Comment by graypegg

4 hours ago

> brushed metal was... a choice

Man... I stand by it being an interesting idea that they fumbled by not following their own HIG.

Even if it is a bit of a silly line of reasoning, there was (at least originally) a purpose to the brushed metal UI. Anything that was capable of external IO (quicktime for ingesting firewire feed from camera, itunes for syncing with an iPod, finder for disks) was supposed to have a brushed metal interface. There's a world where 2 different classes of windows stuck around (one for things INSIDE the computer, one for things OUTSIDE of the computer) and I bet we would've gotten a lot more afforadances for real-life devices. Maybe a predictable device status UI in those sorts of windows or something. Maybe they'd just be those white panes with fancy animated product shots that show up when you get an Apple-blessed bluetooth device near an iPhone. There's at least some reasoning to treat external IO windows as sharing some sort of common UX. (Answering pretty common gadget questions like: is it connected, is it charging, is it lost, etc etc etc)

But then the waters get muddied with the calculator being brushed metal because it's trying to look like a calculator. And safari... because I guess the network is external but...?

I think a little after John wrote this blog post I'm using to jog my memory, all pinstripe windows were gone except maybe the preferences panes... so it was definitely arbitrary form over function at that point.