05.25.00
MacOS X DP4 … Hands On!
Well, this is interesting…. 🙂
I’ve gotten my hands on a working copy of Mac OS x Developers Preview 4, which was released at the WWDC last week. It’s more academic curiosity at this point, but it sure is fun running X so many months before the first beta is due (this summer).
I’m having some difficulties, but that’s to be expected with pre-beta operating systems. And some of it may even be chalked up to the loose nut behind the keyboard <http://www.mcs.brandonu.ca/~ennsnr/Tags/Alpha/e.html> rather than any real software problem.
Aqua is gorgeous. The dock kinda sucks, but it’s not bad. I’ll probably stick with DragThing. Who knows, maybe DT will add the cool animation in the next rev.
I’m loving the rendering of icon names. This may seem strange, but the icon names are white, with a black outline stroke *and* a drop shadow. It should be noted that all drop shadows are from the 12 o’clock point, not the usual 10:30/45° angle.
I don’t find the floating, useless Apple in the middle of the menu bar to be all that distrcting. It disappears if the menu items grow enough to cover it, so it’s fine.
I’m curious to see how long it takes me to adapt to the new button locations. It’s dawning on me just how often I use the ‘expand’ button in the upper right hand corner of most windows. I think that’s the green button on the left hand upper corner now, but I’ve still got to play with it.
One other interesting UI change is the option for the scroll bar. Currently when you hit an empty area in a scroll bar, the windows will jump down one page-full of info. MOX has an option to just the thumb directly to where you click. It’s an interesting concept, but I think combining the two would be great. If you click within a single-window’s jump of the thumbnail, the window should shift down one page-full. Outside of that, the new direct jump method should kick in.
Anyway, those are my thoughts on topics that haven’t generally been covered elsewhere. I’ll be investigating more in the future to be sure. 🙂