C’mon Apple, Where’s Your Consistency?

Posted on 28 January 2011 | by Ryan Battles

Normally, I applaud Apple’s design aesthetics. They lead the way in terms of simplicity, usability, and beauty. Lately however, they have been messing with my mind in terms of usability. What really bothers me is how much they are altering the window layout of their most popular apps.

To start with, let's look at how the navigation and close/minimize/maximize buttons work on both the native file browser and Safari:

Finder: File Browser

Safari: Web Browser

So far so good. We have some consistency in design here. Now what follows are two of their most recently updated applications, iTunes and the Mac App Store:

Mac App Store

iTunes

Now they're just throwing things on there. Okay, to be fair there are reasons for why they are doing what they are doing. For the App store, it shrinks the size of the window to throw the navigation to the right of the buttons instead of under them. With iTunes, well, there's still no excuse. They say that it is to provide consistency for what the app looks like in its minimized version. Oh well, you may think I'm splitting hairs, but I think that they are confusing their users with all these shenanigans.