Congrats! I haven’t heard of Jaiku before, though…
Browsing articles from "October, 2007"
Leopard
I must again give it to the Apple designers, they’ve done a fantastic job in creating Leopard’s GUI. Where visuals between Windows versions are plagued with the throw it away and redesign from scratch syndrome (aka not inveneted here syndrome, if the lead UI designer changed between versions), Apple designers seem to follow the mantra of changing things just enough to make the visuals appear fresh and modern.
The devil is truly in the details. Leopards visual changes are so small, but yet make a huge difference. The OS just feels much more modern compared to Tiger, and all it took was some settle changes here and there instead of throwing out all the visuals out and designing from scratch. As a user I hugely appreciate this kind of design. I feel comfortable and familiar from the first second, yet still there is a welcome freshness to the UI.
There are however a few things which I would have liked to see implemented. I don’t know why Apple has made the decision to implement a slight delay when highlighting menu items. It’s been there since 10.0, but in my mind it downgrades precision when navigating a large menu. When quickly moving the mouse over, say, 20 menu items, only a few items are highlighted along the way. This makes my Mac feel slow. The other thing is that UI controls still lack any rollover indication. I don’t want the Windows christmas tree treatment, but a small, settle highlight when rolling over controls would again add some precision to daily UI tasks.
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Congrats Jaiku!
Jaiku, a social mobile service with emphasis on rich presence who has shared the same office space with us has been acquired by Google. Congratulation guys! I’m still mad that they recruited one of the best web developers I’ve known from us, but hey, seems he made the right decision.
And since I’ve created some Flash apps for them I can finally say that I’ve done some work for Google. Sort of at least;)
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Hydra – does the future look fast?
By now you’ve probably heard and seen the news from MAX. Custom filters, fills and blend modes using the Adobe Imaging Framework and coded with Hydra. Nice. But… Why not go further? AIF certainly makes use of the GPU to very quickly manipulate bitmap graphics by passing in one or two images to the graphics card and a compiled hydra-script which instructs the GPU to basically create a pixel shader and apply that to a textured rectangle.
Now it seems that the good stuff ends there. While fast image manipulation (and we’re talking realtime fullscreen image manipulation as opposed to Flash 8′s slow software filters) certainly is cool, why not go all the way? I wold guess that only the image manipulation is done on the GPU and that the Flash Player then retrieves the rendered texture from the GPU to pass it back to the Flash Players software rendering pipeline. I would have really loved to see all (or most) rendering taking place on the GPU.
Tinic, how about one of your great technical posts on this subject?
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From a visual design standpoint, I’m not sure about the whole “making the background windows lighter” decision. Brightness attracts the eye, and as such making the active window darker while surrounding it with brighter background windows doesn’t really work for me.
If they really want to show off their graphics capabilities, I’d almost consider doing an alpha fade on the background windows, or perhaps blending a light gray color over them such that they dim slightly into the background.
I think the word you’re looking for is subtle not settle.
I think the word you’re looking for is subtle not settle.
Yeah, subtle, not settle.
I’d be very careful with the highlighting when hovering. One of the reasons I feel so lost when using many Windows programs is that I can’t seem to put my mouse anywhere withoug invoking some sort of tooltips etc clutter.
My main gripes about the Leopard basic interface is that some of the dialogs are still unoperable with the keyboard, the selections scheme with keyboard is still flawed, selection is not considered an action and can’t be undone, windows can still be only resized from one corner and there is no centralized place for status reports (like eg. in the new Mail) in Finder.
Why selecting items with the keyboard is problematic:
http://daringfireball.net/2006/08/highly_selective