As Janelle Brown noted in her Salon review of Mac OS X, I may be setting myself up for accusations of being a Luddite (or simply a stick-in-the-mud), but I think it's important to focus on what is lost in the change from the current Mac OS user interface to the Aqua-fied OS X. After all, even as Windows was slouching toward such "modern" OS features as preemptive multitasking, Mac users could point to Apple's seminal, research-driven Human Interface Guidelines, which helped shape the Mac's UI into one of the most usable and intuitive in the computer industry. But, as noted previously, Jobs, who seems to be the prime mover behind OS X, also seems to have little regard for interface engineers. And it shows.

It's true that OS X offers more graphical goodies than the platinum theme of Mac OS 8 and 9, including translucent menus, throbbing save lozenges, photorealistic icons and multicolored window widgets. But after the first blush wears off, the new interface reveals itself as more hindrance than ideal helpmate.

The candy colors, for example, drew the ire of graphics professionals immediately after the first public demo of OS X in January. All the multicolored dollops, went the plaint, would pollute their perception of color in their work. In the recently released public beta, there is a quick option to drain these colors from the on-screen widgets, but here's a tip for prospective interface designers: When a feature can be eliminated with little end effect, or even a slight improvement, it's time to ditch the feature. As for the translucent menus? They're good for reminding people of Apple's style-setting computer casings, but try to read one of these menus when it ends up over a page of dense text.

Photorealistic icons, where your hard drive icon actually looks like an internal drive gruesomely ripped from the guts of your computer, brings up a more philosophical problem: The whole point of icons is to abstract meaning, from a specific item to a more general class.

Facing a door with a photo of Ross Perot on it, some men may decide to go elsewhere, fearing a lecture on tariffs studded with folksy yet incomprehensible sayings. Adorn that same door with the generic image of a man, and many will make a different decision, stepping inside for a little relief. What, then, to make of an icon of a compass and a loupe? You don't have to start tossing around semiotics terms such as "unarticulated narrowcast codes" to see there's a problem here.

A simple label -- you know, words -- might help, but OS X, perhaps loath to sully its pictures with ordinary, humdrum letters, strips icons of labels where they'd most help -- in the "dock." Ah, the dock.

The Free Software Project
Read Andrew Leonard's book-in-progress on Linux and open source -- and post your comments.