“A few weeks ago I wrote about the new, flat look of OS X 10.10, and how it could be inferred from Xcode. But that was just a very small taste of what could be coming,” Lou Miranda blogs. “Lately, after getting a Windows PC and using iWork on iCloud, it suddenly dawned on my that the new look of OS X 10.10 is probably staring us all right in the face.”
“Initially, I thought iCloud apps were going to look more like their iPad brethren on iOS 7. The iWork apps, certainly, take a lot of inspiration from the iPad versions,” Miranda writes. “But the utility apps (Calendar, Contacts, Notes, Reminders, and Mail) certainly look more like OS X, with complex dialogs with Save and Cancel buttons in the lower right. Mail preferences, for example, on both iCloud and OS X look a lot alike in terms of their layout (tabs on the top, attributes in the middle, help button on the bottom)–but their look and feel (fonts, colors, graphics) are significantly different.”
Much more in the full article here.
I hope not, that is so ugly. Ive should be fired and take Cook with him.
Is that you cupertino joe with a new moniker?
Is that you cupertino joe with a new moniker?
Same boring drivel! Same boring drivel!
You don’t understand the difference between design and decoration. Form Follows Function!
Yes. Look how badly Apple is doing. Get rid of them, and find new leaders who can turn the company around. Steve Ballmer is available.
Ballmer sure could turn Apple around alright.
From soaring on high to spiraling right into the ground.
“Polly wants a cracker” “Polly wants a “Polly wants a “Polly wants a cracker” “Polly wants a cracker” “Polly wants a cracker”.
That’s all that the likes of ‘Joe’ can do, repeat the same tired dirge over and over again.
The thing is, they just do it because every other clueless drone does it; the parrot is a lot smarter, when it asks for the cracker, it’s because it wants the cracker.
To call the likes of ‘Joe’ a bird brain would be insulting to birds.
The Crow is certainly much more intelligent for it can use tools while Joe and his ilk seem incapable of even finding the off switch.
I have an first gen iPad with iOS5 that I fired up recently. Can’t tell you how much pre-iO7 looks helplessly .. As said earlier, form follows function. And yes, like in iOS7, they will offer a bolder font setting in the new OS X
I hope not, that is ugly. Ive should be fired, and take Cook with him.
Ugly? You haven’t used Windows lately!
The “fire Ive” chorus has begun.
You’re right. I would love to see the guys that trash this,come up with something better. Bet ya they can’t.
What we have NOW in 10.9 is BETTER. QED.
The T Party resists all change.
Um, are you suggesting I am anathema to change? If so, look below at my big HINT to Apple.
‘Change’ is not good. GOOD change is good.
That’s actually quite easy. 10.6 Snow Leopard
I’m torn on the direction of the UI. iOS7 has grown on me, but I still don’t think it’s fantastic.
When I see iOS6 on someone’s device still, it looks nicer in some ways, yet feels old and I don’t want it. The best comparison I can make is seeing an older TV from the 80s that used be embedded in a giant piece of wood. All fancy looking, allowed you to put your pictures or whatever else on top of it. My great aunt used to have that kind of TV.
Welcome to the age of “bleh” appearances. That said, EVERYTHING is better than the green felt and leather stitching.
Lush beautiful green felt and solid golden hardwood: Gorgeous!
And it NEVER gets old. The classics stand the test of time.
Flat iOS 7 got old in a week. And that’s the fact, Jack. 😉
Add the feel and fragrance of fresh stitched leather …
Green felt and golden hardwood. You left out the smokey atmosphere and the clack of billiard balls.
Vintage seventies, very good years but way in the past, you 8 ball wizard, you.
30s radios the glorious Superheterodyne now they were beautiful far superior to such product design post war. Not sure I want to use them now mind, except the quality of their sound anyway, can’t beat a valve but fragile and immobile to be practical. One has to move on.
I’m with you.
My old iPhone that I use as an iPod has iOS 6 and when I use it I feel relieved to be free of the tiny type and hard-to-see icons.
But just turning off wifi is awkward and there are little improvements in iOS 7 that add up to a lot, but in the end it’s still two steps forward and three back.
Now I have to look forward to all that on OS X.
Pardon me if I don’t leap for joy.
I liked the green felt and leather stitching! Now every program looks the same, every button looks the same, you can’t tell a button’s function by it’s shape, sometimes words are buttons and sometimes not. It is a huge step down in usability.
Those “embedded” TV’s are called console television. They are from the 50’s and 60’s.
Thanks, silverhawk1. Admittedly, I never knew the names of those TVs or what the style was called.
And portable TVs had plastic cases made to look like fake wood grain.
Sound familiar? Not even fine Corinthian leather.
In the same way I predict that the next version of Office for Mac will look like the recently released OneNote for Mac.
I’m getting so tired of reading complaints about the look of Apple’s OS’s. I wish those who still feel compelled to whine would just buy a non-Apple device. It seems pretty obvious that no one really cares what their personal taste preferences are.
Its ok for people to share their impressions of a new look in the comment thread for an article on that subject.
Perhaps if you are tired of this topic, then don’t read comments in articles about this topic?
You could drop all this bullshit if you would only buy an Android phone, preferably a Samsung gem.
You could change the font and background colors daily and finally STFU.
A fair and reasoned response that covers everyone. I count one adult here out of the faux intellectual STFU crowd.
GFY.
This is a free and open forum.
*I’m* getting tired of twats like you whining that -shock- not everyone loves Hello Kitty design, mice type and 20% gray text.
You know you can always NOT read the comments if they offend you so much.
IOW: I should just move over to Linux and forget about OS X being the most advance operating system in the world.
If this flat crap 10.10 turns out to be real, I’ll be switching to the ‘oust Tim’ camp. OMFG that’s so dull and old world.
But I have hope. This is just some analcyst blethering away at us to fill up enough bandwidth to get his weekly paycheck.
Hint Apple: The real world is full of 3D objects. So is the future of operating systems. How long have I been pointing this out? A decade.
Exactly. The real world is full of shading and texture, which when used sparingly makes things easier to see and more attractive for our visual systems which was not designed for a flat 2D world.
Everything looking the same disables another part of our mind. Our brains interprets variations in style, shape and color as an associative cue to context. Control vs. status vs. heading are places where visual cues help. Also just switching apps is mentally easier and people will be more motivated and interested in each task if each app looks different. This is not logical but it is how our brains work.
By the logic of Ive we should probably go back to monochrome interfaces. Let’s hope he doesn’t get excited about that for X 11/iOS 8.
Well said, DC. Completely agree 3D is the future.
With all the cash and resources at Apple, hard to believe visual design is NOW a retreat to the past, instead of a step into the future.
If enough voices join the chorus, maybe one day Apple will listen … fingers crossed.
The iCloud pref panel for Calendar shown in the screenshot is a visual disaster.
Thin fonts are hard enough to read on a non-Retina screen without it also being too light a gray.
Everything is a flat tri-chrome (near-black, near-white, blue), even the selected tab is harder to make out now. Checkboxes, radio buttons and dropdown borders barely stand out against the white background. If you told a newbie to hit the Cancel or Save buttons they’d have to double-check with you because they’re no longer buttons (yes, it’s happened).
Let’s not forget … ” Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” And ornament is a crime!!!
Dieter Rams, Massimo Vignilli & Jony Ives were all right!
Designers were trained to fight. To fight “Ugliness”.
Quotes like that are supposed to be understood as relative, i.e. in this case reactive to too much complexity. They are not true in any absolute sense.
I doubt any of these people live in a “simple” house with only a single color for walls, carpet and ceiling, with identical looking furniture everywhere.
Too much simplicity becomes uninspiring very quickly.
Design dictums such as “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” or Form follows function.” can be misapplied, such as applying them to the point of absurdity or applying them to the exclusion of other design principles. This leads to baffling amateurish designs instead of sophisticated design achievements. For example, if you simplify a design to the point of absurdity, then there is almost nothing remaining. This is not an innovative design, but nothingness. It is not the ultimate sophistication, but the failure to design. You have nihilism instead of design. This is where the Apple interfaces are going. Apple’s recent attempts to almost entirely eliminate the interface is misguided. The interface is needed and should be elegantly and beautifully designed. This is the same flaw the Steve Jobs committed when he “furnished” some of the rooms of his house with almost no furnishings. Furniture has a valid purpose and should be used to beautifully furnish your house. It should not be discarded so you can irrationally claim how beautifully furnished your empty house is.
This idea has been bouncing around for a while. I think the web version of iCloud looks cool, but remember it’s not a multi-window interface. But from a design standpoint , yes of course, we expect the new OS X to take cues from iOS7. Once again, Windows is ahead of the curve here ( they’ve got the visual language across te board, but are massively confused about the UX part).
Historically, when a new iTunes is released, it contains elements presaging the next OS updates.
if all the interface/graphic/etc. bashers have submitted their designs to Apple. I’m guessing not since if they had, Apple would have hired them immediately and we would be awash in the most beautiful, elegant thing we’ve ever seen.
You seem to imply that any view but Apple’s cannot have any insight, or that Apple has never changed course because of customer reactions. Neither are true. The world is a better place for it.
Not saying Apple is Utopia. It just seems it is easier for people to bash a person’s/company’s idea on forums, etc. rather than walk a mile in their shoes. In this case, it seems Apple’s taste for their “look” doesn’t appeal to someone else’s ideas and that’s okay. It’s Apple’s baby. But enough of this. It’s really not that important.
Wow I guess I must be blind or something because I have no issues navigating iCloud apps. I can see check boxes and drop down lists just fine. The words save and cancel don’t need boxes around them for me to know I can click them. I’m excited about this because I think it signals retina screens are coming to all Macs. That should have people excited.
The graphic of the iCloud prefs pane is cleaner looking, with more pleasant fonts when compared to the current OS X pref pane. Isn’t that the whole point of an operating system? To perform functions and not get in the way?
(I don’t necessarily require 3D buttons, unless the buttons are holographic and touch YOU.)
Was that question to Bill & Company?
I like it …. aqua is getting long in the tooth. it’s simple and clean looking.
So boring and washed out. Very difficult for my old eyes.
It looks like when an inkjet printer is running low on ink! I sure hope you are wrong, but your logic seems sound…
I hope the fonts are not that thin or there is a way to bold them as they learned they needed to do with iOS 7. Microsoft makes the same mistake and I have more than a few iPhone apps I can’t use because the fonts are unreadably thin.
I dont get it? What is considered improvement in that faded flat ( blah ) look?
If true… ? Its sad !
Skinny high contrast icons inferior to that which preceded it in a flat, lifeless presentation.
Somebody needs to show Ive the door. Maybe then we can get back user interchangeable batteries on laptops, upgradeable desktop Macs and a user interface that does not look like a hipster take on Windows 8.
Not bad, but if the new system font is Helvetica Neue, it may be too thin for some people to read. I hope Apple would at least offer an option for higher-contrast, easily-readable fonts. Also, the loss of button borders do not bother me, but I know it would confuse newbies. Hopefully there will be an option similar to iOS, but less ugly.
Looking forward to what Apple has up their sleeves for 10.10 (or Mac OS 11, OS XI, or even Macintosh System 11, haha joking) next week at WWDC!
I like the OS X the way it has been before all the tampering being done to it in OS X 10.7 through 10.9.
OS X 10.10 looks like shite
Total crap!
Too Flat, too washed out, the font sucks.
Ives’ is a great Apple product and industrial designer, but his skill as a UI designer and developer is not good at all.
I have gotten used to iOS 7,but it still leaves a lot to be desired, IMO.
Apple needs to hire a brand new UI designer and a chief of UI design.
I really miss Scott Forstall and Bertrand Serlet.
I just hope that they at least change the menu bar font and those stoplight window control colors. Those elements look incredibly dated now.
Images on the right look like SHIT. One of the reasons I buy Apple is it looks beautiful. There, I said it. A young beautiful woman, looks better than a 90 year old.. STOP making excuses for Apple.
IIf YOU can’y see that this looks like SHIT you must be BLIND.
Aside from that, it looks LESS readable, as a practiclal matter.
People SHOULD BITCH if this is what Apple plans.
Ever heard of the customer is always right? Well, thats a little extreme, BUT certainly, people who love Apple stuff, SHOULD VOICE what they think, when they think Apple is coming up with FLAT, MICROSOFT inspiried, shawdowless, poor contrast (harder of course to read therefore), looking SHIT !!!
That DOESN’T MEAN they shouldn’t post. Different isn’t ALWAYS BETTER. Think Different. (BUT BETTER, NOT JUST DIFFERENT.)
@moreck
I don’t.
An idea not likely, but…
Let the customer decide.
YOU pick the look, as a preference setting !
Btw look how much response there is.
Clearly MOST of the people think it SUCKS. No company, should ignore what the customers want.
The only way I like the new look is if it makes the entire OS resolution independent and I can change the widget colors and themes and add textures to the white or black backgrounds.
I too have been advocating CHOICE since I first viewed the thin Tim visually starved iOS 7.
When I open a checking account a personable bank employee opens a book and offers me CHOICE of check styles (visual designs).
Plain Jane, abstract, realistic, urban, rural — all themes represented to PLEASE EVERYONE.
Unfortunately, the lack of user choice at Apple reflects a visual attitude I am forced to adopt or leave behind.
That’s not thinking different, Apple.