tewha.net

I’ve written before about how much I dislike Safari 2’s find. The Safari 3 beta really improved things by doing a much better job of highlighting matches. Actually, it was really good:

Safari 3 in Leopard still does a better job of highlighting than Safari 2, but it introduces a new problem. The highlight now looks like a mere background color change, and the fact that it actually blocks out some of the surrounding text is no longer obvious.

Before, finding “mac” in “machine” produced mac with a strong border around it, obviously blocking out something. Now, it produces something that looks like “mac ine.” Yuck.

If there’s going to be a border there, it needs to be obvious. If Apple wants subtle, I’d suggest removing the border entirely and doing a gradual alpha blend like the System Preferences spotlight. The important part is really the brightness change.

However, it’s worth noting: Find shouldn’t be subtle. It should be as in-your-face as possible about what it’s found and where exactly it is. (And I can’t quite describe how, but the animation seems to have been made more subtle, too.)

Overall? Not much better than Safari 2.

Tags: Human Interface, Mac OS X, Mac OS X Leopard, Safari

This entry was posted on Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 10:09 am and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.