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:
- Shares the window title control elements again, thankfully
- the volume control knob is now a real slider
- 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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