Safari 4 Beta's new tab arrangement has me bothered. It seems to be largely lifted from Chrome's user interface that puts the tabs at the very top of the window. Not only is this a departure from Apple's typical UI choices, it presents problems for users with special needs.

On your average Apple user interface, every object -- a title bar, menu, button, or handle -- has a single function. It can resize the window, move it, close it, or scroll it. Safari 4's tabs, however, have a dual purpose: They not only can be selected to move the entire Safari 4 window, but can be clicked individually to display their contents. In Safari 3, this was handled by two different objects -- the title bar to move the window, and tabs in the tab bar.

Google chose to put tabs at the top of the window because it was an important part of the user metaphor for their web browser, Chrome. In Chrome, tabs are independent processes brought together in a kind of stack. This is all very well and good, but it poses the same problem of having the area at the top of the window do two things at once: move the window as a whole, and control each item in the stack.

Snow Leopard, the next major version of Mac OS X, will include minor tweaks to the user interface, according to MacRumors' Arnold Kim.

"The new theme will likely involve tweaks to the existing design and perhaps a 'flattening' of Aqua in-line with Apple's iTunes and iPhoto interface elements," Kim writes.

AppleInsider's Kate Marsal posted a screenshot of some controls purported to be part of the new interface, dubbed "Marble." It's unclear where the screenshot came from, as Kim writes that development builds have so far used Leopard's version of the Aqua theme. They could easily be Photoshopped screenshots of iPhoto or iTunes, so take that with a grain of salt.

Daring Fireball's John Gruber wrote that Marble was the codename for the new interface scheme in his Macworld predictions roundup, but said later he was wrong when it was not announced during the keynote. He wagered that the look would feature "iTunes-style scrollbars everywhere, darker window chrome, and a light-text-on-dark-background menu bar."

Snow Leopard is rumored to be released before the end of March.

Feature: Web Clips, little roll-your-own widgets for Dashboard that will tell you anything the Web can.

How it works: Making a Dashboard widget isn't really that hard now, but it's about to get a lot easier. There'll be a little button in Safari that you can press to take a "clip" of a web page and turn it into a widget on the Dashboard that updates as that page does. Found your local weather forecast somewhere, or a webcam that watches the outside of your house? Clip that section of the page into a web clip, and you've got a simple, custom-made widget so easy Grandma can make one. Here's what it looked like in an old build, and it's probably going to be even easier in Leopard.

Who will use it: If it's as easy as Apple says it is (and all indications say yes), everybody. Anything on the web can be clipped into a widget, so if you can access constantly updated content (say, the top story of TUAW?) then you could use it as a web clip.

You can check out all our 24 Hours of Leopard posts here.

Dashboard developer iSlayer has posted an interesting article examining the implications resolution independence (a new feature in Leopard) will have on icon design. Even before the issue of resolution independence, UI designers have been in two camps regarding the use of bitmap vs vector files for icons. It is in the nature of vector images to scale, but things get a bit out of proportion and wonky- looking after a while. Bitmap images can be tweaked to a designer's heart's content, but that means they have to produce a different image for each possible eventual icon size. iSlayer breaks down the deeper pros and cons of each format, including resource usage and if there is really a need for such high resolution interface components. Definitely a must read for those in, or interested in Mac interface design.

A new Apple patent uncovered by PC Pro hints at the possibility of portable user accounts making their way into the Spring '07 release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. For a quick break down: the long-standing rumor has been that this would allow a user to keep their account - the entire home directory, applications, media, preferences, you name it - on an external storage device like an iPod, and simply plug that device into any Mac and log in with access to all of their stuff. The possibilities are pretty juicy, and for once the language in the patent is fairly straight-forward, if not a little repetitive: "The multi-user computer system, eg. through its operating system, locates user accounts not only in local storage of the multi-user computer system, but also in any removable data storage attached to the multi-user computer system."

While this particular rumor has been in the wind for a few years now, we don't have anything else specifying that it is for sure arriving in Leopard. This could be yet another unused patent, or it could be slated for 10.7 for all we know. As usual, we'll keep our ears out.

[via Slashdot]

The iPod is the 800-pound gorilla of the DAP industry - there's no doubt about it (well, almost). In its 4+ years of existence, the player has quickly won owner's hearts because of its ease of use and seamless iTunes management experience, amongst other reasons. I personally have owned one of every generation of iPod since the original 5 GB model with the *gasp* mechanical scroll wheel, before all this fancy touch wheel stuff you young whipper-snappers are spoiled with today.

In all this time, however, the iPod's famously simple UI has more or less remained that way - staggeringly basic. While I personally am no fan of devices that add features and options simply for the sake of claiming 'it has more', I'm starting to think that there are a few areas that the iPod's UI and experience are in serious need of an update. Music (and video) collections are getting larger, people are interacting with their devices and the libraries on their computers through increasingly new (and truly useful) ways, and I think the iPod needs to catch up with the times.

I found another one of those 'switcher blogs' and I thought it might make an interesting read for both Mac newbies and power users. I honestly can't find any information on the author, but My Journey to Macintosh provides up some interesting switcher experiences, such as loading up Firefox just because that's what the author used on Windows, then discovering that other browsers like Camino offer a far more Mac OS X-like experience, in part because Camino isn't butt-ugly and it uses the Keychain.

One thing I like about this blog is that the author seems to be a power user, of sorts; while some posts are about discovering the wonders of working with PDFs on a Mac without the need  for Adobe's (fat, bloated, clunky, slow and horrible) Reader, another post laments some hangups in getting PHP and MySQL working. In other words: there's something for everyone!

There isn't a virtual library of posts yet, but I thought it might be an interesting switcher blog to watch because of both the variety of topics the author has touched on so far, and an About section that reads: "Microsoft Windows user since Windows 3.0 moves to a Mac and Mac OS/X Tiger. Watch the process, good and bad :)." See? Fair and balanced, too. Enjoy.