For the record, I am at WWDC right now and they have smoothed out most of the bad user interface issues that plagued OS X last year.
My main pain was that, last year, Apple had clearly not thought out it’s new UI. It was basically a brand new port of OS 8 onto NextStep. It was a graphical mess, and painfully showed the breaking of many old user interface metaphors with no clear replacement.
A year later, this has matured greatly, and I am beginning to have a respect for how much the UI has matured, but mainly in that all the elements have been thought through.
The particular piece that sold me the most was Apple’s new developer tools- specifically,
Interface Builder. One of the coolest features of Interface Builder is it actually has the new user interface guidelines programmed in- so the designer constantly reminds you to “do the right thing” when it comes to button positioning, windowing, etc. And it takes care of the “pixel counting” tasks that make anal-retentive GUI design difficult for some.
I don’t mind a new metaphor, if it is well thought out. Aqua seems farily well thought out by now. I suppose I should delete my (fairly stale) weblog flaming Aqua, now that Aqua is starting to do a stable, consistent thing.
