I’ve used other applications that have the same concept as Cover Flow and find them like most to be very fun to watch but ultimately not as useful. I guess it could be considered support, but then again, so could almost anything else. Products Guide, which is hardware and software is under Support. Mac, Applications, Accessories, Support, and Markets. Maybe because it is unfamiliar, but it doesn’t seem logical. At the moment I don’t like they way they categorized it. It might be that there used to be a ”.Mac” nav item, and that’s so very similar visually.Īnyway, they plopped the Product Guide under the “Support” footer navigation which seems really bizarre. When I first looked at the navigation, it didn’t occur to me right away that “Mac” was where to look for computers. (It used to be on the main page subnav under “Software” (along with hardware, news, etc.) Regarding the new Apple redesign though, I spent too much time today looking for where they put the third-party software. Is this yet another indication that Apple is going more and more for style and fashion over consonance and usability? On the other hand, putting qualitatively different products on a continuous linear dimension is just bizarre. I would miss content and not know it.Īpple’s site has only 3 screen-fuls of objects (on a 1152 pixels wide screen), so it isn’t horrific. You had to guess about how far to move the pointer each time. You couldn’t just position your pointer at the bottom of the track and click-click to page-page. I recall MS IE had this once (I don’t know if it was an intended feature or a bug, but it quietly appeared then disappeared around Version 6). Apple undermines this convention because now how much you scroll depends on where you click. Think trying to distinguish Enya’s Amarantine from the Beatle’s White Album.Īs for the scrolling, the convention for “paging” with scrollbars is to click the “track” for the slider. Even with music cover art, I wonder if it would work better to horizontally squish the objects on the sides so that the most distinguishing regions of the images remains visible in some form. Still, it will be interesting to see if it’s really enough to get the masses to adjust to the weirdness of horizontal scrolling on the web.Īt least there’s more conventional text links in the footer:Ĭoverflow strikes me as a slick way to do a fish-eye view for visually diverse data objects (not for, say, files dominated by text), but it relies on the margins of the data objects being recognizable. The motion is a nice, fairly unobtrusive way to drop the hint. (The Mac section slider goes from Accessories to Macs.) once the page loads, it quickly slides to the second (and more important) area, Products. When you land on the iPod + iTunes page, the slider is all the way to the left, on iTunes… On the plus side, Apple uses a neat touch of motion at the site to get across the idea. And while you can also jump to the section you want by clicking on its name, this less jarring alternative isn’t totally obvious at first glance. Arrow clicks seem like they should work like page up/down keys and scroll you to the next set of entries, but they don’t (you see four new choices, and three old ones remain). The cons in this case: Finding a specific app, say Logic Express, amidst the flying text in that Apple Mac section menu can bring on a headache.
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