Gallery of Leopard 9A499 Images

[TheSpaz]

I think everything about Leopard's UI looks really rough and sketchy. The scroll bars are ugly as hell... the shadows are nasty... the Finder window buttons (iTunes Style) look awkward and the icons aren't even centered in them (look at the back and forward arrows). The new icons aren't that great and the 3D Dock looks really really bad... the perspective is all wrong and the new divider just throws that off even more. The reflections are stupid as well. The new menu bar is just plain lame. When you click on it, it still highlights blue. I think Leopard is the worst for GUI that I've seen in a Mac OS X release to date... even worse than I thought Panther was. I think my favorite OS X GUI was Jaguar (at the time) I'm quite happy with Tiger's GUI and I've gotten used to everything but, Leopard looks like a huge jump into ugly-ville. Also, with everything being vector now, I bet Leopard will be impossible to theme. Yay... *sigh*. I guess no more Max Rudberg to the rescue.

PLEASE tell me you can make the top bar SOLID WHITE and i can remove the see through look.

You cannot change this with any preference as of yet.

 

[brianus]

I think everything about Leopard's UI looks really rough and sketchy. The scroll bars are ugly as hell... the shadows are nasty... the Finder window buttons (iTunes Style) look awkward and the icons aren't even centered in them (look at the back and forward arrows). The new icons aren't that great and the 3D Dock looks really really bad... the perspective is all wrong and the new divider just throws that off even more. The reflections are stupid as well. The new menu bar is just plain lame. When you click on it, it still highlights blue. I think Leopard is the worst for GUI that I've seen in a Mac OS X release to date... even worse than I thought Panther was. I think my favorite OS X GUI was Jaguar (at the time) I'm quite happy with Tiger's GUI and I've gotten used to everything but, Leopard looks like a huge jump into ugly-ville. Also, with everything being vector now, I bet Leopard will be impossible to theme. Yay... *sigh*. I guess no more Max Rudberg to the rescue.

Have to agree with you there. It's like they transitioned all of their talented UI people to iPhone work and let the fanboys design Leopard -- and I mean, c'mon, "unified UI"? That's the most counterproductive fanboy wish ever. You can hardly tell an iTunes window from the Finder now! Exposé just got a whole lot less useful.

Confused about your scrollbar comment though -- they look identical to the Tiger ones, from what I can see.

 

[TheSpaz]

Its just as many steps to send an email as it is to send and IM on my computer?
Right click mail ->new message, type in the recipient, compose the message, send VS
click on ichat/adium, select the recipient (from a long list), compose the message, send

And as soon as someone is back at their computer its there in their inbox

I don't think so. I hate writing emails.... also, I don't know everyone's email that's on my buddy list... also, how often are people checking their email? I only check my email if I'm expecting something or if I accidentally mis-click and click on Mail.app. People are on AIM way more than they are checking email. They sign onto iChat and BOOM a new message from me because I happened to have a question while they were offline... I don't see how I would need to send an email about it and hope they thought about checking their email... I just know if someone sent me an email, I wouldn't see it for at least a few days and by then it may be too late.

I think the current folder icons are temporary and look like they do just so you know what they hold. They will either keep the same color/design and get colored icons or Apple will come up with a new design and when the folder is double-clicked, will open and "spill" its contents into the window covering what is already there. Think genie-effect but from a bird's-eye view.

Umm..... No. The icons are staying (they put way too much work and detail into them to make them simple placeholders)... and as for the "spill" theory.... umm... no... definitely no.

 

[brianus]

The problem with the iTunes-inspspired sidebar is that it appears to be hard-coded, what you see is what you get. I don't see (at least in the screenshots) where you can add your own stuff - if you can at all. And it reamins to be seen if you can drag Apple's hard-coded catagories into any order you see fit, or delete the ones you don't need.

If the sidebar isn't as user configurable as it is in Tiger, that's an absolute deal breaker for me.

Yeah, that'd really suck. I'm guessing you can still drag folders in, at least to the "PLACES" section. Not sure how you'd create smart folders; it's probably a menu option but there should be a Smart Folder button in the status bar below the sidebar too, like in iTunes.

I'll also definitely miss the variable-size (and, by default, large) icons from Aqua. Bigger drop targets make sense when they're frequently used and there are only a few of them, which is the whole idea of the sidebar. For the life of me I cannot understand this drive towards less UI flexibility. Squared off windows, tiny, unresizable icons, drab, metal-inspired UIs.. why are we going backwards?

Umm..... No. The icons are staying (they put way too much work and detail into them to make them simple placeholders)... and as for the "spill" theory.... umm... no... definitely no.

Does beg the question though -- what do the new folder icons look like in the 'open' position?

 

[Peel]

I don't think so. I hate writing emails.... also, I don't know everyone's email that's on my buddy list... also, how often are people checking their email? I only check my email if I'm expecting something or if I accidentally mis-click and click on Mail.app. People are on AIM way more than they are checking email. They sign onto iChat and BOOM a new message from me because I happened to have a question while they were offline... I don't see how I would need to send an email about it and hope they thought about checking their email... I just know if someone sent me an email, I wouldn't see it for at least a few days and by then it may be too late.

Looks like we all have diffee\rent workflows for communicating. I keep mail open constantly, and an IM app only about half the time. You send me an email and (if I'm at my computer) I'll read it and reply within a minute. I will with IM as well, if it's running. I guess it would be nice for both mail and iChat users to be able to more easily communicate. Give us offline IMs, and let us know when reading or composing an email if the sender/recipient is currently online.

 

[MrCrowbar]

Looks like we all have diffee\rent workflows for communicating. I keep mail open constantly, and an IM app only about half the time. You send me an email and (if I'm at my computer) I'll read it and reply within a minute. I will with IM as well, if it's running. I guess it would be nice for both mail and iChat users to be able to more easily communicate. Give us offline IMs, and let us know when reading or composing an email if the sender/recipient is currently online.

Yea, I do it all in Mail too. In combination with GrowlMail (google Growl, it comes with the Mail Plugin), it's really awesome. And there's a nice preference in Mail to check Mails once a minute:

 

[mongoos150]

I think everything about Leopard's UI looks really rough and sketchy. The scroll bars are ugly as hell... the shadows are nasty... the Finder window buttons (iTunes Style) look awkward and the icons aren't even centered in them (look at the back and forward arrows). The new icons aren't that great and the 3D Dock looks really really bad... the perspective is all wrong and the new divider just throws that off even more. The reflections are stupid as well. The new menu bar is just plain lame. When you click on it, it still highlights blue. I think Leopard is the worst for GUI that I've seen in a Mac OS X release to date... even worse than I thought Panther was. I think my favorite OS X GUI was Jaguar (at the time) I'm quite happy with Tiger's GUI and I've gotten used to everything but, Leopard looks like a huge jump into ugly-ville. Also, with everything being vector now, I bet Leopard will be impossible to theme. Yay... *sigh*. I guess no more Max Rudberg to the rescue.

Completely disagree.

 

[benspratling]

Some GUI good, some bad

I think it's interesting how two new features in Leopard things are constantly maligned, the transparent menu bar, which looks like the way a drunk guy would see the world (it's too bright, it's blurry, and there are these wierd floating splotches in my way...), and the new folder icons. I do like the blur effect - that's cool, and it helps the user not get confused by transparency, but the drift towards metal-looking things I don't like. (yeay for no more metal Finder!) You can't do metal effectively on a computer screen because metal gets its look from the different images that go to each eye based on the different reflections. Your brain realizes the images do not match up, realizes they are not at the location that the shape dictates, and realizes it's either reflecting or transparent.

If you have only one image to send to each eye, like on a computer screen, then you completely loose the effect and it comes off looking like plastic or just painted foam. I much prefer the candy/water-looking stuff (ahem, "Aqua").

I do like, however, the tendancy for Apple to realize the coolness of what they do in iTunes can propagate to everything else, too. I think Cover Flow is the eye candy of Mac OS X 10.4-10.5 like the genie efect was of 10.0-10.3.

Speaking of bad user interfaces, who thinks Adobe will ever learn to make a good UI? The Apple color picker and color/contrast display in iPhoto alone blow Adobe's crappy designers out of the water. And talk about Windows having too many dialog boxes, sheesh! I think Adobe has got more dialog boxes in Illustrator than all of Windows! And why are settings for effects in Photoshop modal, huh? I mean, really!

Ok enough about that. I just hope Apple doesn't take design ques from the Adobe guys.

 

[MarkMS]

http://www.carbonnine.com/leopard

^^ mirror ^^

Took long enough to download them all, may aswell hopefully speed it up for the rest of you
and take a load off the WOA servers

Thanks for the mirror link.

 

[Alloye]

Another round of screenshots, another round of opinions. Mine is that Leopard looks fantastic with the exception of the transparent menu bar. I especially like the unified window borders, the complete removal of pin-stripes and brushed metal, and the iTunes-style UI in the Finder.

As for the Aqua scrollbars, they are OK, but I'd much rather see the iTunes-style ones adopted throughout the OS.

 

[zioxide]

I think everything about Leopard's UI looks really rough and sketchy. The scroll bars are ugly as hell... the shadows are nasty... the Finder window buttons (iTunes Style) look awkward and the icons aren't even centered in them (look at the back and forward arrows). The new icons aren't that great and the 3D Dock looks really really bad... the perspective is all wrong and the new divider just throws that off even more. The reflections are stupid as well. The new menu bar is just plain lame. When you click on it, it still highlights blue. I think Leopard is the worst for GUI that I've seen in a Mac OS X release to date... even worse than I thought Panther was. I think my favorite OS X GUI was Jaguar (at the time) I'm quite happy with Tiger's GUI and I've gotten used to everything but, Leopard looks like a huge jump into ugly-ville. Also, with everything being vector now, I bet Leopard will be impossible to theme. Yay... *sigh*. I guess no more Max Rudberg to the rescue.

QFT.

 

[iTone]

You can.

But it won't be solid white it will be the grey gradient it is in Tiger.

thank god. i am just not feeling that see through look.

 

[TheSpaz]

QFT.

Nevermind... just looked it up. I didn't realize it was a nice comment.

DONE.

NEXT!

 

[Braz0s]

Lepard Upgrade question

WorldofApple has posted an extensive gallery of screenshots from Apple's latest Leopard (9A499) build that was seeded to developers in late July.

They detail visual enhancements that have been detailed before but along with an extensive gallery of images of Apple's upcoming operating system.

Apple has announced that Leopard will be released in October of 2007.

Article Link

In the past Apple has offered a free upgrade to the new OS if a machine was pruchased within a certain window (30? 60? 90 days?). Does anyone think that's going to be done this time?

 

[obesecat55]

It's in there. What were you expecting to see?

I was expecting to see the Zoom feature in Universal Access to be not pixellated. I haven't seen anything about that though.

 

[Evangelion]

They really are making everything like iTunes, CoverFlow was just one of my examples (as you said). So, my friend, it really isn't as simple as "don't use CoverFlow" (unfortunately).

Um, yes it is. you are not forced to use it. Sure, you still have the iTunes-esque sidebar, but I see no problems with it. Do you see a problem with it? what kind? The fact that it's somewhat similar to iTunes? And that's bad why? It's actually a good thing for things to be similar, that way you only have to learn one scheme.

Hell, I can also see CoverFlow as an useful feature: combined with Quicklook it can really change the way you interact with your files.