It's really a "first reaction" question. I'm growing to like it more and more, but my initial reaction to seeing that the entire UI was dark-gray was not a good one --- it just didn't seem visually appealing to me. The same reaction was seen by quite a few others (a friend of mine, for example, who isn't a developer, saw Leopard yesterday and actually asked "what the heck happened to mail and system preferences?"), and I'm interested to see if that was a point of concern among others. It's obviously a personal opinion, albeit one which I'm positive I'll adjust to.
In my experience, "unified" means the unified toolbar and window title look, possibly with a darker shade of gray. I haven't seen it used to describe the Mail look as a whole. I'd describe Mail as unified with a source-list-style list on the left.
I wasn't referring to Mail as a whole, but rather the toolbar and window title's appearance --- light plastic. Under 10.4, System Preferences as well as Xcode shared this appearance. As I stated before, my initial concern was that switching these applications to a dark-shade may cause serious conflicts with existing apps, as they were designed around the light concept. These conflicts seemed more pronounced at first, albeit less so now, but even so, it does present an issue for developers looking to deliver 10.4 + 10.5 applications.
For example, the darker shade obviously affects the design of toolbar icons, and since "unified" in Tiger looks different than "unified" in Leopard, it creates an aesthetic problem as to which style to design icons around, or gluecode to determine which icons to use under which OS.
While I'm positive moving toward a consistent UI is a good thing, I'm also positive we're going to end up with a bunch of ugly applications towards the beginning of 10.5's launch. The good outweighs the bad here, but it's still worth asking about what other developers are intent on doing for their 10.4 + 10.5 applications.
by Brian Amerige — Jun 12
It's really a "first reaction" question. I'm growing to like it more and more, but my initial reaction to seeing that the entire UI was dark-gray was not a good one --- it just didn't seem visually appealing to me. The same reaction was seen by quite a few others (a friend of mine, for example, who isn't a developer, saw Leopard yesterday and actually asked "what the heck happened to mail and system preferences?"), and I'm interested to see if that was a point of concern among others. It's obviously a personal opinion, albeit one which I'm positive I'll adjust to.
I wasn't referring to Mail as a whole, but rather the toolbar and window title's appearance --- light plastic. Under 10.4, System Preferences as well as Xcode shared this appearance. As I stated before, my initial concern was that switching these applications to a dark-shade may cause serious conflicts with existing apps, as they were designed around the light concept. These conflicts seemed more pronounced at first, albeit less so now, but even so, it does present an issue for developers looking to deliver 10.4 + 10.5 applications.
For example, the darker shade obviously affects the design of toolbar icons, and since "unified" in Tiger looks different than "unified" in Leopard, it creates an aesthetic problem as to which style to design icons around, or gluecode to determine which icons to use under which OS.
While I'm positive moving toward a consistent UI is a good thing, I'm also positive we're going to end up with a bunch of ugly applications towards the beginning of 10.5's launch. The good outweighs the bad here, but it's still worth asking about what other developers are intent on doing for their 10.4 + 10.5 applications.