that would be able to identify the problems with the GUI are in the minority in a major way.

The majority of people are more than happy with the Mac OS GUI, and I bet that most people would not know that there was a "problem" with the GUI. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that far less than half of the people complaining are actually "qualified" to complain (if there is such a thing) since they probably were just like me and didn't notice the problem until someone else mentioned it. There are plenty of talented people here, and I don't doubt their skill, but I think that there are far more that want to seem talented.

Anyway, like I said, I'm not an artist. I really think the Mac OS GUI is fine. Honestly, I probably won't even theme it. If I could change some things, would I? Heck yeah, but that's only because I'm aware of the fact that they are "wrong" since people mentioned it here. If I hadn't heard it here, I doubt I would've changed anything on my own. Heh.

[olorin15]

why don't you guys just get a petition going so that each one of you can simply sign it, instead of wasting time submitting identical posts? you don't like the new buttons. we get it. enough already.

[siMac]

Originally posted by olorin15:
why don't you guys just get a petition going so that each one of you can simply sign it, instead of wasting time submitting identical posts? you don't like the new buttons. we get it. enough already.

Why don't you just stop reading this thread, instead of wasting time posting about how you disagree with everyone here? You don't like people badmouthing Apple's GUI, we get it, enough already.

[olorin15]

Originally posted by siMac:
Why don't you just stop reading this thread, instead of wasting time posting about how you disagree with everyone here? You don't like people badmouthing Apple's GUI, we get it, enough already.

who said i keep reading it maybe i just like posting here. and i'm not the only one who disagrees btw ...

[kwyjiboy]

Originally posted by smeger:
But, Apple, god damn it!!! Why do you bother to create interface specifications if you don't follow them in your own apps!!?? NSToolbarItem provides buttons and popup menus for any application to use. What's so special about Mail.app that you need to break your own damned spec!?

Annoyed...

A-****ing-men. Inconsistency is really making me sick.

[Randman]

There's still time to fix the gui aspects.

Still, if that's one of the biggest gripes that people have, that does say something about the OS itself.

[BlueIce]

Originally posted by Randman:
There's still time to fix the gui aspects.

Still, if that's one of the biggest gripes that people have, that does say something about the OS itself.

Good point, Randman. While Windows users are constantly stuck talking about the latest virus or security patch, OS X users are griping about how the next major version of their operating system looks. That does say a lot about the OS.

Edit: By the way, the next major version of Windows won't even be out for another couple of years. All in all, I'd say we OS X users have it pretty good.

[Fonzie]

Okay then, why don't we all just stop discussing all together !? There's no point in discussing it seems. People disagree of the posters that disagree. Really cool stuff. Turn off your computers everybody. Throw 'em out even. I'm not gonna however

I still disagree of the decision made to Mail.app.

[ARENA]

The new menubar apple looks awful, it reminds me of 10.0 apple but flatter. I preferred the glossy endcap style from the previos Tiger builds.

[King Bob On The Cob]

Originally posted by Ji Eun:
1024x768

I wonder if that's the release date for Tiger right now... (Look at the postmark, June 23rd)

[mrtew]

Originally posted by Anubis IV:
The majority of people are more than happy with the Mac OS GUI, and I bet that most people would not know that there was a "problem" with the GUI. ...

I don't know about that. Just because people can't change it or don't know how doesn't mean that they like it. I've heard quite a few windows people say that they heard Apple computers are good but they just look to 'kiddy' and 'gilrly' for them and they like the professional look of Windows. That's just sad and SO the opposite of the way things used to be when Apple's used platinum. Why can't there just be a choice of about 3-5 nice appearances built into the system. Aqua was not a bad theme but it's totally screwed up now and it not so great that it has to be the ONLY one in the operating system.

[Catfish_Man]

Originally posted by Anubis IV:


The majority of people are more than happy with the Mac OS GUI, and I bet that most people would not know that there was a "problem" with the GUI.

UI design is not something people should notice. They shouldn't have to notice all the little subtleties that go into making something useable. They should just go "oh, this is quite nice. Looks good too". OSX is pretty damn good, and if it gets a bit worse people won't complain, or even notice much. That doesn't mean, however, that it won't affect them at all. It's like CRT refresh rates; most users never know anything is wrong, but when you bump it up from 60Hz to 85Hz they suddenly say "wow, this is a lot nicer to use now. I never noticed that it hurt my eyes before..."

[FB Eye]

I'd be willing to put up with Mail's goofiness if Apple got rid of that darn brushed metal!!! The Finder looks so quirky with that mix of aqua buttons and brushed metal...

Please Apple, just brush away that metal... please...

[Devin Lane]

I'm really hoping that this is just all beta stuff and will disappear in the release. I consider myself a GUI elitist, and there is nothing I hate more than inconsistency. Apple lately has this nice flatish look that I really like -- UI elements are bezeled, but not incredibly high, and not with an overwhelming amount of gradients.

This new stuff, however, looks like something I would see in windows. Random background color here, new colored bezel here, huge gradient here, etc. I believe the only reason to modify the GUI is to either add a useful feature (useful systemwide, not just for a specific app), or to fix something that was inconsistent before.

Now don't get me wrong, there are some times when breaking the guidelines does look pretty nice. But in these cases, such as, say Address Book in 10.3 (all the +- buttons, and strange text fields), are they really breaking the guidelines? Although such elements are not spec'd in the HIG, they seem to fit in with the general GUI appearance, and don't look jarring or out of place.

These new elements in Mail, however, do look jarring and out of place. It took a few seconds to convince me this was a legit screenshot -- surely this was just a theme or some experiment! Never would I have expected such uglyness from Apple.

If you think I'm whining, think again -- I think Apple has done an excellent job with the GUI so far. When I mention OS X to my PC using friends, they usually comment on how nice and professional the OS X GUI looks. I would hate to see this change.

[cSurfr]

Originally posted by King Bob On The Cob:
I wonder if that's the release date for Tiger right now... (Look at the postmark, June 23rd)

Good eyes. Didn't even notice that. Though I do have one question. What the hell happened to the apple in the menu bar? It looks like ass.

[skimpson]

i agree that mail.app sucks...so far...but Tiger is not officially out yet, so there is still hope that some of the complaints mentioned will be resolved...lets not completely write off Tiger as crap just yet