You are right, voice, Apple did make a lot of improvements in OS X's interface, but unfortunately also made some sacrifices. I refer you to John Siracusa's extremely comprehensive and knowledgable reviews of all the versions of OS X since DP2 at
http://www.arstechnica.com/ (links 1/2 way down the right, keep in mind these reviews will take at least 2 hours each to read
)
There are two principles of the old Mac OS interface that made it great: 1) the OS was designed to support a GUI right from the start of it's existence (not vice versa), and 2) since screens were much smaller back then (Mac Plus
), many elements
had hidden/were in condensed forms most of the time for the computer to have enough real estate left to be usable (pull-down menus for example. (now those were a REAL innovation, be it from Xerox's PARC or Apple). That concept came from the interface designers modeling after a real desktop, with "pull-out" drawers and a trash, a concept that is still relevant but more and more lacking today.
1) Today's OS X does not hold true to these two facts. Apple can't really do much, if anything about the first one I mentioned because UNIX is first and foremost an OS designed to be used through a command line. Sure, Apple can add great layers on top of the UNIX core like Cocoa and OpenGL, but the whole interface we are used to is run as just another process, called the Window Server - it is not an inseparable part of the OS as it was in OS 9 and earlier (to see it in action, open up a terminal, type top, and notice it's processor % jump when you resize a window).
Since most users think of the interface AS the computer, it comes as something of a surprise (it did to me, anyway) that the whole interface was just another process (granted, it is a "protected" system process which separates it somewhat but still). I recall one section of John Siracusa's articles about OS X where the 10.0 window server permanently crashed while the rest of the machine was still perfectly fine and could even be telnetted into.
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/01q2/macos-x-final/macos-x-7.html#ui-death
Anyway, I guess what I am trying to say in this point is that Apple has done a great job making a working interface for OS X, but they can't change the basic inner workings of the original OS they've adapted (well, maybe they can, but not without some SERIOUS rewriting of UNIX).
2) What Apple CAN address but hasn't are the old Human Interface Guidelines that they themselves established years back that made the Mac interface the envy of PC users. They discarded many of the tried-and-true guidelines when they created Aqua in favor of glitzy, processor-intensive translucence and wow!-factor shadows, but I find the changes usually do not offer a truly useful advantage.
Personally, I don't mind these kinds of effects, but only when they truly help. Keep in mind I have a relatively old G3 (see specs below), but I think my thoughts are still relevant in general since there is a larger base of users with older specs than one with newer specs (because there are more older machines in use than new ones)
When was the last time you thought, "Translucent menus really are making me more productive, because my processor is NOT tired and has extra cycles to burn! The fact that this window minimizes with a genie effect makes me work better! The superior method of distinguishing windows from one another is NOT a draggable or even resizable border, drop shadows are simply better! Eye candy is more important than UI speed (a large part of productivity). Thanks Apple!" The gratuitous use of these features looks nice, sure, and creates a sense of OS X as a truly different OS in consumer's minds, but I always find that the extra features cost more cycles than they are usually worth. If I drag a translucent terminal window around my screen while iTunes is playing for example, my entire processor is totally maxed out and the MP3 I am listening to goes stops (yes, I am running latest versions of everything and have 320 MB of RAM). Sorry, Apple, I know UNIX underpinnings are great and all, but in the end it is the results that count, not the feature bulletpoints.
This revolutionary OS is only revolutionary in my mind if it improves in more than a few ways. Stability? Sure. Much improved file I/O performance? Great, we all benefit form that. Interface, though? While pretty, it needs serious revision, and much of it is too late too fix. Apple has already established Aqua as the final interface and won't signficantly change it anytime soon (Jaguar's changes are welcome, but still only minimal) because even if developers follow guidelines, significant UI changes this late in the game would be suicide on Apple's part.
The least I think Apple could do is add a Sys Pref panel that would enable/disable most of these features, primarily live window resizing. Aqua windows should at least have a checkbox for resizable borders, and possibly even OS-supported theming should be brought back.
And speaking of interfaces, an advantage Windows has over the Mac OS X interface is the way windows are handled. You can think of Window's windows (hehe) as vector graphics and Mac OS X's as bitmapped. This means that there is much less memory overhead for Window's windows(haha) than OS X's. If I understand correctly, the way Windows manages it's windows is that it describes each component of a given window with a set of parameters: the title bar is x pixels high, the scroll bar is x pixels thick, the titlebar font is x, etc. This is why if you ever get a monitor with 20,000x15,000 resolution for a Winblows OS as old as 95 you can just change these widget sizes, and the vector parameters will increase so the widgets don't have to be miniscule. This is not possible on the current interface of OS X, as the widgets are stuck in one non-resizable size.
(end post #1 thanks to message limit)
