If we’ve got the Kyoto treaty driving us towards a zero carbon house, how can we possibly expect consumers to manage those homes efficiently if we’ve got all these different systems and they’re not integrated[?]

…

This one device that controls 50% of your home's energy wasn't being innovated at all. It seemed like it was stuck in the ’80s.

—Colin Calder (Passiv Systems) and Tony Faddell (Nest) on their smart thermostat projects

In the pages of this sketchbook, which hardly anyone but Kare has seen before now, she created the casual prototypes of a new, radically user-friendly face of computing — each square of graph paper representing a pixel on the screen.

—The Sketchbook of Susan Kare, the Artist Who Gave Computing a Human Face

To the Windows 8 team’s credit, the expanded view’s resource consumption heatmap and contextual command to search the web for a process name are nice additions that I’d be happy to see Apple steal for the Activity Monitor on OS X.

Overall

1. I think the most important overarching user feature in 10.7 is state retention. I wrote about it a few years ago in State of the User.
2. I’m generally fine with the scrollbars not appearing until scrolling. What’s annoying is the inconsistent display in third-party applications, a problem that should disappear after a round of updates.
3. I switched scrolling behavior several months before installing 10.7 using BetterTouchTool, which is still very useful as a way to assign more gestures, either app-specific or system-wide.
4. I like the redesigned login screen, but will see it maybe four or five times per year at home. Hooray for stability.

Finder

1. Minor additions I appreciate:
   1. The list view folder inline expand/collapse animation.
   2. All My Files is a nice way of replacing the previous default Smart Folders.
   3. I’m really happy that list view column customization via a header row contextual menu is finally available.
2. Groupings in Finder are interesting. They will be more useful when viewing /Applications once more developers embed category metadata in their app bundles. At present, I have dozens of apps in Other.

Mission Control

1. I really like being able to take a peek at an adjacent desktop without fully switching using the Magic Trackpad. I can position iTunes or Twitter at the side of a desktop and check a song name or update without much effort. I wish Dashboard would update when any part of it is displayed rather rather than having to fully switch for widgets to update, behavior that would be particularly useful for Stocks and Weather.
2. I’m really surprised the Misson Control “Automatically rearrange spaces based on most recent use” is on by default. There is no communication to the user as to what is happening or why; you just see your desktops mysteriously rearranged after some action based on whatever algorithm MC uses. I don’t know of any good “move UI around based on heuristics” examples. Microsoft removed the adaptive menus from Office for Windows for a reason.
3. I’d like to be able to drag and hold a window against the menu bar to trigger Mission Control so I can drag it to another desktop.
4. Desktops are labeled as such in Mission Control itself, but referred to as “spaces” in the preferences.

Miscellaneous

1. The window of an outgoing message shooting off the top of the screen when sending in Mail is a nice way to convey the action through animation.
2. When is iChat going to be rewritten to include iMessage and FaceTime functionality? OS X currently has too many real-time communications apps with overlapping functionality.
3. I eagerly await Contactizer’s full CalDAV support. iCal and Address Book look silly.
4. Mail/Contacts/Calendars could be a third tab (Accounts) when viewing a user in Users & Groups.

1. Style names appear in the bottom left of the panel only when scrubbing over them. You can use the Styles menu in the Properties Inspector, but that has no visual cues.
2. There is little differentiation between type sizes with the small icon size.
3. Styles cannot be rearranged, making it hard to group related styles if they aren’t created serially.
4. White text or objects appear as white boxes in the list, requiring mouse scrubbing to reveal the title if multiple are used.

Styles List

1. Type is rendered at size up to a point, beyond which letterforms are too big to be meaningful in icon form. For those unusually large sizes, the icon might appear similar to another, but at least the size is given in the secondary label.
2. The icon for text styles is based on the first use of the style.
3. Styles can be rearranged. This isn’t depicted, but it would just be a matter of drag-and-drop.
4. Light text and objects are given a contrasting background. Fireworks would have to determine a subtle but contrasting color.

A list view could complement the two existing icon views.

Contact details and related files

The files shown below the contact details are those sent to or received from, or authored by the contact. The contact details section increases in height to the point of only showing two rows of files if necessary.

Contacts list popover

The iPad guidelines say popovers cannot be styled so consider this aspirational.

Contacts sidebar and details split view (landscape)

Editing Contact Details

The details card slides down out of the corners and expands.

Viewing Files

The Info button at top right displays a popover listing file metadata.

Icon Sources

Some from app-bits, some from glyphish. My thanks to both.

Full 512px size:

Zipped Apple icon format (.icns), 650 KB.

The Assistant would only appear when two password input fields are detected. What to do when a site doesn’t require confirmation? Maybe check the Keychain for existing accounts at the domain and show the key icon only if none is found?

I didn’t see anything on the Snow Leopard Enhancements and Refinements page about Detectors being added anywhere but TextEdit.

A second barcode (which creates a bit of confusion) would not have to be added if the scratch-off alphanumeric code could be recognized as such using OCR. With foreknowledge of the typeface and the processing power of modern Macs, this seems technically feasible.

In case the camera is in use by another application, the Scan via iSight button is disabled and the application name is displayed.

There would have to be some conditional rules to hide the mention of optical scanning and the attendant button on Macs without a compatible camera.