Smashing Magazine have just posted their latest article entitled “35 Designers x 5 Questions”. I’m very flattered to have been chosen to participate. Head over there and take a look, it’s a very interesting read and yet another great resource from them. Kudos!
In the latest build of Leopard, Apple has started to pay attention to the window chrome, unifying it across the board.
I’m positive this is an indication we will see some serious work done on the interface of many core applications (unification is just the first step).
Here’s a mockup of a new Finder interface, and what I feel we might see, or at least I’d love to see, in the October release.
When iTunes 7 was released, along came another new interface. However, this time there had been a lot more thought put in. There were new widgets, new colors, and a distinct lack of “Aqua”.
My personal opinion, and that of many Mac enthusiasts, is this will start the transition. A transition away from the jelly bean, “reflections everywhere” look and feel that has been with OS X since day one. I think we will see this look and feel (or at least some sort of variation of it) across the board in Leopard.
Tabs are something that Finder has been crying out for for a long time. When tabs exploded onto the browser scene a few years back, people took time to adjust to having multiple layers in one window. I think most people now find it hard to live without them. Tabs help stop window clutter and make it simple to see all of the locations you have open at one time.
I think Apple would be crazy to leave tabs out of a new Finder application.
This is something I would personally love to see. A Finder bread-crumb would represent a history of where you’ve been, rather than just a simple folder hierarchy. This would tie in nicely to the back and forward buttons, but also allow you the freedom of jumping to any point in the history. This may well break interface guidelines however, as it differs from the way it works in iTunes, so it’s probably a long shot.
Smart folders are great, I make them, use them for five minutes, and then forget about them.
What if Apple came up with some pre-made smart folders that would appear in a section at the top of each finder window? Most of the time I’m opening finder if get hold of a file I’ve edited pretty recently. If Finder presented me with my last five edited files, this would be a big time saver.
Apple could create other options such as “files with a red color label” or “files less than 5mb”. All this functionality already exists through smart folders. I’m just making it more useful for the average user.
Following on from before, smart folders and burn folders are hidden up in the “File” menu. Why not bring this into view by using a “cog” button on the main finder window?
Along with the new look and feel, I think we will see new folder icons. The current ones are very “pinstriped” and look dated. Maybe we will see folder icons along the same style as the new Adobe CS3 folder icons?
What are you thoughts on a new Finder?
I picked up Dan Cederholm’s book “Bulletproof Web Design” about six or seven months ago. I really enjoyed it, and it highlighted a number of great techniques. Now, with the release of IE7 a few months back, I can’t help but think a couple of the techniques days are numbered.
Personally, since reading the book and even before that, I’ve made programming flexible and scalable (aka bulletproof) designs one of my top priorities.
The only trouble is I find it takes a whole lot longer to program something to be bulletproof, than it does just to whip it up the old fashioned way. It’s absolutely worth it, but it’s a lot more fiddling with images and extra markup in any case, which takes time.
Now, the aim for many of these bulletproof techniques is to keep your site design together when the browsers text is resized. Take a look at Dan’s site and resize the text in Firefox as an example of a great bulletproof design (he is the author after all!).
If you have a copy of IE7 installed, try bringing up Dan’s site and resizing the text again in there. See the difference?
IE7 has taken on something called “page zoom” which basically resizes everything on the page in unison. The first time I saw this was in Opera, and it’s a really nice feature. So instead of the text on your page bursting at the design seams when it’s resized, all the containing boxes and graphics will also resize at the same time.
When Opera was the only browser using page zoom it didn’t really matter, as Opera only counts for a very small percentage of users. Now that IE7 is using page zoom, it becomes a very different matter. We may end up with 70-80% of web users with page zoom as their default behavior.
If Firefox chipped into that, and switched to page zoom in their next version, we’re looking at perhaps 95% of internet users with page zoom instead of simple text resizing.
If that becomes the case, then would it be right to say that it’s pointless to do the extra work to make your designs bulletproof for text resizing? I personally think so.
Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself a little, it’ll take some time before IE7 picks up and overtakes IE6 as the major player. Its numbers however are moving fast thanks to the Windows automatic updates feature (and the fact IE6 is a security train wreck). IE7’s page zoom is also not up to the standard of Opera’s just yet.
So for now at least, I’m continuing with the good practice of bulletproofing for text resizing. I’m sure however, that in the next year or so, the practice will become close to redundant. Then we can all relax knowing that our sites will look great at any size.
At least, until we start talking about resolution independence. 