inessential by Brent Simmons

iTunes 5 look-and-feel: what do you think?

What do you think of the new iTunes 5.0 look-and-feel?

Dan Wood does not like it; drunkenbatman does like it.

Some random notes, things I’ve noticed...

- No margins.

- No brushed metal. (Is brushed metal now passé? Will iCal, iPhoto, etc. also drop brushed metal in favor of this new look?)

- It’s a custom window—in color and in shape.

- It is not the same as the new-in-Tiger unified title-and-toolbar look as seen in Mail, Dictionary, System Preferences, and other apps. It’s darker. If you compare it to a brushed-metal app, it’s about as dark. You could call it un-brushed metal. Smooth metal. (Will this become a standard look, available to developers? If so, Leopard is a long way off. Time to figure out how to duplicate it now.)

- The display thing at the top now does the two-tone glass thing. (Maybe it did before but I didn’t notice? Either way, that two-tone glass thing is big. Big I tell you.)

- The source list background color is almost the same as in Mail. I think it has just a smidge more red.

- It has another custom splitview, of course, because no two Apple apps have the same splitter. And this reinforces the 1-pixel-wide splitter as pioneered by Mail.

- The window corners are almost right angles. At first it reminded me of looking at a Honda Elements from behind. (Which is good or hideous, depending on your taste.)

- No standard configurable toolbar.

- The interior of the search field dims when the app is not in front, which is new (I think).

What do you think? Me, I don’t have a lot of opinion yet (just observations).