A quick review of Leopard, really, really quick.
In short, I’ve put the newest of Apple’s big cats through it’s paces and I’m loving 99.9 percent of it. What I don’t love is that in their quest to bring some visual consistency to the windows of the GUI, they actually introduced a new inconsistency, and its an ugly one. Here, an illustration:
For the love of all that is good in this world, can’t they see that they have a great looking button style in the finder and iTunes, and that they have a horrible, plasticy, cheap, pill-looking bunch of crap in Mail.app and Preview? These guys are supposed to be the paragons of great looking design, and they let that stinking pile of crap get through? Come on, its like the original brushed metal quicktime player all over again.
Someone, anyone, start a petition, stage a protest, bribe an Apple UI designer, do something, anything to make those god-awful capsule buttons go away. I’d rather look at one of those old flower-power iMacs all day than have to see those buttons every time I check my email or open a picture.
Oh, and they’re horrible in terms of usability too – you can’t tell which buttons are enabled unless you actually move your cursor over each one to see if it highlights or not, that’s just amateurish on so many levels its not funny.
