Deep Thought and our friend over at codepoetry have had a little bit of a back-and-forth regarding the current gooey state of the Mac GUI. In case you missed it, here’s what happened last time on “The Young and the Geeky”:

• I Have Fallen Off The Face of Earth
• The View Is Much Better On The Face Of The Earth
• Okay, What the F**k? (I’m keeping this blog post PG-13 )
• More on Overcooked UIs

There will be a quiz on the above articles tomorrow.

Okay, I’m not an interface designer, nor am I a programmer. I really don’t know what goes into designing a user interface in terms of coding, aside from dragging stuff around in Interface Builder, so I really only have experience from an end-user’s perspective in this regard.

A lot of what Adam Knight discusses in his posts on this issue has to do with what he describes as “overcooked UIs"—that is, user interfaces that use copious amounts of eye candy—with a secondary focus on the “undercooked apps"—applications with incomplete, missing, underdeveloped, or poorly-implemented feature sets or codebases—that the overcooked UIs belong to. (The epicures reading this must be cringing right about now with all this talk of over- and under-cooked stuff.) Most of this article will be dealing with the issues that Knight discusses in his last article on this topic, though not necessarily with his article itself. And no, I won’t directly rebut Knight’s response to Pilky’s blog entry on the topic.

The following excerpt from More on Overcooked UIs sums up Knight’s point pretty well:

The death of the Macintosh UI will come in the form of fades, wipes, slides, and every other element of the overcooked GUI.

The Macintosh UI used to be clean, sharp, and useful. It used to get you right to the point of what you wanted in a non-modal way and not get anything else in the way as you did it...The idea was to give you a workspace for what you wanted to work on and try to prevent any situation from coming up that would block you from working if at all possible.

Now it’s turned into a perverse nightmare of animated doohickies and gizmos and every effect known to man flashing by when something is clicked. It’s like...Flash took over the desktop and is taunting us with its mystic flair. It’s animation overkill.

How much iCandy (or “eye candy” for those of you who want to kill the lower-case “i” prefix) is too much? Where do you draw the line? When does it get in the way of usability? Is eye candy a bad thing?

What is eye candy?

For the sake of this article, eye candy is defined as any visual effect that is not required to complete a given task on a computer or give a minimal amount of visual feedback. So while a button darkening or changing color when clicked would not count as eye candy (since it is a minimal amount of visual feedback), the button spinning, bulging, and then being sucked into a vortex after being clicked would be considered eye candy.

Assorted sweets

I really don’t think eye candy itself is a bad thing. There is absolutely nothing wrong with integrating eye candy into an application or operating system. In fact, eye candy can be a good thing. For example, Mac OS X comes with a fair amount of visual effects, large icons, anti-aliased text, and such. Minimized windows zoom into the Dock. Switching users yields a cube effect. Dialog boxes and alerts implemented as sheets slide out from window title bars. Application Dock icons bounce as the application launches. You get the idea. There’s plenty of visual effects in OS X, and aside from looking cool, most effects actually serve a logical purpose. They keep you notified as to the status of a task, for example, or they keep you abreast of changes in your working environment. A minimized window doesn’t just disappear from your desktop and show up in your Dock, but quickly zooms into your Dock via the Genie or Scale effect. The idea behind sheets is that a dialog can pertain to a particular window without hogging the entire application. The sliding action reinforces the connection between the dialog and the window it pertains to.

I guess I should qualify my initial assertion. Eye candy can be a good thing when it serves a useful purpose.

Mac OS X’s use of eye candy is generally organic and subtle. The drop shadows under the windows reinforces which window is in front. Animations are quick and simple. After using Mac OS X for even a short amount of time, many of the effects become a natural extension of using the operating system and are unobtrusive (for most people anyway—you can’t make everyone happy).

So I’ll qualify my statement again: eye candy is a good thing when it serves a useful purpose and is unobtrusive.

Burnt to a crisp

Now that I’ve discussed eye candy when it comes to Mac OS X as a whole, what about eye candy in third-party applications? Let’s start with one of the more popular Mac apps of recent years, Delicious Library. Adam Knight had this to say regarding Delicious Library:

At least Delicious Library did something useful and well with that over-cooked interface; it had a saving grace. What does eye candy give you if that’s your only “feature”?

I don’t know about calling Delicious Library’s interface as “over-cooked” but I’ll discuss that in a minute. I find Delicious Library to be an application that uses eye candy wisely and to its benefit, as Knight says. For example, music CDs are represented by a CD jewel case; DVDs are represented by a DVD case; and books are represented by, well, a book (duh). At first glance this detail seems kind of silly and useless, but it serves as a subtle reminder of what the item in question is, since CD, DVD, and book cover art can sometimes look interchangeable (e.g. a DVD cover could look like a book cover at first). Overall, this is an unobtrusive but nice touch and actually useful. There a numerous other touches to Delicious Library such as this. This is where I object to using the word “over-cooked” to describe Delicious Library’s interface.

To me the ideal modern application has a strong feature set and an interface which compliments the feature set. It would be clean and easy to use and easy to learn. It would feature eye candy when appropriate to accentuate the feature set. Delicious Library, in my opinion, does a reasonably good job at hitting this goal. And Knight does imply that he feels Delicious Library does a good job at what it is supposed to do. I just feel that Knight uses “over-cooked” as a derogatory term, and I don’t think that “over-cooked” is the right word to describe Delicious Library’s interface.

How does Delicious Library stack up to the criteria I set up earlier? Is the eye candy useful? Yup. Unobtrusive? Yup.  So in my mind Delicious Library is eye candy done right. Other examples of well-crafted, useful implementations of eye candy include iTunes’ Cover Flow feature (a great way to browse through your albums and it re-creates an old school jukebox) and Quicksilver (a little program I can’t live without which uses some simple and unobtrusive fading effects as it appears and disappears).

The problem with eye candy is when it gets in the way or becomes over-the-top. The biggest example that comes to my mind right away is the starfield in screenshots of Leopard’s Time Machine. The zooming windows effect serves some purpose in that it clearly shows that you’re stepping back into previous incarnations of a window or application, but the starfield is too much. In that case, I think Adam Knight and I are on the same page, and that’s the point he was trying to make in his original point, although it is indeed a “vague blog post,” as he puts it.

So did I just write something worthwhile? Do I agree with Adam Knight? I have no idea; this whole thing is a bit convoluted. If anything, I think I’m agreeing with him on certain points (e.g. glitzy interfaces do nothing if your application sucks) and disagreeing with him on others (e.g. what classifies as an “overcooked” user interface,). To those developers out there reading my nice long rant, let me say this: have a little fun with your apps, just don’t get carried away. Churn out software that has a high level of quality from feature set to inner workings to user interface. Make something that is not only fun to use but lets the users get stuff done quickly and easily. And let’s not forget one of the Ten Commandments from The Macintosh Bible, Fourth Edition: “This is the Mac. It’s supposed to be fun.”

And with that, I ask myself; did I actually write all that on the usefulness of visual effects? The non-geeks out there must think we’re all nuts.

Stir in some mixed nuts...

I’ll be pulling back from Deep Thought for about a month from the middle of November through the middle of December while I tackle two large papers. If all goes well, I will be a UC Berkeley graduate with a degree in English by Christmas. Yay me!

Also, my MacBook’s power adapter appears to be failing; the wires where the cord attaches to the MagSafe connectors seem to be weak, as it cuts in and out. My brother had an iBook power adapter spark on him. I’ve had a previous iBook adapter die on me. My sister’s two-year-old PowerBook adapter is on its way out. We have not had much luck with Apple power adapters. Bah.

This has got to be the most Gruber-esque article I’ve ever written, at least in terms of length. I don’t think I’ve written a blog entry this long before.