Interface
At first glance, Mavericks looks like Mountain Lion. There are no major changes to the appearance of standard controls like scroll bars and buttons; the Dock looks the same (in its default position, anyway); most application icons have not changed.
But poke around a bit and you’ll spot a few differences. Move the Dock to the side to reveal its new smoked glass appearance. It’s a nice match for the attractive gray metal look introduced in Mountain Lion, though the smoked glass Dock is translucent instead of reflective like the metal Dock.
The gray linen texture that invaded OS X in a big way a few years ago has now been expunged. The Notification Center sidebar and the login screen are now a soothing slate gray.
Linen also no longer covers secondary displays when full-screen mode is active; more on that later.
With these changes, Mavericks can be seen as continuing to follow the lead of iOS 7, which also notably parts ways with the linen texture. But Mavericks is unwilling—or at least unable—to follow iOS 7 the rest of the way down the road. For now, Mavericks has settled for expelling as much visual and interactive baggage from iOS 6 as possible.
Consider the state of the Address Book application in Lion. It was the spitting image of its iOS 6 counterpart on the iPad: a beautifully drawn leather-bound book with a red cloth bookmark. But the artwork was more misleading than helpful. The application looked like a book, but it didn’t behave like one. Worse, important functionality was sacrificed on the altar of those graphics. The third pane used to display contact groups was removed entirely; an open book has two sides, not three, after all.
In Mountain Lion, the newly renamed Contacts application brought back the groups pane, but it did so by cutting into the contact list’s space on the left side of the “book” graphic. Open books must have two equal sides, right?
Mavericks says enough is enough. The leather’s gone, the fake pages are gone, the three panes are independently resizable (more or less), even the title bar is bone-stock, and it’s… boring?
The story’s the same for the Notes application. Once an iOS 6 lookalike sporting torn bits of paper on a yellow legal pad, it’s now stripped of all pretense. Also possibly removed: beauty, fun.
Calendar is straight up the middle, with just a touch of iOS 7’s super-lightweight text (e.g., the year) mingling somewhat awkwardly with the other typefaces.
When Lion was released, here’s what I wrote about its stitched-leather calendar application:
The immediate, visceral negative reaction to the rich Corinthian leather appearance had little to do with usability. What it came down to—what first impressions like these always seem to come down to—is whether or not you think it’s ugly. People will take “really cool-looking but slightly harder to use” over “usable but ugly” any day.
The freshly undecorated applications in Mavericks may test that assertion. Contacts and Calendar look plain compared to their previous incarnations; to my eye, Notes borders on ugly.
Don’t get me wrong, in the case of applications like Contacts, I’m all for excising the misleading graphics and returning the functionality that was removed in service of them. But that kind of surgery appears to be the only significant change to these applications in Mavericks. Apple took the Mountain Lion versions, removed the graphical frills, and updated the UI enough to work correctly without them.
I’m not sure there were any better options given the time constraints. Leaving these applications unmodified would have made OS X look like even more of an old fogey next to iOS 7 than it already does. An OS-wide overhaul (following the iOS lead or not) would have easily pushed Mavericks out into next year, blowing Apple’s annual release schedule. And if an interface overhaul is in the cards for OS X in the next year or two, a fresh rethinking of each application within the constraints of the current OS X look might have been wasted effort (in addition to making Mavericks late).
And yet there are places where hints of iOS 7 peek through. The icon for the new Maps application, for example, looks like an OS X-style application icon with iOS 7’s color palette and smooth gradients applied to it. The iBooks application icon takes this look one step further. The new iCloud preference pane icon looks like a straight lift from iOS 7.
You might expect the Calendar, Contacts, and Notes icons to have been revised in the style of the new Maps icon to reflect their newly chastened interfaces. Nope, no time for that either, I guess.
Many applications haven’t been modified at all in Mavericks. Game Center retains its tacky green felt and wood. Reminders still looks like textured black… something surrounding white note paper. Messages still sports glossy text bubbles.
The influence of both iOS 7’s “frosted glass” header elements and the sadly misguided translucent OS X menu bar can be felt in the new list-view headers in the Finder.
I can think of only one practical use for this effect: to indicate that there’s more content above the current scroll position when no scroll bar is visible to communicate this information. At all other times, this transparency only serves to slightly impair the readability of the column headers.
And then there’s the crazy sparkle effect that appears around newly installed applications in Launchpad.
The same effect is used when a new Dashboard widget is installed. I’m tempted to say this is no more gaudy than the water-ripple effect used when a new instance of a widget is placed on the Dashboard, but in the context of the overall trend away from ostentatious ornamentation across Apple’s product line… yeah, it does seem a little worse.
In short, the look and feel of Mavericks is a mixed bag. The iOS-inspired interface divergences introduced in Lion and refined in Mountain Lion have been partially rolled back in Mavericks, but there’s still much more to be done. I look forward to the day that the OS X interface will finally stop backtracking and start moving forward again.
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