MacWorld Keynote

Updated 09JAN2000

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Steve Jobs had to leave his hardware announcements until MacWorld Tokyo, unfortunately. That left him to detail MacOS X during his keynote (more details are given in the First Bit).

So here's my perspective on Aqua, having seen it first-hand:

• I think we can safely put the modal dialog discussion to bed. Linking it to the title bar!! Brilliant! This way you have a modal dialog, tied to a window, without forcing the user to pay attention to that window instead of another window.
• Mac users will be glad to know that the fade-away windows now match Windows 2000. And I spotted the window-shadows before anybody else. :-)
• Take a good look at the Aqua quicktime player -- it's much more sensible:
  1. Shares the window title control elements again, thankfully
  2. the volume control knob is now a real slider
  3. and the thumbwheel is gone!
• Plus the new UI is very minimalist, eg file-save options ...
• The thick borders are gone (though I suspect are still draggable/resizeable)
• The icons can totally be resized, and smoothed, to your heart's content. Looks to me like the raw icon image must be huge. For the most part they make a dynamic thumbnail anyway.
• They can make the windows minimise and the movie will still play down there? That dock has to be the most effective use of a 'thing stuck on the bottom on the screen'. Much more constructive that MS-Win's "task bar" which only puts an icon-and-title in the minimised window; this makes it much too easy to run out of space and then you have to cut off the words!
• Plus, now they're document-centric, they don't use the app name in the title-bar anymore. I said it was minimalist and space-efficient :-)

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