One of the TOP SECRET features that Apple refused to disclose during Leopard’s first preview in August 2006 was the new User Interface of Mac OS X Leopard, which Apple has referred to in its marketing as the New Desktop. This includes a new translucent menubar (originally transparent, but grumbles from users got Apple to make it a little more substantive), a new reflective/3-D Dock with Stacks, and a new unified Aqua user interface which completely eliminates the pinstripe/white gradient design and the brushed metal windows. While some of these changes help to refine the Mac OS X interface as cleaner and more pulled together, many of these changes are superfluous and unnecessary, and in some cases, downright distracting.

I’m a big believer of what Merlin Mann preaches: the simpler your desktop is, the less chance you have of getting distracted. I don’t think you necessarily have to have ADD to be easily distracted by computers–computers are very distractible, and that’s one of the reasons that I don’t like Windows with all of its popup speech bubbles and all that. On that very note, the new translucent menu bar and the reflective Dock don’t sit very well with me.

The translucent menu bar looks okay when you have either a very dark background or a very light background underneath the menu bar, because in that case the menu bar actually looks reminiscent of Tiger’s menu bar (albeit less glassy goodness), which I actually got used to. Props to Apple’s marketing team for choosing a really nice default background that allows them to say “See? The menu bar is perfectly normal.” But just wait until you choose a desktop with colors, or horror of horrors, with changing things up in the menu bar area, and suddenly you find yourself looking at a very distracting menu bar. Suppose (as an example) that I still liked the old Aqua Blue background, and had that selected. Guess what? I’ve now got a menubar with a bright, light blue background glaring at me all the time. Pick that grass example that Apple used from June-October 2007, and you’ve got a bright green background. Until I upgraded to Leopard, I had a desktop of the Golden Gate Bridge on my desktop, but one big reason that prompted me to change it was because the middle of my menu bar was showing the top of the golden gate bridge all the time–that’s distracting. But what if it was something with changing colors up in the menu bar area, like many personal photos do–alternating light and dark colors would actually make it quite difficult to see the names of certain menu items. You see, my work environment on my computer is one where I like to have my applications take up every single pixel of the full screen view. My e-mail is full screen, my web browser is full screen, GarageBand (when I’m podcasting) is full screen, Pages and Microsoft Word are full screen, you get the idea. The translucent menu bar might look good when every window is closed and I’m looking at the desktop, but most of the time, the translucent menu bar just serves as a distraction, and I hate it. My advice to Apple: You know that System Preferences pane called “Appearance” which hasn’t seen any changes over the past few OS X releases? How about letting us CHOOSE the opacity of our menu bars, rather than you deciding for us? That would make me and many others MUCH happier.

I’m a little more indifferent over the new reflective Dock. It’s a nice bit of eye candy, but again, I really don’t think us Mac-heads were crying out for Apple to give us a new design for the Dock. The thing that I do think is kind of annoying is that the new Dock makes it hard to figure out where the Dock ends and where the window positioning can begin, and if you have the Dock set to always show itself, applications like Safari will try to position themselves above the icons, leaving a little bit of blank space between the “edge” of the Dock and the edge of the window. Personally, I have always kept the Dock set to have hiding on, and this new Dock has not caused me to change my mind, which makes the reflectivity rather pointless. I guess Leopard was not intended for full-screeners like me.

Stacks intrigued me when I first learned of it in June, but in practice, it seems quite a bit limited. I had already been a fan of putting folders in the Dock so that I could right-click on them, see the entire contents pop up in a menu, be able to navigate through submenus, etc. in Tiger. Having the new, more animated and snappier interface for browsing through folders in the Dock is nice, but the Grid interface can display only so many items before it tells you “view the rest of them in the Finder”. It would have been nice if Apple at the very least could have offered some way to scroll through the Grid view, particularly if they’re planning to have Downloads be an integral stack since my Downloads folder has been known to get quite hefty, and I don’t think that the 62-item maximum capacity of stacks (on my computer, at least) will be able to be enough for my Downloads folder in the near future. I’m also upset that Stacks has totally replaced the ability to get the full menus that I had before. The eye candy might not be as nice, but that system at least let me see the whole folder and go through subfolders as well. Maybe this means I’ll have to train myself to pipe more stuff through Quicksilver.

However, I will give a few props to the new unified interface. While I hadn’t particularly been a complainer over the variety in window interfaces in Tiger, I will agree that the new “tannish” unified window interface in Leopard looks pretty good, and gives a new veil of uniformity and professionality to the Mac OS X interface. Some applications with slightly customized interfaces, however, may need to catch up. For example, in Camino, the toolbar (where the address field and search field are) has the new interface, but the bookmarks bar and tabbed interface still has the pre-Leopard look. The combination is weird but tolerable, but a future Camino update will probably unify things.

While the new unified window interface in Leopard can be seen as an improvement, overall, the “New Leopard Desktop” contains primarily unnecessary superfluous changes which can in some cases be downright annoying. If a future Leopard update permitted customization of the interface through the Appearance system preference, however, that would greatly improve my attitude to the changes, but in the meantime, I’d have to say that whatever I spent $129 for, it wasn’t for any of the new visuals.

Feature Satisfaction Rating:

Be sure to check out the other articles in the Leopard Feature Presentation, occurring throughout the month of November here on Webmacster87.info.

Tags: Desktop, Dock, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, menu bar, review, user interface, window