The windows are usually too large to touch in the way you are showing them in your first mockup
Sorry, that was not intended to be a mock-up. In
post #524 I simply showed, unmodified, three of the images that were originally provided by jkkool.
(Note the edit line there, a few hours ago: "sorry, I can't easily scale down the images".)
My intention there was to emphasise that each window is "beautiful in isolation".
In your second example (with the multiple window frames) sure, the windows are impossible to identify.
you should navigate via Mission Control or the Dock,
I do so (in Mavericks) frequently, and very happily. Typically with keystrokes. Plus Command-F12 for Launchpad then find-as-you-type, and Spotlight to launch or switch to an app, and more than anything: application switching with Command-Tab and other key combinations. The application switcher is a particularly useful complement when I switch to single application mode for the Dock. Plus fullscreen without hesitation, whenever that's beneficial. The ways in which those
features of the operating system work together coherently and predictably exemplify Apple at, or close to, its best.
Add to those things: hopping between Windows, Linux and OS X in both physical machines and VirtualBoxVM apps, knowing to add (or refrain from) certain keystrokes to work with the peculiarities of the latter. Plus Outlook 2007 in CrossOver, knowing to not accidentally use MS Windows keystrokes despite the Windows appearance of things. I try to be
very good at adapting to change when that change is good.
Yes, Mission Control is both beautiful and functional. However, to remind people about such things is to lose sight of what was, to me, genuinely and frequently troublesome:
- the state of windows in their natural state, when I simply observed the screen.
Those observations were often after spending time away from my desk with tasks that are diverse and/or fragmented. First impressions of what I returned to with Yosemite: too disorienting, too often.
The operating system should help me to
recognise and interpret immediately, at a glance the screen, as it was when I left it.
A natural approach to immediate recognition:
titles, predictably and consistently positioned at the heads of windows.
Instead, I found myself battling with Yosemite, with no way of restoring lost functionality. For me to find that degree of worsening at an Apple operating system level is unprecedented.
OS X was always 'weak' when compared to systems like Windows, because it does not offer any automatic windows arrangement (like tiling, snapping, etc). But then again, it does not matter
For me, those things
do matter. So I use things such as BetterSnapTool, and SizeWell (with EasySIMBL)
but not always. There's also a huge amount of everyday dragging of things, dragging as a prelude to computer-assisted tidying.
So again, to reiterate: while your examples make some sense if you look at them in isolation they are of little consequence outside artificial arrangements.
Here, the opposite.
Yosemite was naturally problematic. Nothing artificial drove my feedback to Apple.
Off the top of my head, maybe only two mock-ups from me in the Yosemite area of MacRumors Forums; one of those was
of Classic and explicitly for fun.
Fun aside
seriously, I found Yosemite to be initially disorienting not always, but often enough and troublesome enough for me to know that something was wrong and giving it time was not proving to be a workaround. The difficulties became harder to bear. To the point where I rebelled.
Your mistake (IMO) is that you are concentrating on the window borders and completely ignoring the actual application content.
Not so, but I can understand how that impression is gained. It's impossible to convey a holistic user experience within the constraints of a forum such as this. (I would not attempt to convey the whole thing; most of the whole must remain confidential.)
your question of 'how easy is it to identify individual windows' is simply of no practical consequence, at least not in scenarios you describe.
Here, the opposite. I rebelled because multiple consecutive pre-releases of Yosemite proved to be
less practical, less productive, more disorienting than Mavericks when applied to my real-world situations.
YMMV of course
