Small history of the Camino interface.
Monday, November 21, 2005 22:33
I had been actively interested in the the UI of Mac OS X, playing around with wonky design things at Resexcellence and Spymac before the actual release of Mac OS X. I never really did icon design or interface design. I was just interested. That all changed when OSX and later on Chimera where released. I just loved the new Apple software look, the community aspect of software development and opensource as a whole. The promise of being able to make a difference was to great a temptation for me.
Because Mac OS X made it so easy to tinker with an applications resources, as it saves all the files in it's package, all of a suddon I could view and change any file. More so since regular graphic formats such as TIFF and PNG where used. I had been using resourcerer on Mac OS 9, and I can asure you that really wasn't a creative stimulation.
Back then I had only one aim for Camino; make sure it looked as good as or better then Omniweb and Apple branded applications. Oh boy did I suck, I mean the first icons I did looked like crap. Looking back I even feel a bit ashamed that I showed them to people. Only at the end of 2003 did I reach a level where I could finally convince Mike Pinkerton that I could do what was needed to lift the Camino interface to a more professional level.
The first one comes from the 0.7 days. The later ones where craps, the Safari buttons where in for a week or two.When looking at popular interface design from Apple and other software developers there are a couple of ways of deciding what an app should look like. a) Make the application conform to the Human Interface Guidelines from apple. b) Do everything the way you want it. c) Follow the interface guidelines for the most part and ignore them when you believe it's really better to do it your way.
I really believed, and still do, that for Camino doing the first option described was the best way to go. I actually believe that for any opensource project it's wise to follow guidelines because if you don't you will easily end up with an interface that is a complete mess. All the different people working on a project have their own ideas and really want it done their way. Only when you have one clear leader that works continuously on a project can you make precise discisions, keeping consistancy in mind, to walk away from the guideline at some point.
An opensource product is always fragile from both a user and a developer point of view. They generally don't have any marketing budgets and there for solly rely on their feature quality and ease of use. In the case of Camino the UI was not strengthening it's market position but instead made it look more like a beautifull odd duck. Choosing for an icon style that more closly mimicked Apples aqua style was done to ensure that users would feel right at home. Based on the majority of the feedback emails we get from users I think I can safely say that we achieved that goal.
My goal for the 1.0 release is to ensure that all the aspects of the interface are as close to perfect as we could get given our limited time. That also included revisiting each and every icon over and over again to ensure it's clarity and the clarity of the application as a whole.
A preview of some of the icon changes for Camino v1.0.
20 comments Add Comment Email post Digg post
- At 2:26 AM, said.
Definitely making the 1.0 release sexier. Great work, as usual.
- At 8:10 PM, said.
Must say I like the new buttons. When will they be in nightly builds?
- At 10:21 PM, said.
Nice article, I hope to see the new icons on Camino quite soon ;-)
- At 5:07 AM, said.
Playing around with the Camino 1.0 beta, I really think you have basically got it perfect. It's almost a new style built on top of Aqua and that makes it feel real and at home.
Keep up the great work. :)- At 7:07 AM, said.
The new icons look really fancy! BTW, do you have any plan for simplifying the Home button like the Back, Forward, Stop, Reload buttons? That would be cool.
- At 4:50 PM, said.
where can i find the older buttons ?
- At 11:00 PM, said.
Terrific work, Jasper.
It's always interesting to read about the design process -- esp. when it evolves into something so nice-looking. ; )- At 8:34 AM, said.
Now when are they finally going to land? I'm getting tired of replacing the old ones with these every time I grab a new nightly :-)
- At 10:07 PM, said.
Hi Jasper,
love the new icons, but there are two things that bother me, the refresh button and the progress indicator (do you read the camino list?) The refresh button breaks with the other arrows with that little trail. I think it should look a bit more like the other arrows (as it used to be) Then the progress indicator looks just plain wrong in the icon bar. It's too big, the colors are too diverse (from full opaque to black doesn't look good) The former version looked more camino-like. Othewise I like your work a lot. Keep working on it!
Bernd- At 3:27 AM, said.
Jasper,
I must say: the first time I noticed the handle of the door on the "back to home page" icon I was getting scared! I believed that such handle was a bad pixel of my brand new cinema display. When I discovered that it was only a black pixel done by the designer of the icon, I really hated you for about 30 seconds :D- At 12:32 AM, said.
those new icons look really nice, i've been checking out some of your work, and it is in fact all very nice :-)
- At 10:45 PM, said.
The new Camino interface is stunning. Far and away the best looking browser I've ever seen. I love the circular buttons and the subtle effect you've applied to them. Your choice of colours also hits the mark. Perfect!
Particularly next to Lanham's Agua icon theme - they work so well together. Were they born in isolation? Or do you know (and/or work with) David?
All in all, I think Camino is looking the best it ever has. Its definitely the prettiest app on my Mac, and the most used.
Kudos to you and the rest of the team. I'm looking forward to v.1.0.- At 12:14 AM, said.
while i love all the internal icons, the ones that appear in the preferences pane, i just cant reconcile myself to the tutifruity colour scheme of the browser buttons.
i will hold out till the mythical graphite theme is made by you.
thanks for all the great work.- At 12:58 PM, said.
Hi Jesper,
I followed a link from the appzapper blog to your site. I was pleasently surprised to see that you were the man responsible for Camino's design. I have been using Camino on and off since it was called Chimera. Safari was nice, but with the latest releases of Camino, I just preferred the GUI, and made the switch. I wanted Firefox/Mozilla browsing ability but a native Mac OS app. The latest design tweaks make all the difference and design continuity across the site, material and browser itself make for a great experience.- At 4:37 AM, said.
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