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October 24, 2007

Leopard: Final Dock

Another good piece of news. MacOS X 10.5 Leopard has a new appearance for the Dock; it looks like a reflective 3-D shelf for your application icons. There’s been a lot of debate about this, centering around two arguments.

It flies in the face of Apple’s human interface guidelines in terms of the 3-D perspective and light-sources. If you aren’t aware of such things, then it just looks a little… wrong. If you’re aware of such things, it screams like a misused “it’s” to an editor.

It looks horrible at the side of the screen. Many users - especially those with multiscreen or widescreen setups - place the dock at the side of the screen. The sideways shelf looks really…. wrong.

Apple apparently listened. One last-minute change in the final release version of Leopard is an alternate appearance for the Dock that’s “flat” - avoiding the perspective and positioning issues of the Shelf appearance.

Whew.

Posted by jim at October 24, 2007 10:14 AM