> With this new design, OS X...now looks a bit more like iOS 7, but
> there is still quite a bit of depth. Indeed, more than flat, the
> design almost seems to focus more on translucency than anything else.
The above is an incomprehensible collection of words to me. I am not sure if this is because of my lack of an intimate connection to Apple products, terrible writing or some combination of the two.
When design of an _Operation System_ boils down to just how "truculent" and "flat" (but with "a bit of depth") it is, you know we are talking less about the Operating System and more about the GUI/Window Manager.
That does seem to be a bit of a jumble. I think what they're trying to convey is that although it uses flat design like iOS 7, on the desktop it has a feeling of depth due to the layering of translucent UI elements.
Not really. On iOS you can't/don't overlap windows, so its design language never had to describe this relationship.
One of the questions floating around for the past few months was whether the next OSX would go in a flatter direction, and if so how they would cue window overlaps. It looks like the answers are (a) yes and (b) using roughly the same shadowing as before, plus translucence.
I believe Apple explicitly stated they were describing translucency and layers with iOS 7.
Both the Notification Center and the Control center on iOS "overlap" the screen through translucency. It could be argued that the parallax feature is also another attempt at differentiating layers within iOS, coupled with some of the animations i.e opening folders (also translucent), and multitasking.
That being said, I feel that iOS is unable to convey relationship of layers/overlapping windows well the way we are all accustomed to with desktop computers.
windows/views do overlap on iOS. Apple specifically mentioned translucency when demoing Control Center in iOS6 at WWDC last year. They are using the same playbook for OSX
Overlapping UIViews with interactive transitions between view controllers have rapidly become the hallmark of a good iOS UI experience. I personally haven't ever seen overlapping UIWindows though...
That's not what he means. The naming of which view or window class we're referring to is meaningless. iOS 7 features the same concept where views slide and transition onto the view you're looking at (which as you pointed out is not new in iOS) using translucency to indicate depth and layering. For example, see notification center, control center, and others. That was a new concept, and it's been brought to OS X now.
I'm running Yosemite now. The same feel you get from iOS 7 UI is prevalent in the OS. They flattened the window headers. They flattened the toolbar on the bottom. They flattened the status bar on top. It makes for more of a content-focused approach.
The translucency they speak of is in regards to the side menus in apps. In order to give a dynamic feel to the UI, they added some translucency like they have in some iOS 7 apps.
