My first impression when looking at the screenshots and movies of Mac OS X is how it actually looks like its made out of the same stuff as an iMac or iBook – translucent plastic. But they’ve gone beyond matching the appearance of the host device by adding buttons and other assorted controls that actually look like they’re filled with colored liquid. The interface artists that worked out the graphics for this release did a fantastic job of getting the texture of an iMac across through software. The point here is that the user interface of modern operating system shouldn’t be gray anymore. We’ve grown out of it.

I’ll mention the new 128 x 128 pixel icons used in the Finder just to illustrate how much attention is being paid to the notion of usable document previews via icons in the Finder. Not sure I need my icons that big, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt on this one.

Animated interface

I can’t remember how many usability studies and books I’ve read that said using animation in the user interface was not only distracting to the user, but truly evil. Well, once again, let’s open that one up for debate. The Aqua interface is highly animated for some of the most frequently used operations in the Finder. You can see examples of this on Apple’s website via QuickTime 4 movies. Even the smallest details, like clicking closeboxes and opening windows, have been made more dramatic through the use of animation. And it’s non-trivial animation at that. The “window open” motion is described by Apple as the Genie, probably because it reminds you of a genie coming out of a bottle on the Dock (a re-purposed UI element from NeXTStep that serves as a launch pad).

Once again, I can’t say that I’ve lived with this animated interaction for months and months, but I’m already sold from the excitement perspective. Anything to get rid of these old, gray battleships we use today. And no, I don’t just mean Microsoft Windows. Take a look at any modern OS. They all smell and feel old. Even Linux.

Solid technology platform

World-class graphics technologies lurk just beneath Aqua’s shimmering surface. The combination of QuickTime for video and sound, OpenGL for 3D gaming, and Quartz for 2D graphics gives designers a solid base to build on. And that’s the key point – Apple has exploited these core technologies in their basic Aqua interface design. Of the three, the most interesting is Quartz – a new graphics engine presumably descended from the original Display Postscript engine in NeXTStep. This addition promotes Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) to native document status. What it means to you is that documents displayed on the screen will be more WYSIWYG than ever. That translates into stunning document previews via the Finder icons, because Quartz can render into any size area or resolution, like those 128 x 128 pixel icons. See where this is going?

All that said, the innovative technologies used in a modern operating system have rarely influenced how the general user interface looked or acted.  But now they will. We were all trained to be good little interface designers and not push the envelope in the general OS. But I always wondered to myself – "why doesn’t anyone use all the power of the underlying platform technologies in the user interface?" Well, obviously the Apple design team wondered the same thing. And they’ve acted on it before anyone else at the OS level. I’ve seen the recently published Microsoft Research papers and the alternative windowing environments for Linux, but no one has had the guts to try it on their installed base before.

Told you so

Not that you really care, but I figured out this was going to happen a while ago. You can stop reading now, or listen to this short self-serving anecdote.

In March 1999, I had an opportunity to interview at Apple for a position on the team that was working on Aqua. I didn’t know exactly what they were doing at the time, but I figured it had something to do with the next big change in Apple’s Finder interface. At the time, I really wanted to be the Manager of the Human Interface group, so I’d be in a better position to do what Steve Jobs has now successfully done – steer the software industry back in the right direction. A lofty goal, but I thought I’d try anyway.

To prepare for that interview, I wrote a short paper called “Augmenting Mac OS X Windowing” on what I thought my prospective boss at Apple would want from me in a typical day. It has my design approach to the problem and four ideas on how to improve the windowing behavior of the Mac OS. No one outside Apple has seen it before now. Turns out that three of the four major points I brainstormed are now in integral part of Aqua, and the other should find its way in soon.

I’ll call that a win. Just like Aqua.

M. Pell