Apple Peel

Mac OS X at Work: The Usefulness of Translucency

The daily use of Mac OS X, even in its most current incarnation (v. 10.1.1), continues to be a puzzling affair. While this should not be too surprising for a software product which is, in many respects, still in its infancy, I find some of Mac OS X’s strangely “missing features” and performance issues really infuriating at times. On the other hand, certain aspects of its technology evoke a definite feeling of excitement that has not subsided, even after several months of daily use. In fact, if anything, this feeling has actually strengthened.

In this new instalment in my “Mac OS X at Work” series, I would like to share a bit more of my own daily experience, in the hope that it might be of use to people who have yet to take the jump, or are finding it a bit difficult to adjust to this new experience.

Quartz Graphics

A few weeks ago, James Thomson released the latest version (4.2) of his interface utility DragThing. Like many updates before this one, it is a minor update available free to registered users, but it features improvements that are not so “minor.”

The one improvement that has definitely struck a chord with me is the addition of support for the Quartz graphics engine. Simply put, Quartz is the new 2D graphics engine that replaces QuickDraw and is involved in drawing everything on the screen from windows to buttons to the Dock to menus. (OpenGL takes care of the 3D stuff, although some of Mac OS X’s “pseudo-3D” feel, such as the drop shadows, is done by Quartz as well. QuickTime takes care of the video stuff.)

One important new feature in Quartz is its built-in support for translucency. If you’ve used Mac OS X at all, you know that several aspects of the Aqua interface make use of translucency: menus let you see — or rather distinguish — what’s underneath them while they are dropped down, the title bars of inactive windows are semi-transparent as well, the background of the Dock itself is semi-transparent, etc.

There has been (and still is) some debate over whether translucency is actually a useful addition to the Mac interface, or rather just one of those “buzz-word” things that nobody really ever asked for and that are just “eye-candy” used by Steve Jobs in his keynote addresses to elicit exclamations of approval from an admiring crowd at MacWorld Expo.

I won’t pretend that I have the answer to this question here. What I would like to do, however, is describe one particular way in which translucency has improved my own computing experience — in a subtle, yet significant way.

A New Tool

Quartz is not a software application. It’s a technology that is part of Mac OS X. What Quartz effectively does is that it makes it easy for developers to add translucency features to their own applications. This brings me back to DragThing, and the addition of Quartz support in the latest version.

The migration to the Quartz engine means that DragThing now also includes translucency features. More specifically, it lets you set the level of opacity of the background of any DragThing dock that you might have created — as well as DragThing’s own Process Dock.

Translucency features in DragThing 4.2

Interestingly, I never thought I really needed this ability. However, being the adventurous type (at least when it comes to Macintosh computers!), I started fiddling with the background opacity settings for my various docks.

That’s when it dawned on me: Translucency is actually useful! Throughout all those years spent using the “classic” Mac OS with its so-called “Platinum” appearance, I’d always been bothered by how “blocky” windows, palettes, control strips, etc. were and by the fact that, well, these things would often get in the way of what I was trying to do. For example, no matter where I’d put my control strip, on either one of my screens (I routinely use a dual-monitor set-up), it would always end up hiding something that I wanted to have access to at some point. Similarly, while I really liked the applications palette (which I used in its compact, icons-only form), I could never find a good compromise between the palette’s proximity to where my cursor would be most of the time and its interference with the rest of the contents of my screen. Either I would move it away to a more remote area, and then it would turn out to be too far for me to travel back and forth between the applications palette and the area of my desktop where I did most of my work, or I would leave it closer to that area, but then there would always be either a scrolling bar in a window or a tool bar in Microsoft Office or a palette in Photoshop or some text I wanted to read which would end up being hidden by the application palette and therefore unaccessible unless I moved something. In other words, there was always more mouse movement required than I would have liked.

Now, translucency in itself doesn’t entirely solve this problem. Even though certain parts of the interface can be made more or less translucent, which means that you can more or less see through them (with a level of clarity that depends on the relative opacity setting), clicking and dragging is still a “black or white”, purely 2D proposition: either you are clicking on the item (including its semi-transparent parts) or you are clicking on what’s next to it. You still need to move a semi-transparent object away in order to be able to click on the things that are “semi-visible” through it. What translucency does, however, is somewhat alleviate the issue of “blocky” items, by making the “hidden” parts semi-visible (behind the semi-transparent parts of the items in front).

More Pleasing to the Eye

For example, I use DragThing’s built-in “Process Dock” feature as a replacement for Mac OS 9’s applications palette. (I know Mac OS X’s Dock is supposed to fulfil that purpose, but it also tries to be many other things at the same time and I find the overall result too messy.) Up until DragThing 4.2, I’d customized it so that it would display at all times in the top-left corner of my main screen as a fixed palette of buttons without a title bar:

Opaque Process Dock in DragThing

As you can see in this partial screen shot, this palette was fully opaque and would therefore always hide part of my desktop volume icons.

With DragThing 4.2, however, by simply setting the background of the Process Dock to a lower level of opacity, I can actually see the full desktop volume icons through the background of the dock. (The icons themselves in the Process Dock are still fully opaque, but I could change that as well if I wanted to.)

Translucent Process Dock in DragThing

You can see what happens better if you compare the two “zoomed-in” screen shots below:


Zoom on Process Dock without and with translucency

How is this actually useful, you might ask? Well, first of all I can see the full name of the “Machine” desktop volume icon. Granted, I usually only have one hard drive desktop icon whose name begins with the letters “Mach”. However, considering that another one of my hard drive desktop icons is called “Mac OS X”, you can see that, if half of the name is concealed, the two names become almost identical, thereby increasing the chances of an error.

More importantly, however, I think the improvement works on a more subtle level. Rather than just giving me access to more information, it also gives me the impression that I have access to more information, that things don’t always get in the way of each other. With its semi-transparent background, I no longer feel that my Process Dock is a “blocky” item that hides part of my desktop environment from me. For most intents and purposes, it obviously still does hide half of the hard drive icons, but it “hides” them in a less obtrusive, more seamless way. It is much more pleasing to the eye — and, let’s face it, if you are going to be staring at your computer monitor for eight hours a day or more, the fact that things are more pleasing to look at is important.

Indeed, the more I work with my semi-transparent DragThing docks (needless to say, I am now using some level of translucency in all my docks), the more I wonder how I ever did without them. And, to me, this itself is a clear indication of substantial progress in the area of computer interface design.

A Lesson for Apple

Interestingly, even though ubiquitous translucency features is something that Apple itself introduced in Mac OS X, it took a third-party software program (DragThing) to make me fully realize the positive impact it could have on my everyday computing experience.

In fact, I sometimes get the impression that Apple itself doesn’t realize the full impact and the actual usefulness of some of the things it has introduced with Mac OS X. You might have read about this new “feature” in Mac OS X 10.1.1 which effectively prevents you from placing desktop icons anywhere near — not to mention underneath — the Dock, even though the Dock does have a translucent background. When you try to move an icon near the Dock, OS X automatically moves your desktop icons away from it.

Well, as far as I am concerned, this “feature” is a sign that Apple, at the present time, still doesn’t really “get” the usefulness of translucency. At the very least, Mac OS X should give you the option to deactivate this behaviour. Not everyone has a 22” Cinema Display flat screen with tons of room on their desktop. Some people might actually want to have a desktop icon (for an alias to an often-used utility, for example) positioned so that it’s half-hidden by the dock.

The latest version of DragThing, on the other hand, fully embraces translucency and makes it an essential part of my computing experience, giving me enough flexibility to customize it to my own computing needs and thus make my own experience more pleasant.

Apple needs to continue to listen to its customers and to pay attention to what third-party developers actually manage to do with the tools and technologies it has introduced. If Apple has the necessary humility to recognize that other people might be able to devise uses for its technologies that it hadn’t initially envisioned itself, then the future of Macintosh computing is indeed getting brighter with every day that passes and that sees more Mac users turning Mac OS X from the brain-child of Apple lab engineers into a real-life computing tool that is both useful and pleasant to use.

Pierre Igot

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