At this year’s keynote we were presented with a completely overhauled UI. From a semi-transparent menubar and unified windows to 512 x 512 icon states and a revamped dock, Apple presented us with a wide variety of new UI features for Leopard. Following the Keynote, we rushed to grab hold of someone capable of dissecting Apple’s new direction, so we turned to our very own GUI guru, Renato Valdés Olmos of Atacama Design to do just that. Renato brings us this month’s Insider. Feel free to digg it!

About the Author: Renato Valdés Olmos is a designer currently graduating at the Utrecht Graduation School of the Arts, MA in Interaction Design. He has been working as a Graphic/UI designer for over 6 years and has been specializing academically in user experience and product design, from research to production. Renato’s current project can be found here.

After watching last night’s keynote I sit at my desk feeling pretty satisfied. After months of speculations and rumors the WWDC finally came upon us. Jobs started out with his required dosage of name-dropping and bashing the guys in Redmond to fire up his reality distortion field. But quite frankly, that wasn’t necessary this time. At least not for me. We got a new desktop, and a new Finder. And not just some minor revisions, but a conscious application of new user interface paradigms.

Apple’s philosophy has always been that a user interface should ‘get out of the way’, feel natural and be able to let the user concentrate on their work. In Leopard, they’ve shown that the general minimalist UI conventions that hail from 10.0 times have matured to lead the way to operate upcoming generations of their machines.

The upcoming years, we’ll be seeing that our consumer electronics will gradually move away from conventional input methods: more intuitive ways of interacting with your data are ready for mass implementation. Apple implemented one of these technologies in the first multi-touch consumer product: the iPhone. iPhone makes use of very intuitive multi-sensory input, taking away the need for extra peripherals bridging the interaction between you and your data. Now keep in mind, transitions take a lot of time and patience and a transition like this in the personal computing industry will even take longer. But eventually, mouse and keyboard will disappear from our desktops.

From what I’ve seen, Apple is gradually preparing the Mac OS for multi sensory touch based input. Heavy emphasis on dock-based launching, a transparent menu-bar which blends away into the background and an overall application of very clean and minimalist but considerably large user interface elements. Apart from that, Apple also continues their march towards a scalable user interface with resolution independence sessions at the WWDC, to provide high quality user interfaces for displays over 72ppi.

What does this mean for the look and feel of our apps? This is where CoreAnimation comes in. Gestural based input is more intuitive than the point and click standard, but a lot more complex. You’d have to give the user feedback on their exact movements, and this is done best by UI animation. Just take a look at iPhone’s scrolling gesture, it’s smooth scrolling is based on the motion’s direction and speed. Now imagine that, in Finder, or Safari, or iPhoto for that matter, on a Johnny Ive-designed desktop Mac (ergonomic and sus-tainable, undoubtedly). And there we have the future.

Now like I said, a transition like this won’t happen overnight, but before we fire up our flaming engines and start judging Leopard over taste-related issues like the opacity of the Apple menu bar, take a deep breath and look at the bigger picture here. Apple has been an industry innovator when it comes to human computer interaction. They commercialized the GUI/mouse/keyboard combination and etched the desktop environment into contemporary society. But new technology forces companies to look beyond existing conventions. And Apple knows that better than any other.

Point-and-click interfaces are a standard, but are they the best way to interact with your data? If you ask me, Leopard is, with all its new technologies, the first step towards gestural based user interface implementation into OS X.

Besides the utilitarian part of the interface, the aesthetic part is of crucial importance to a good user experience. It needs to be pretty enough to actually be enjoyable to use. But, aesthetics are also the most tricky part. User interface usability is a lot easier because most users in Apple’s focus group (this is not a niche people; it’s your granny, your little brother and quite possibly your neighbor) feature similar operational patterns when it comes to perception of the information provided by the system. I won’t bore you with Fitt’s law or Gestalt theories, but the bottom line is that positioning user interface elements is a lot easier than styling them. Why? Because we, Apple’s target audience (read: the whole world), all have different cultural and emotional backgrounds which directly affect the perception of imagery in our cognitive systems. That why some people like Picasso, and some just don’t.

The same thing is happening here. Once we’ve seen the screenshots, the pretty marketing demos and Stevie J’s ‘booms’ we tend to open up a frenzy of disgusted chatter based on personal taste. All Apple has done here is look at what paradigms are working now (Coverflow, layered UI, high contrast icons and overlay UI panels) and applied them in the vertically integrated way they design all their products. It’s impossible for them to come up with some UI aesthetics which could appeal to all people of the planet. But that’s where this community comes in.

What do these new paradigms mean for the themeing community? From what I’ve seen, read and discussed, Apple has provided a framework to provide ‘HD quality’ to their user interfaces. So what icon designers have been doing for quite some time now, themers will also need to pick up: start working bigger. Use vector-based apps like Adobe Illustrator, Freehand or open source alternatives or pump up that DPI in Photoshop, Fireworks or the Gimp if you’re into that ‘free-love’ thang. The rest will be up to the guys at Unsanity.

Now to sum things up, Apple picked up a broom and performed some necessary cleansing of the UI: preparing the OS for the future. The visual consistency has been applied in a usable way (note that from a cognitive point of view, extreme uniformity isn’t good in user interfaces) and aesthetics are open to interpretation. You can either love it, or hate it. Or theme it.

And, hey, at least they killed brushed metal.