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Without this interview with John Gruber at GUIdebook. Case in point:
I wouldn’t be surprised if the horizontal stripes in Aqua are gone for good. (But that might just be wishful thinking on my part.) In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole translucent red/green/yellow thing goes away. As I stated earlier, that look to me seems tied to the old candy-colored iMac hardware. Apple has long since abandoned that gestalt with their hardware, and I think they’ll eventually do it with their software too.
You can see that the designers at Apple are getting tired of the candy-colored look and feel. A lot of their new stuff, the custom controls, doesn’t look like that at all....
I can’t say I’m following Longhorn (or “Vista” as its marketing name seems to be) all that closely. I look at screenshots when new betas are released or leaked.
....the “themes” in Windows have never struck me as being very similar to the Mac.... But it does seem, however, like Microsoft is now aping quite a bit of the Aqua look-and-feel. Just in terms of what the windows and buttons look like.
So I think it’d be interesting to see Apple zig away from this look just when Microsoft starts to zag toward it. The idea being that Apple might introduce an updated look that makes Vista look dated by the time it ships.
The guy is dared to predict interface changes and he responds with horizontal stripes?! Horizontal stripes for a horizontal interview, I say. An interface dreams big! It transports you from the teeny tiny bits of ones and zeroes into launching a rocket with one click! (Okay, fine, for a rocket I think I'd add at least a single password-protected impasse.) Digital display technology of today is far beyond digital innovation! Allons-y! There's lots of work ahead! Neat-o things you sholud be able to do online, and currently can't! Here, watch as I make giant frantic gestures! with my arms spread wingspan-wide! You should probably also duck, as I might have accidentally smacked you in the face with my vigor...
The rest of the piece, too, reads like a bug list without an ounce of innovation: inconsistent "poof" animation when items are deleted, being able to access the Apple menu from several pixels further left than before. The sweet sweet irony is that when asked about the 5 things he would do about the Mac interface if he were Steve Jobs, number three on the list is itself a list: "I’d compile a list of all the areas where default Cocoa behavior and appearance differs from the HIG, and in each case, change either the implementation in Cocoa or the guideline in the HI."
I think what hits closest to home here is that Gruber is a respected source of Mac news being heralded as a UI expert, and I have enough trouble already explaining the connection between my major and my career and the furtherment of world peace. In French there's a super-useful word, truc, that's more or less the equivalent of "doohickey" in English but ten times as common and a hundred times more acceptable to use in everyday speech. After describing my specialty as "l'interaction humain-ordinateur" to many a blank stare — not that it's better in the States anywhere outside of about three departments at Stanford — I've resorted to "Je crée tout ce qu'on voie quand on utilise aucune chose avec un écran digital... des trucs d'internet..." What I don't like about my description is that I'm trivializing it in a way by calling it a "truc" — but in light of this interview it seems to me that what Gruber does is more reverberatingly worse.
Comments
more food! less computers!
just kidding. but i don't get the e-speak.
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