http://news.worldofapple.com/archives/2007/08/22/look-a...d-9a500n-of-leopard/

"the on/off switch replicates that of an iPhone GUI item"

Oh yeah. Yet another GUI.

Hilarious.

By the way: Can anybody explain to me what sense a "backup solution" makes that puts the "backup" on the same HD as the source ?

Hilarious.

what absolutely cracks me up is how they ditched the crystal BUTTONS, and kept the crystal pull-down menu widgets, window widgets, and all kinds of Aqua blue bullshit. Aqua is so dated, it's not even funny. I'm way more into the new "pro" black/grey multimedia interface than I am friggin' Aqua. Aqua looks like a crib toy compared to some of the better interface choices I'm starting to see.

But that still leaves the Mac with fifty competing interface ideas, all creating a busy, disorganized mess. It's gotta somehow get hammered into a design that hangs together, or it's always going to look like opensource crap.

The GUI designers at Apple are retards. My world will be torn asunder if Tog doesn’t severely criticize that stupid on/off slider-thingie that you see on the Time Machine (eye roll) panel. This has been an obsession with Apple since Steve Jobs II: try to make everything look analogous to a real-world device (which is often a bad idea for many reasons). If you think back to some of the earlier (and quite unwieldy) versions of the QuickTime Player, you’ll know what I mean. And I think it was Tog who eviscerated this travesty. Here is that critique.

Apple GUI “designers” (go ahead and slap me for using those quotation marks) are indeed retards; that is to say, their knowledge of designing effective graphical user interfaces is retarded.

Same schlep, different day. This really is amateurish stuff. Here's that more extensive review from the Interface Hall of Shame.

Quicktime-Player is really a perfect example of lousy UI-Design.
The best Version IMHO still is Quicktime-Player 3.0, which showed what "less is more" is all about. A while ago i got an app called Nice Player, which didn't show any UI as long it wasn't needed, you just saw the movie. Perfect concept, although technically a bit weak. (was slower than QT-Player, stuttering, etc.)

Hell, my addiction to beer coming back...

A while ago i got an app called Nice Player, which didn't show any UI as long it wasn't needed, you just saw the movie. Perfect concept, although technically a bit weak.

Windows Media Player has modes like that. In fact, it has so many modes and options I just tend to say "Screw it" and leave it at the default. I'm a but gunshy. Shirley I'm not the only person to have flipped a media player of some type into a mode and then couldn't figure out how to get it out again. Windows Media Players leaves a lot to be desired in terms of intuitive simplicity. Apple use to be the sort of company who would come up with elegant solutions to things like this and leave you whistling, "Oooo. How did they ever think of that?" But nowadays we're all waiting for them to surpass many aspects of Platinum, let alone think up something new and useful.

A good GUI designer is worth his or her weight in gold. Those guys and gals are true artists, scientists, researchers, and engineers. But alas, I think too many people with only art backgrounds get involved and forget the other aspects of the discipline.

Apple's GUI designers ARE friggin' retards.

I think the whole problem boils down to trompe-l'oeil. 2-D vs. "3-D". I really don't see the point in fooling the eye for depth and atmospheric lighting effects in a graphical interface, if you're not going to take it the whole way and go photo-realistic/cinematic. I don't see why a scroll bar has to look like a mechanical device, when you could just drag a flat SHAPE up and down and have it do the same thing. The APPARATUS of GUI has gotten out of control. I'd like to see it carved down to minimal. For example, I think some of the FLASH player controls we see now are infinitely more attractive and useful and better designed than any other media player.

Iconic, flat, simple. Less-is-More. Our WORK is lush and 3-D and multimedia enough. We don't need our interfaces to compete with that. We need our interfaces to get the fuck out of the way. Just simple heads-up displays. The bare minimum. A few icons you click and/or drag to adjust. I don't need to flip virtual switches, drag realistic virtual sliders, click on buttons that look like acrylic. Tomorrow it could all be flat as a pancake, and I'd probably cheer.

There were a few depth effects in Platinum. They were fine, because they were unobtrusive. But in many ways, the interface was stronger when it was only black and white, in the very early days of the mac.

All we need for a good interface is for it to be logical, visual, and easy to use. We don't need all the useless ornament.

People are ALWAYS asking me to redesign the Mac interface. You know what I do? I hold up a white sheet of paper. There, redesigned. People go, whaaa? There's nothing there! I go: "precisely."

Seriously, I could probably design a new Mac interface in a month. Something that would be leaps and bounds better than what we have now... uh, for work. What it wouldn't be, is a crib toy, and therefore Apple wouldn't take a look at it, no matter how good it was. Ive would love it, but it would tank with them, because they've already made up their minds that a lush, overdesigned interface is the way to go. It's going to be very hard to get them to see the logic of "less is more" without having them consider it "ONLY" a pro GUI. Not for the masses. They'd worry that digikids would miss their hyper-rendered icons, and sound and fury and visual superabundance. And they'd be right.

I'd be putting the Mac GUI on a crash diet, and yeah, it would be healthier, but there'd by a great hue and cry against it, as if you were taking big macs away from fat kids, and giving them salad. Because Apple is probably right that being a total distraction engine sells computers. But it sells them to slackers.

A smoothly efficient minimal GUI would look to much like you had to fucking WORK. But that's exactly why I want an interface like that. To make work easier. To be a better tool. Which is why I think there should be a choice. A baseline minimal... to which you could add bullshit, as much as you like. If you want YOUR UI to look like a Rocooco palace, you'd be able to add that crap. If you didn't, like me, you could leave it plain and monochrome.

People are ALWAYS asking me to redesign the Mac interface. You know what I do? I hold up a white sheet of paper. There, redesigned. People go, whaaa? There's nothing there! I go: "precisely."

Put me on the list of people who want you to redesign the interface. It's bound to be much, much better, although something tells me you're likely to err on the side of too little. ["Where the hell did the scroll bars go?"] But after Aqua, I'm willing to give it a try. ["Here. Use the supplied Platinum Plus magnifying glass included in every shrink-wrapped box. Now can you see the scroll bars?"]

I'd be putting the Mac GUI on a crash diet, and yeah, it would be healthier, but there'd by a great hue and cry against it, as if you were taking big macs away from fat kids, and giving them salad.

Oh, jeez. I really did laugh out loud after reading that.

["Hmmm. I can't tell if that's the scroll bars or a dead pixel."]

quote:

Originally posted by klapauzius:
By the way: Can anybody explain to me what sense a "backup solution" makes that puts the "backup" on the same HD as the source ?

Hilarious.

It makes absolutely no sense at all.

However, had you done even the *slightest* little bit of reading on Time Machine (which I must assume you think you're referring to), you'd find that backing up on the boot drive is not even an option.

Time Machine is activated the second you first hook up a new external hard drive - it pops up a window asking whether you'd like to use that disk as a backup drive. If you say "Yes", it's running.

That's it.

Whenever you boot from a Leopard Install Disk, the very first thing it asks you is whether you have a Time Machine backup available.

If you say "Yes", it will simply restore everything from that backup to *exactly* the way it was - the end.

Drive replacement (or even basic back-up functionality) has never been made so brain-dead simple.