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lunadelcorvoThis morning I did something I have never done before. You see, I’ve used Macintosh computers for almost exactly twenty years. I began with a second-hand ‘baby-Mac,’ and old SE30. From there it was a brand new Centris 610, with (ooh!) color – 256 colors to be exact. I was in heaven. From System 6 through 9, and every shade of OS X, I’ve never missed an upgrade, never failed to adopt early. Today, after maybe 10 Macs (plus a dozen more in offices and agencies I’ve worked in) I did something I’ve never done before.
Less than 24 hours after installing Lion. the latest and greatest OS from Apple, I gave up in disgust, and downgraded back to Snow Leopard, my previous OS. Truthfully, it was a hard thing to do (not technically, I’ve been upgrading with new and all but untried OSs before). It felt a little like breaking up.
So why the parting of ways? The bald truth is I hated Lion. I think Apple has made some great updates below the hood, and that’s great. But they have made some big mistakes up front, and taken the interface backwards; a long way backwards. Here are some of those mistakes.
1. Color? What color? In previous versions of the OS, items what are given custom icons show those icons wherever an icon is used to represent that item. Big, small, sidebar, menu, titlebar – if it shows an icon of Item A, it shows Item A’s actual icon. For those of us who have lots of folders we use often, the Finder’s sidebar gave easy access to all of them from every FInder window. Giving them custom icons, often color coded, made recognition instantaneous. Lion changed that. The Finder sidebar now represents all items with the same, monochrome, icon type. See below:
Above is the finder sidebar in Snow Leopard. You can see each item here has a unique icon. Folders (the circles) are distinguishable from each other by color, as are other items. One doesn’t even need to read the labels. Below is Lion’s sidebar:
Everything is the same color! (And the contrast is lower, making the entire window look washed out.) Even the four items you see here, with very distinctive icons, show up as identical in the sidebar. And since we’re here – the top image shows all the drives currently available (you can turn some off if you like, I use them all pretty often, so I leave them all on.) Where are they in Lion? Hidden, until you turn them on, and then they fall below favorites. Furthermore, items cannot be reordered in Lion’s sidebar, but they will change order based on most recent use (something that isn’t made clear anywhere outside of a third-level preference panel) so even remembering which one is on top won’t help you find it fast.
Making the user do more work, and making text labels crucial instead of additional is a big interface no-no in my book! So is making things change around in ways that are not clear. But let’s look at some more aspects of the finder windows that Apple changed in Lion.
2. Where am I? What else is here?
Here is a Snow Leopard Finder window. I’d like to point out a number of things that many users take for granted (until they are missing, that is). We see the same sidebar discussed above. But let’s look at some other things. First, look at the bottom of the window. The very bottom bar tells us how many items are in this folder (46), how many we have selected (1 – and you’ll know this is vital info if you’ve ver accidentally copied 15 items instead of one), and how much space is available on this drive. Right above that, we can see exactly where we are. On websites, this information is called breadcrumbs. It tells you where you are and how you got here. Again, you may not think much about this, but in this example, if you have an applications folder on your hard drive, one in your home folder (an OS X standard convention) and maybe some apps you only use occasionally on an external drive, it’s good the be able to see where you are. Imagine being a web developer, where every website you build has files named “index.html, contact.html, images, about.html” and so on. How helpful is it to be able to see at a glance which client’s site you are looking at?
3. I just keep Scrolling along.
Finally, look at the far right of the list view. That blue scrollbar not only tells you where you are in the list (about the middle) but the size of the bar gives you an idea of how big the list is. You can click to jump the ne next screen, grab the bar and move it, or use the arrows positioned at either end. Let’s see how these features fare under Lion’s ‘improvements.’
First off, the entire bottom bar is gone! No breadcrumbs, no drive space, no telling how many items are n this window. The scrollbars (which the user needs to turn on, or they are not there at all) are tiny. The bar is hard to see, much thinner for grabbing, and the arrows are also gone. I will note one improvement: the extra pop-up button allowing one to access the ‘sort by’ and other view options from the toolbar is awesome. But I’m not sure it’s worth all the things that are gone.
4. Mail Mayhem.
The dearth of color (and with it quick recognition of what and where things are), carries over to Mail:
In Snow Leopard, the “delete: is a big red crossed circle, junk is a brown cardboard box, the address book mimics the icon for the app itself, and so on. The icons have depth, enough color to make them easily distinguishable. I don’t show it, because I am trying to keep the images from being TOO huge, but this follows through in the sidebar as well. Also, the user can choose how much of each title, subject they want to see by resizing the columns for each. Let’s look at Mail in Lion.
The grey strikes again! Quick, which button is for junk mail? Addresses? Can you tell? Also, the icons are far bigger – that takes up precious screen space. You can’t change that in Mail, that preference (which controls sidebar icons size in all apps that use it, including the Finder), is now in a system preference panel. Finally, compare the amount of space each message takes up in Lion’s Mail. Four lines of preview that cannot be turned off. Sure, it may be a great feature, but shouldn’t that be up to me?
5. Everything’s going Grey.
The entire look of Lion is…drab, rigid and flat. The visual richness and depth which have characterized OS X have been muted to what looks an awful lot like the pre-OS X Platinum interface. The ‘traffic lights’ (buttons that close, minimize or resize a window) are not only desaturated, but they are smaller. Not for any good reason, the title bar is the same height, so it isn’t space-saving. It’s just a smaller target for my mouse. And things are grey that shouldn’t be. For example, it has been an Apple interface convention that things which are ‘greyed out’ are not available for interaction. But look at Lion’s GUI compared to Snow Leopard’s. Tabs are geed out when active? When did this become the norm? FInally, the progress bars, buttons and checkboxes seem to be right out of OS 9….
The one exception to the new colorless Mac interface? (I couldn’t possibly make this up!) iCal and Address Book get hokey, cheesy, retro, fake-real skins. No, seriously:
iCal looks like the kind of cheap off-brand desk calendar you’d find in an auto parts shop. I’m surprised they didn’t include a coffee mug-ring. And the Address Book? It’s too cutesy for words. Yuk. And OK, so maybe some folks think retro fake cheese is da bomb when it comes to their GUI. Let Apple offer it as an optional checkbox in the prefs. But why, oh why, when you’ve taken all color and depth out of the OS, do you cram this dreck down my throat? Apple, what the hell are you thinking?!
And Apple says, “It’s not you, it’s me. I’ve changed, and we don’t seem to fit like we used to. Can we still be friends?” Typical breakup stuff. I’m not giving up my Macs, that’s for sure. Personally, I think we need some time apart. I’m going home to Snow Leopard, and we’ll just have to see how things go….