Elegant Chaos

Apple have updated iTunes so that it looks more like Mail.

Is it me, or do they both look pig ugly? Brushed metal is bad enough, but this thing is just a horrible mish-mash of styles.

I take Jack's point in Stolen Sheep about people getting all misty eyed about the consistency of the user interface on previous versions of MacOS.

I think he missed the mark slightly though, particularly by mentioning OS 9. I don't know anything about Jack, so maybe he had an original Mac 128k, but I would never hold up OS 9 as a paragon of consistency, and people who do have obviously not been around that long!

The rot set in a lot earlier than that - for me it was around the time of Powertalk and Apple Guide. I would say that system 7 was pretty consistent though, and system 6 even more so.

Sheer complexity of the system is part of the problem I'm sure, but as I mentioned in Bring Back The User Interface Police I do think that Apple should keep a tighter overview, and at least conform to its own standards.

Brent Simmons has been posting a number of articles recently on inconsistencies in the latest Tiger UI. Here's an example.

He makes some good points.

I'm all for innovation, but I do think that Apple's UI design has been getting more than a little flaky recently.

It's not that it's all bad, just that it seems to lack any kind of intellectual rigour. For every great new idea, there seem to be five inexplicable changes which make things less consistent, or harder to use.

I'd like to see some sort of internal review process within Apple which caught a lot of the inconsistencies a bit sooner (e.g. at the beta stage). I find it hard to believe that such a process doesn't exist already, but if so then it's clearly broken!