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Mac OS X Lion to Have User Interface Overhaul?

tigress666 said:
Please don't tell me that there are going to be application icons all over the desktop.... if so I hope it's an option to turn off. I like setting my desktop to be how I like it to be. If i want it with icons in a grid pattern, I'd make it like that.
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The icons aren't on the desktop, it's an overlay. When you click on the launcher icon in the dock or via keyboard/mouse shortcut, the desktop blurs into the background and the launcher appears over the top. Once you launch the app, the launcher fades away and your desktop reappears.

It copes with the explosion of apps that apple expects you will install on your mac, in the same way the iphone went from no apps to thousands of the sods and finding them became a pain. The dock simply can't handle more than about 20 or so apps.

Personally i keep about 10 apps in the dock and the rest i launch with spotlight. #+space and about 3 characters gets me into any app i have installed. But that doesn't work for most people.

I don't like the fact that the launcher uses the whole screen real-estate, hopefully it'll be configurable to number of apps per screen and keep them in the centre or bottom, rather than from top left filling the full width of the display.

M. :D
 
this is funah said:
i gotta say i will fully trust apple in ANY UI design modifications. everything theyve done since 2001 has been nothing but an improvement.
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this wont be popular with some on here (the ones who start with I'm an Apple fanboy BUT...) as they are convinced that Apple are doing their level best to make their lives as miserable as possible, and who are very vocal in letting us all know it.
 
The 10.7 Lion Preview was never really a proper preview in my opinion... it felt like a last minute rush to get to the real announcement that Apple wanted to make that day...

... the Mac App Store.

Think about it... It was supposed to be a preview of the next major version of (in my opinion and Apples) the best operating system in the world.

But all we got was a bunch of "iOS" interfaces with stupid marketing hyperbole names ("Launchpad", "Mission Control"... *cringe*), displaying on top of what looked like Snow Leopard.

And then, the BIG exciting new feature for 10.7 (the Mac App Store) is released for the current version of OSX anyway... :rolleyes:

I share the same concern about 10.7 that others have stated. I don't want iOS on my desktop. Having said that, I also don't believe Apple's "preview" was anything but a prelude to the Mac App Store announcement, and when we finally do get a proper preview, we'll be pleasantly surprised.
 
I don't want 'linen' backdrops or hideous bookshelves on my Mac any more than I want them on my iPhone.

Then again I run my Mac in graphite and love the 2D dock.
 
arkitect said:
I am sure it has been mentioned before, but if Apple intends to go the whole distance and make OSX an iOS, then where are the touch screen Macs?
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Yup i'm thinkin that too. But i'm also thinking that Lion is a 2 faced beastie, desktop mode for legacy macs or when you want to drive with a keyboard and mouse and a full screen iOS mode when that iMac is pulled down like a drafting table or your macbook's screen is flipped over the top of the keyboard. :D
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

The more it looks like iOS the more I'm likely to get a Mac.
 
I agree with the last poster... it's time to give MacOSX a real overhaul. Love the OS... it's the best by far, but like Leopard did in some of it's innovations, it's time to really change it up.

I'm looking forward to what Apple comes out with... I think it will be cool. However, I am a little cautious and curious about how iOS affects it. :)
 
BRING IT...

I won't buy Mac's buggy OSs for 12 months after release, anyway. The last two were such crap for about 6 months, and then a pain for almost another 6.
 
tigress666 said:
Please don't tell me that there are going to be application icons all over the desktop.... if so I hope it's an option to turn off. I like setting my desktop to be how I like it to be. If i want it with icons in a grid pattern, I'd make it like that.
Click to expand...

It won't hog our desktop. the new launch-menu-thingy (I forget the new name) will need to be envoked, like expose and dashboard. They're merging them into one program that will let you control spaces, dashboard widgets, expose and full screen apps.
 
Some interesting discussions going on here. Firstly, people wailing about Lion turning into iOS need to calm down. From what I can see and have heard, everything is looking positive.

+ iOS scrollbars, less intrusive, inertial scrolling
+ Auto save, state resumption for apps (no indicators in Dock)
+ Full screen apps
+ Mission Control merging Exposé and Spaces
+ Swiping/gestures to switch Apps/go to Dashboard

From what we've seen, these new features seem well designed. I think the UI does need further refinement - if Aqua makes it into Lion somehow it will be truly ridiculous.

The Dock is losing active app indicators which is actually a rather seismic shift for the OS. I think we'll end up using Mission Control far more than we realise, and utilising Spaces and Full Screen apps more. And think, hopefully we'll get notifications (i.e. for email) without the app being "open".

I think the change in working behaviour will be rather profound. Some apps are born to be in Full Screen (iPhoto etc) but there has never been a solution to have a mixture of Full Screen and normal windows - Mission Control is the answer to this.

I'm hoping the built-in apps (Mail, iCal, etc) will receive significant feature and UI overhauls.

My wishlist for further refinements:

* Change system wide font to Helvetica.

* Complete abolition of Aqua a la iLife. Every shred of candy (progress bars, traffic lights, buttons!) needs to be flattened and given a sleeker look. The traffic lights need to be flattened as well and made less crazy.

* Standardising of the window chrome colour. iTunes 10 is a lighter gradient, if this is desired apply to the whole OS.

* Refresh system and built-in App icons. Just little tweaks to Mail, iCal, Address Book etc to freshen the system up.

* Invert the menu bar to be darker.

Manderby said:
If they want to clean up the UI, they should start with the menu.

The apple menu is in its basis very nice and of course, removing it would be an axe-cut (and me myself, would remember it as an icon). But look at it. At least two items (App store, Dock) do not even belong here and the others are only used sparsely as they can be activated quicker and more securely (have you ever accidentally put a remote computer to sleep with the menu?) by pressing the power-button. The only thing really useful for a user is System Preferences.

The Application menu: The only things really belonging here are the preferences and Quit. About belongs to the Help menu and Hiding belongs to the Window menu. Barely any application ever uses this menu for anything else (including apples own applications).

Ditch the window and Help menu alltogether and find a better solution (for example a button on the right of the menu for help which can be turned off for the entire system if wanted.) The window menu could have been ditched since the introduction of exposé, but unfortunately in Leopard and with the new Magic mouse, exposé became increasingly uncomfortable (And grand-master-control-central-station-whatevertheycallit will not make it better), so I ended up using the window menu while I have never used the menu before the changes. So for now, I need the window menu but I know, there are better ways to solve this (and I don't mean single-window applications).

Now this would need some get used to but if Apple looks at computers user-centric nowadays, the menu as it is is just not conformant to that idea.
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Very interesting post. The menu bar IS increasingly redundant, but I'm not sure how they could justify keeping it if they stripped out too many options (Help, Window etc). On the other hand I can't see what they could replace it with.

usertech said:
Apple really needs to make Lion standout. As people have stopped complaining about Vista and have started praising Windows 7 as being much better. I cant see M$ getting things wrong now with any future OSes on the Windows side.

Its good see some of the software technologies thats already in IOS being ported to the Mac.
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Agreed. It's got to look significantly different, we are due a UI upgrade. The OS is still ageing well but Apple need to get ahead of the game. We expect a sleeker UI now.

Think Reeder, Sparrow - the developers of these Apps have done amazing jobs of evolving the UI in the right direction.

Really hope the UI changes involve more than Launchpad, Mission Control and iOS scrollbars.
 
pad07 said:
From what I can see and have heard, everything is looking positive.
Click to expand...

For you.

pad07 said:
+ iOS scrollbars, less intrusive, inertial scrolling
Click to expand...

- No quick indication of how much document is left or how much you've gone through. Requires mousing over the "scroll bar area" or lightly scrolling.

pad07 said:
+ Auto save, state resumption for apps (no indicators in Dock)
Click to expand...

- No knowing what apps are currently in a running state instead of a saved state. Is your skype still open ? Waiting for a call ? BitTorrent client running, ready to gobble up the bandwidth you might not have on your 3G tethering ?

These negatives far outweight the "positive" of "cleaning up the UI" to me.
 
KnightWRX said:
- No quick indication of how much document is left or how much you've gone through. Requires mousing over the "scroll bar area" or lightly scrolling.
Click to expand...

To a degree yes, the iOS ui does show a scroll bar while scrolling the document so you still get that indication, and then it disappears.

I would think you'd have more of a problem of not being able to grab that bar and speed through by moving it to where you want to be in the document.
 
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