There is a general overlapping of features. Let’s start by examining things in Snow Leopard here’s the Exposé & Spaces preference pane:Īnd here’s the Mission Control preference pane in Big Sur: It’s mostly a matter of spatial arrangement, and things become quickly subjective here. I think Snow Leopard was perhaps the best version to integrate these functionalities.įrom a UI standpoint, judging which is the better approach between Exposé & Spaces versus Mission Control is difficult.
#MAC OS X 10.6 SNOW LEOPARD WALLPAPER MAC OS X#
Exposé was originally introduced in 2003 with Mac OS X 10.3 Panther, while Spaces was introduced in 2007 with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Snow Leopard is the last Mac OS version to feature the old approach to window management and virtual workspaces before it was rethought and its name changed in Mission Control. Personally, I find the effect in Big Sur unnecessarily tridimensional and I’m slightly bothered by the fact that the menu is not attached to the menu bar (there’s a 2‑pixel gap). If I had to use more descriptive terms to differentiate these two types of menu transparency, I’d say that in Snow Leopard the effect resembles flat, thin paper, while in Big Sur is more like frosted glass. But as you can see above, menus in Snow Leopard are already more contrasty than in Big Sur, even with their default transparency. There’s just an Enhance contrast slider you can move to increase the contrast of the whole interface and reduce the menu transparency in the process. Snow Leopard doesn’t have a Reduce transparency option in the Seeing tab of System Preferences → Universal Access. While the effect in Big Sur isn’t completely terrible, judging by the feedback I’ve received since I started publishing my Big Sur logbook, many people find the contrast between the menu text and the menu background to be rather poor, especially for inactive menu commands, so they usually enable either Increase contrast or Reduce transparency in System Preferences → Accessibility → Display as a workaround. The effect doesn’t really change from an image to another, but I wanted to show it both with a black & white and a colour desktop wallpaper as background. On paper, you’d think that this effect may appear similar in Snow Leopard and Big Sur, but when you look at the implementation, things couldn’t be more different. In both systems, when we pull down a menu from the menu bar, the menu background isn’t matte, but has a degree of transparency that lets you vaguely see what’s behind the menus (a portion of the desktop wallpaper, another window, etc.). What I forgot to mention, however, is the way menu transparency is handled in both Mac OS versions. In my previous piece, I talked about how Snow Leopard treated menu bar transparency (or rather translucency), and how I consider it a better, more user-friendly implementation than the one we now see in Mac OS Big Sur. Rather than adding them to that already long overview, I’ve decided to publish this addendum. And while I haven’t received many particular requests in the form of, You didn’t talk about, you should add that example, when I returned to Snow Leopard on my 2009 MacBook Pro, I realised there were still a couple of things I had left out that were worth mentioning.
I wanted to provide enough examples of user interface details to prove my point. I’m glad it was clear from the start that it wasn’t my intention to write an exhaustive overview of Snow Leopard and the user interface degradation I’ve witnessed in subsequent Mac OS releases.
It was well-received and I want to thank everyone offering praise and feedback.
#MAC OS X 10.6 SNOW LEOPARD WALLPAPER SERIES#
After reacquainting myself with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard over the past two weeks and collecting a series of notes and observations about its user interface, I assembled everything in the article I published a few days ago.
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