Question

What do you think of the Mac OS X interface?
They have gotten rid of many of the redundant black lines surrounding windows, and replaced them with drop shadows and transparencies. What are your thoughts on this interface design?

Matt Gilbert

-- Matt Gilbert, July 20, 2002

Answer

E.T. on the OS X interface
.

Some say there will be big gains from being in Unix. I hope so since Apple is placing a big bet on OS X. But how about the Unix-gain without this new styled interface?

Like the dreaded Sherlock 2, the OS X interface design is distracting and self-conscious, with a marketing slickness rather the straight-forward transparent charming style of the past. It is out of tune with the superb industrial design of Apple hardware.

Mac users will probably get used to it.

For my own current work (Photoshop, Illustrator, Quark with large files on large monitors), I see no particular reason to prefer the new design to 9.04. Indeed I regard 9.04 as nearly ideal (large flat-screen monitors are key; the Apple Cinema monitor is an enormous advance in design and as a working tool). Maybe when we do digital video that will make a difference in favor of OS X.

The roman numeral continues the industry tradition of strangely annoying typography.

Years ago I very much liked the NeXT interface (a big influence on OS X), except for the dock-array of inflated icons. Alas that contraption has persisted on OS X. Bruce Tognazzini, whose judgment I greatly respect, has a devastating critique and a suggested repair of the dock at http://www.asktog.com/columns/044top10docksucks.html

The original graphical user interfaces (Xerox PARC and Metaphor, 20 years ago) remain superbly designed. Recently some version of Windows looked pretty good, nice and clean, on the laptop screen of an adjacent airline passenger, but I have not done a side-by-side Windows/Mac comparison.

And what about the long-awaited Yangfan 1.0? This Chinese government knock-off of Windows 98 with Linux is described at http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992573 If you like really large bureaucracies designing OS interfaces, then you'll love Yangfan 1.0. Perhaps they won't turn the OS interface into a marketing experience in the manner of the U. S. computer industry.

Operating system interfaces are what you bump into when you are trying to do your work. There is no need for workaday users to see an operating system interface at all; the current OS interface is bureaucratic bloat, an unnecessary impediment and tollgate. Users are interested in direct links to documents, not in operating systems and aps. Opening screens should show documents, not an OS. The metaphor for the interface should be the information, not an OS, not an ap, not a marketing experience.

To paraphrase Alan Cooper, no matter how beautiful your OS interface is, no matter how cool your OS interface is, it would be better if there were less of it.

-- Edward Tufte, July 20, 2002