Secret Weapon Labs

It seems everyone and their spouse is chiming in on the GUI enhancements / f**kups put through in the most recent release of the Apple OS. I’ve been meaning to chime in on this but only until I’ve actually used the OS and understood the intuitive wrestling that goes on behind it.

Having said that, alot of what bloggers are ranting on and on about is for the most part true, but there is more to it than that. Fundamentally, when people are devoutly in love with their productively tools they resist change, sometimes even when it enhances their productivity. The changes to the desktop and in Leopard are rooted in the desire to make things better for the user, but the end result while pretty, is superficially executed in not the most well-thought manner. What we’ve been reading is true.

Time Machine is a great idea, but if one backs up regularly what is the rest of the point of the OS? Retrospect does a great job in managing my system and while I may not back up every hour, I do a pretty good job of keeping safe the files I need to keep safe. That’s not the case for 96% of other Mac users so this is a good thing.

But the new Leopard folders definitely need some fixing. They don’t match the color scheme of Leopard and are low contrast for recognizing stylized folders at low resolutions. The latter is especially pronounced as Apple squeezes more and more pixels into the displays of laptops and iMacs. So expect to find yourself squinting increasingly more and more. More reading on it here as well.

The Dock still remains a central part of OS X’s digital sex appeal, but it misses more key points and doesn’t refine the usability experience any further. ThinkMac has an interesting few ideas which you can read about here, but I think this leaves me wanting to take my own stab at it and put it up here for others to read.

But the fundamentals of what Apple is trying to do is not off base, but the execution lacks the foresight that previous efforts had. Steve Jobs posed that the goal of their successful interfaces was to be initially as useful to the 20 yr old who never steps away from the computer to a new user who has never touched a PC in their life. While the Dock looks sexy enough to accomplish that, it fails in executing the answer fully. On the other side of the coin, the Downloads folder fan is a clever idea, but is it that much different than having Safari download to a specified folder and having that folder dragged into the right hand side of the Dock? This is a workflow that Safari and Firefox have offered to users since version 1. Now Apple is endorsing the workflow and adding some jazz. It doesn’t warrant upgrading necessarily.

I don’t see myself being inherently more productive with Leopard. I can manage windows fine without Spaces, I do backups semi-regularly, I can manage downloads without a new downloads folder, and I don’t need the hassle of compatibility updates for the next couple of weeks. There are the juicy bits of initiating remote support through iChat, 64-bit processing, Unicode support in Apple, and a much stronger suite of development tools. If you want a great and really in-depth look into the nuts and bolts of the OS, look no further than Ars Technica’s review which you can read here.