Mouseovers: Just-In-Time Information

OS X: A First Look

Apple appears on course to release a great demo. Like all great demos,OS X has been stripped of all those extraneous details that detract from initial reaction, extraneous details like the names of the files you are working on. While I applaud the designers for what they have done to date--much of which is very, very good--their work, if OS X is to be more than a swell demo, is far from over. Right now, OS X, as a whole, is frighteningly reminiscent of New Coke, painstakingly developed to appeal to an upcoming younger generation, but destined to become the greatest marketing disaster of the Twentieth Century.

New Coke blew up in Coca-Cola’s face because they didn’t differentiate between the demo and the product. Pepsi had been killing Coke in county-fair taste tests because Pepsi was sweeter and less complex. Coca-cola whipped up a sweeter, less complex version of Coke, then tried it out in similar taste tests. What Coca-Cola failed to recognize was that people’s reactions to the taste of a tiny sip at a tasting booth did not translate into these same people’s experience when drinking 12 or 16 ounces of the same product. When Coca-Cola released their sweeter, less-complex product, people shied away. When these same people learned that Coca-Cola had ceased production of the old beverage they held so dear, they revolted. Coca-Cola was totally unprpared for the reaction of loyal Coca-Cola drinkers to the apparent desecration of a product their customers held so dear.

The Apple story is playing out a little differently, but, so far, not that much. OS X is not being taste-tested on a variety of users; it is being taste-tested on a single user: Steve Jobs. Like those county-fair tasters, however, he is not drinking deeply of the interface, but merely reacting to the initial fizz. Were it to be released today in its present form, Apple might well experience what Coke did as customers switched from the old Coke, but to Pepsi. Fortunately, we’re a year away from release, allowing much time to build upon the fine work already done.

The Fizz

OS X is beautiful. If you haven’t seen it yet, take a look. The new aqua appearance is cool and clean, in sharp contrast to the ponderously-heavy 3D chrome look that Microsoft visited on the world and Macintosh quickly emulated.

OS X features new, semitransparent dialog boxes, directly associated with the windows that generated them, ending the current confusion of untitled dialogs with ambiguous wording “Save changes?” suddenly appearing in the middle of the screen. The semi-transparency is slick and, while it does knock down readability, it should be OK for those dialogs stable content. Dialogs which impart unique information, such as “You have elected to save this file with the name FOOT8ALL; was that your intention?” could be problematic. Will users notice the substitution of an 8 for a B if it is happens to be set against a vertical stripe? I support transparency, but developers must be able to selectively turn it off, and Apple should provide them with clear, strong guidelines for when to do so. End users should also be able to block transparency altogether, using a preference. I also very much like the idea of the “gumdrop” window controls that, when moused-over, reveal symbols for close, dock, and zoom.

The new elevators, with their liquid blue color, not only are pleasing in appearance, they offer sharp contrast to the elevator shafts. This should help lessen the problem of the Illusion of Completeness, where users assume that the first windowfull of information is all that exists.

The new Single-Window mode, entered by clicking a control where the Close box is on Windows, might be useful for people who become confused by overlapping windows.

Addition of drop shadows to increase sense of depth. (However, Apple should also lower brightness and contrast of rearward windows to really "sell" the illusion.)

The new Quartz imaging, based on PDF, offers many capabilities, including improved WYSIWYG for printing and display-resolution independence. I have some reservations about this path, however, given that PDF has nver really blossomed even into the kind of limited tool that HTML + JavaScript has, and PDF has a propensity for turning 1K documents into 100K documents, making it ill-suited for the Internet.

OpenGL will offer first-class support of games, adding not only fizz, but sizzle.

All this new technology that directly affects the look and feel is coupled with protective memory and preemptive multitasking, ending, once and for all, the nightmare of daily—sometimes hourly—system crashes.

Mouseovers: Just-In-Time Information

OS X makes good use of mouseovers, one of the more popular features of weblications. Mouseovers are a form of just-in-time information delivery. They are useful for reducing screen clutter, while still supplying all necessary information. They must be used sparingly and well.

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 703