Riccardo Mori

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. It was well-received and I want to thank everyone offering praise and feedback.

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. I wanted to provide enough examples of user interface details to prove my point. And while I haven’t received many particular requests in the form of, You didn’t talk about [feature], 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. Rather than adding them to that already long overview, I’ve decided to publish this addendum.

User interface

Menu transparency

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.

What I forgot to mention, however, is the way menu transparency is handled in both Mac OS versions. 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.). 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.

Here’s Snow Leopard:

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.

Here’s Big Sur:

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.

Snow Leopard doesn’t have a Reduce transparency option in the Seeing tab of System Preferences → Universal Access. 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. But as you can see above, menus in Snow Leopard are already more contrasty than in Big Sur, even with their default transparency. 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.

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). But I’m really nitpicking here.

Exposé and Spaces

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. 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. I think Snow Leopard was perhaps the best version to integrate these functionalities.

From a UI standpoint, judging which is the better approach between Exposé & Spaces versus Mission Control is difficult. It’s mostly a matter of spatial arrangement, and things become quickly subjective here.

Let’s start by examining things in Snow Leopard; here’s the Exposé & Spaces preference pane:

And here’s the Mission Control preference pane in Big Sur:

There is a general overlapping of features. The main difference between the two models, conceptually, is that in Mission Control there is one shortcut to both show All [open] Windows and all the virtual workspaces (desktops); while in Exposé & Spaces, as the name itself suggests, the two things are accessed separately — one shortcut to show all Spaces (F8), one to show all open windows (F9). [In this section I’m going to refer to the default Fn-key shortcuts for practical reasons.]

Here’s what happens when you invoke Spaces in Snow Leopard:

 

And here’s what happens when you invoke Mission Control in Big Sur:

Details worth mentioning:

• As you know, that is not exactly what happens when you enter Mission Control: at first you only see all the open windows of the applications in the desktop you’re currently in. To also show an overview of all the other desktops and all applications running in fullscreen mode — as in the above image — you’ll have to move the mouse towards the top of the screen.
• Once you’re in this view in Mission Control, there’s not much you can do: you can access a specific window in the current desktop, switch to another desktop, move an app window to another desktop, or add/delete other desktops.
• Note also that if an application has multiple windows, these will appear as a group. So, in a way, your bird’s eye view on the whole situation is a bit limited: you can’t see at a glance the contents of all windows because they’re grouped per app, and you also can’t see much of what’s happening in other desktops, because the thumbnails aren’t big enough.

Over on Snow Leopard, things are more fine-grained. Since Exposé and Spaces have separate controls, you can:

• See all open windows in the current space.
• Have a clearer view of apps and windows opened in other spaces (see above).
• See all open windows in all spaces at a glance if you first invoke Spaces (F8) and then Exposé (F9). See the image below:

With the Spaces + Exposé view combined, you have the possibility of jumping directly to a specific window in any of the spaces. To achieve the same result in Mission Control you have to:

• Invoke Mission Control (F9)
• Move the mouse to show all desktops
• Click on the desktop where the target window is located (or you think is located, since you can’t really see all open windows)
• Once you’re in the other desktop, if you don’t see the window immediately, you have to invoke Mission Control again.

It’s clunkier, isn’t it? In Snow Leopard you hit two keys and you click once on the window you’re after, because you clearly see everything ‘from above’ in greater detail.

[Update — Eric on Twitter writes: “Quick tip about Mission Control — hold down Option when clicking on a space, you don’t zoom in to the space but still switch to it, so you can still pick a window without having to go back to MC (or pick a different space).” I admit I had forgotten about this shortcut. It certainly makes things easier in Mission Control, but the execution is still clunkier than Spaces on Snow Leopard.]

Oh, and another thing. In Snow Leopard’s Spaces preference pane, if you enable the option to Show Spaces in menu bar, you’ll always know which space you’re in thanks to this icon:

And by clicking on it, its menu will allow you to select any other space (though using Ctrl‑1, Ctrl‑2, Ctrl‑3, etc. is faster).

Personally, I have no problems navigating Mission Control: after years of muscle memory, and the fact that on my iMac 4K running Mac OS High Sierra Mission Control still shows all app windows without grouping them per app, I can move between app windows and workspaces rather quickly. Yet I have to point out that the Exposé & Spaces implementation in Snow Leopard is better designed and more versatile.

Labels vs Tags

Tags in the Finder were introduced with Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks and replaced the previous Labels functionality. Or rather, they expanded the Labels functionality. Before Mavericks, Labels in Mac OS X used to work in a simple way, virtually unchanged since the classic Mac OS: you were given seven colour-coded labels (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, Grey), and you could use them as-is, i.e., by leaving Red, Orange, Yellow, etc. as label names; or change their names and call, for example, the Red label “Important”, the Blue label “Work”, and so on. This designation was simply to give each colour a name that was meaningful to you.

But you could only assign one label to an item, because the label’s colour was the predominant part, not the name. You could have a folder full of important documents, and if you used Red to indicate something “Important”, you could assign the Red label to that folder. But if you wanted to use labels to indicate that the contents of such folder were “Important” (Red) and from “Work” (Blue), you couldn’t assign both labels to it.

It’s safe to deduce that the reasoning that went into the execution of the Tags functionality in Mavericks was to overcome this hurdle and make things easier. With tags, you’re still limited to the same seven colours, but since these are tags and not just labels, the tag name is predominant, not the colour. In fact, with this approach, you can create all the tags you want and then assign a colour to them, if you want. But they can be colourless, or you can have different tags with the same colour. This, among other things, allows you to have an item with multiple colour-coded tags. Using the same example as above, you can indeed have a folder with the “Important” (Red) and “Work” (Blue) tags, along with many other tags of your choosing.

This implementation also allows for more fine-grained Spotlight searches. While with labels you could search all items marked with a specific label colour, with tags you can search for any tag by name.

In practical terms, if the Labels approach was perhaps too simple, the Tags approach is certainly more complicated. From a merely visual standpoint, labels are more effective. Yes, you can only assign one colour to an item, but when you do, the whole item’s name is highlighted, and it definitely stands out:

With Tags, since an item can have more than one colour-coded tag, its name won’t be highlighted — a coloured dot will appear by its side:

And it doesn’t stand out in the same way. You can find a few more examples in my brief piece Labels vs Tags, written in October 2013.

In a nutshell: Tags are more versatile than Labels; Labels are more effective than Tags in how they behave visually.

Pedantic interpolation on Tags’ behaviour in a multilingual setup

There’s an irritating side-effect of how tags and colours work, as opposed to the old Labels model, but you’ll only see it if you, like me, need to occasionally switch from one system language to another. Since with Tags, names are more important than colours, when you change system language the seven default coloured tags (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, Grey) will be localised in the other language. But when you revert to your preferred language, you’ll see that those localised tags have remained along with the original seven. That’s because the system thinks that they’re two distinct sets of tags, not the same set with names changing according to the language.

So, if you switch from English to Italian as system language, the green tag with the name “Green” will become a green tag with the name “Verde” (Italian for ‘green’); but when you revert back to English you’ll find yourself with two green tags, one named “Green”, the other “Verde”. Same for all the other six colours:

This creates unnecessary confusion, and not just because you now have seven additional tags you didn’t want. Suppose you typically use tags as you once used labels, and you don’t assign a specific name to a tag but you just leave its colour’s name as-is (e.g. “Green” for the green tag). If you have English as the default system language, and assign the green “Green” tag to a bunch of folders, when you switch to Italian, all those folders will still have a green tag with the “Green” name, but if you find another item you want to tag as “Green”, after selecting the green dot from the Finder’s File menu as a quick way to assign the green tag, you’ll find yourself with an item that has a green dot but the name “Verde”, because now the system language is Italian and the default green tag is called “Verde”. So you’ll end up with items which indeed have the same tag colour, but different tag names.

Yes, it is as confusing as it sounds.

Conversely in Snow Leopard, with the simpler Labels model, if you don’t alter the default label names (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, Grey) and use them as-is, when you switch to another language their names will be translated into that language, but when you revert to English, they’ll revert to English as well:

 

Left: System language is Italian. Right: System language is English. The “Screenshots” folder retains its green label and the colour name is automatically localised.

My apologies for this pedantic excursion. I’m aware that the confusion generated by using Tags in a multi-language setup is something that may be annoying for only a subset of users, but it is nonetheless yet another example of something that is implemented without taking into account other scenarios that may differ from the default. And of course this has nothing to do with Big Sur, as the change from Labels to Tags happened way before.

Applications

iTunes

Some people wrote me asking why there was no mention of iTunes in my previous article. On the one hand, speaking about the user interface of iTunes is probably enough material to write a small book, especially considering how, over its long history, it has often eschewed system-wide UI conventions in a few places of its interface. On the other hand, the last iTunes version supported by Snow Leopard is 11.4, and by that version its user interface was already deteriorating. So while I still think that iTunes, in general, is a better application than the current Music + Podcasts + TV apps, I didn’t feel that version 11.4 under Snow Leopard was a particularly good example of iTunes user interface.

iTunes 11.4 under Snow Leopard. Nothing to write home about, UI-wise. In a previous version of this article, I wrote that the Column Browser (shown here) was a feature “sorely missing from the current Music app”, but Mike kindly corrected me over Twitter — the feature is actually present and accounted for in the Music app. Terrible oversight on my part. 

While many long-time Mac users tend to prefer iTunes when it was just a music player, I consider both iTunes 9.2.1 and 10.6.3 to be two solid versions of the more jack-of-all-trades iTunes that came later.

 

‌iTunes 10.6.3 on my iMac G4 running Mac OS X 10.5.8 Leopard. Buttons that look like buttons; quick access to view options right in the upper area; clean, thoughtful organisation of controls, especially in the status bar at the bottom.

Other odds and ends

Reader Simon H. contacted me via email and, among other things, he writes:

I know it’s not a UI question, but I seem to remember that Snow Leopard had great network stability. What’s been your experience in this regard? Can you confirm?

Quite satisfactory. In more recent versions of Mac OS, all my Macs will sometimes (not frequently, mind you) disconnect from the wireless network or fail to reconnect automatically after exiting sleep. The old 2009 MacBook Pro has been running Mac OS X 10.6.8 for the past two weeks and its connection to the home wireless network has been very stable and reliable.

Another place where I’ve noticed more reliability compared to more recent Mac OS versions is when connected to other Macs for file sharing. Sending or retrieving sizeable files from my two Macs running High Sierra can sometimes fail with what can only be described as a network timeout: the copy process hangs for no apparent reason and never resumes, and I have to abort by relaunching the Finder. With the MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard this has never happened so far, and I’ve shared several large files in the past two weeks between it and my iMac running High Sierra.

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In my previous article, I mentioned two very usable browsers you can try to surf the Web under Snow Leopard, as Safari 5.1.10 is too old and unsupported. Jeremy reminded me of TenFourFox, which is more up-to-date. Since TenFourFox is a PowerPC-based browser, at first I thought Jeremy was suggesting running it under Snow Leopard via Rosetta, but it doesn’t work anyway. When I reread his tweet, I realised he said TenFourFox for Snow Leopard. I hadn’t realised there was a separate project for Intel Macs. Anyway, after some Web searching, I found TenFourFox Intel (a.k.a. “TenSixFox”), and also another project, called Arctic-Fox, which seems fairly recent as well. I haven’t had the time to properly test either, unfortunately.

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Another thing I wrote in my previous article was about the little-to-no iCloud functionality under Snow Leopard:

Predictably, iCloud (still called MobileMe in Snow Leopard) doesn’t work either. Login fails in the System Preference MobileMe pane and when setting up an iCloud account in Mail. The only way to access iCloud is therefore via the Web.

In the same tweet, Jeremy mentioned that he has been able to set up iCloud email accounts by using the direct incoming/outcoming mail server addresses and configuration. So I went back to Mail and tried again, but even creating a new account and manually entering all the settings found at this Apple Support page, I still was unable to set up an iCloud account. Mail kept telling me that “the icloud.com IMAP server rejected the password” for my account.

And with this, I think it’s all for now. I still welcome feedback via Twitter or email, and may write further updates on this subject in the future.

Introduction

My recent article, The reshaped Mac experience, received a lot of attention judging from the response on Twitter and the WordPress analytics — apparently, among other places, it reached Hacker News and Reddit. Unlike my four-part series ‌Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth, however, it didn’t attract any hate mail at all. The sheer majority of feedback I received was very positive, with many many people agreeing with me and my observations. A few — some provocatively, some genuinely curious — asked me something along the lines of, Well, if you dislike the current Big Sur UI and Mac experience, what’s an example of Mac OS UI and experience you DO like?

It’s a more than fair question, and this piece serves as an answer. When I wrote back to those who asked me, I replied Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. It was sort of a gut-reply based largely on fond memories of using that Mac OS version quite extensively.

When I purchased my 15-inch MacBook Pro in July 2009, it came with Mac OS X 10.5.7 (Leopard), but I immediately upgraded to Snow Leopard when it was released a month or so afterwards. As you know (and if you don’t, here’s a refresher), together with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, Snow Leopard was one of the Mac OS versions with the longest lifespan — almost two years, from August 2009 to July 2011, when the final 10.6.8 v1.1 minor release came out. On my 2009 MacBook Pro, I kept using it until mid-2012, as Mac OS X 10.7 Lion (released in July 2011) didn’t fully convince me at first, so I waited until at least version 10.7.3 before upgrading.

So, I used Snow Leopard on my 2009 MacBook Pro for about three years, and then again on a 2010 Mac mini that a friend gave me to maintain, as a sort of offsite backup. That Mac mini was kept on Mac OS X 10.6.8 for the whole four years it was in my custody (2011–2015) and it was switched off only twice during that period and maybe restarted four or five times in total. It enjoyed an insane uptime and it was a testament to Snow Leopard’s stability.

But back to my ‘gut-reply’, I wanted to be certain that my fond memories of Snow Leopard weren’t just nostalgia. While I am confident when I say that Snow Leopard is the most stable version of Mac OS, I wanted to make sure its user interface was really the good user interface and experience I was remembering. So, after a few frustrating attempts at creating a virtual machine on my current iMac with Mac OS High Sierra, I decided to install Snow Leopard on a USB flash drive, and boot my 2009 MacBook Pro (yes, it’s still alive & kicking) in Snow Leopard from that flash drive.

Installation

Ah, When Mac OS welcomed you after the installation process was complete…

Since the MacBook Pro doesn’t have an optical drive anymore, I had to create a bootable USB flash drive from my original Snow Leopard DVD Installer. The fastest method is to use Disk Utility — rather, an older version of Disk Utility, from a time when this application was really a utility, and you could use the Restore feature reliably to clone the bootable DVD to (in this case) an external volume.

From a bootable USB flash drive to another USB flash drive, installation was relatively fast, about 20–25 minutes. Although I would have preferred an external SSD for the speed, I must say that using Snow Leopard from the flash drive is a breeze nonetheless. The system is responsive and I haven’t noticed any particular lags.

User interface

Now let’s examine just a few aspects of Snow Leopard’s user interface — just like I did for Big Sur in my logbook — and draw comparisons with Big Sur’s interface.

The menu bar

Back in August 2020 when I started testing the first Big Sur beta versions, I wrote in my Big Sur logbook:

In Big Sur, the menu bar by default isn’t solid white, but has a noticeable degree of transparency: it takes the colour of the desktop wallpaper behind it, in an attempt to blend in with the rest of the desktop environment. Some may consider this sleek, but it’s just gimmicky and usability-hostile.

What happens when the desktop wallpaper has darker colours? Well, menu items and menu bar icons become white, of course. The problem is that the wallpaper doesn’t have to be too dark.

In other words, when Big Sur decides that the desktop background image is dark enough, text and icons on the menu bar become white. The problem is that there are cases where the background colour simply isn’t dark enough to warrant a change from black text and icons to white text and icons. Consequently, the contrast is too poor. The only option for better usability is to select Reduce transparency in System Preferences → Accessibility. This brings the menu bar back to a useful state, solid white with black elements.

In Snow Leopard, the menu bar has transparency set to on by default, but it’s definitely more subtle, even with darker desktop backgrounds:

In the top image, menu bar transparency is off; in the bottom image, transparency is on. The difference is almost negligible.

Only with certain background images that contain dark and light areas starkly juxtaposed can menu bar transparency become a bit of an issue under Snow Leopard, but that is partly mitigated by the visible drop shadow beneath the menu bar itself, which helps to make the menu bar stand out more:

Contrast, even in these conditions, tends to be more tolerable than in Big Sur, at least for my eyes. And in any case, in Snow Leopard you can quickly turn off transparency right in System Preferences → Desktop & Screen Saver:

I’ve been talking about ‘transparency’, whereas it’s actually ‘translucency’ — at least in Snow Leopard.

Finder windows

In Snow Leopard, Finder windows are essentially perfect from a user interface standpoint.

When I shared this over Twitter, Mario Guzmán observed that Things are nicely compartmentalized by color. You can distinctly tell each section of the window (even the damn scroll bars)… it’s not just one blob of white with grey symbols.

Exactly this. The window has clearly distinguishable areas: the Title bar (with the semaphore controls at the top left of the window, and the sidebar+toolbar show/hide toggle button at the top right), the Toolbar, the Sidebar (with colourful icons helping you quickly and easily locate items at a glance), the Path bar, the Status bar, and finally the scroll bars which are always visible.

Persistent up/down arrows and scroll bars are the right thing to do, usability-wise, and it is such a user-friendly design. The length of the ‘aqua blue’ bar immediately gives you an idea of how populated that folder you just opened is going to be. Further, if you need to rapidly scroll down, you just grab the bar with the mouse pointer and scroll.

In later Mac OS versions, scroll bars are set by default to appear only based on mouse/trackpad movement, which is a pity; many users probably don’t realise they can have scroll bars appear permanently, so they don’t have to time the mouseover action for the scroll bar to appear and then hope they’ll manage to grab it when they want to quickly scroll down a long list of elements.

I am once again reminded of that infamous quote by Alan Dye (Apple’s VP of Human Interface) from WWDC 2020, speaking of Big Sur’s UI redesign: ‌We’ve reduced visual complexity to keep the focus on users’ content. Buttons and controls appear when you need them, and they recede when you don’t. I still believe this is not a good approach in general, and especially for essential elements like scroll bars, which should always be visible by default, because they are UI elements whose usefulness isn’t limited to when you use them or interact with them — they signal something even when not strictly needed. In the case of the scroll bars it’s a visual estimate of how many elements a folder contains, how long a list of items is, and more importantly your current position when scrolling.

Back to Finder windows, here’s an “Apple’s attention to detail” detail: notice that icon in the bottom left of the window? It is a subtle visual cue that tells you if Finder icons (items) are sorted, unsorted, or simply snapped to a grid. When opening windows from read-only volumes, the icon of a crossed-out pencil appears here, meaning that you can’t modify the enclosed items or write to that volume.

Items are unsorted (Arranged by: None) — No icon in the bottom left corner

Items are sorted (by name, size, kind, etc.)

Items are snapped to grid

Window from a read-only volume

While I don’t find this UI detail to be crucial, it is certainly nice to have, and an example of those little things that contributed to make the Mac’s interface great. As I said above, it reflected a certain attention to detail and overall thoughtfulness I’ve seen progressively fade away in later Mac OS releases.

A look back at a few system apps, with occasional UI comparisons between Snow Leopard and Big Sur

Safari

5.1.10 was the last version of Safari running on Mac OS X 10.6.8. Here are a few things I still prefer over the current Safari:

The blue progress bar

The RSS button (you could read RSS feeds with Safari)

Another detail I very much prefer in the older Safari over more recent versions of Safari is how the plus [+] button near the address bar works. Its placement makes its function rather unequivocal: Add the current page to something. As usual, tooltips are helpful:

But what if I want to add this page to my Reading List? No worries, when you actually press the [+], a thoughtfully-designed sheet comes down, and you can put the current page exactly where you want: in your Reading List, in the Top Sites, or in your Bookmarks.

The other plus button, to open a new browser tab, is placed in such an obvious spot that you know what it does without even waiting for the tooltip to appear:

Now, let’s take a quick look at the UI in Big Sur’s Safari:

At first glance, there’s only one plus button in the app’s chrome. Try to look at this UI with fresh eyes and guess what the [+] button does. Despite its prominence, it just opens a new tab. If you want to add the current page to your Reading List, you have to move the mouse pointer inside the address bar, and at that point a tiny (+) will appear on the left side of the address bar.

But wait, if you want to add that page to your Bookmarks instead? Well, you’ll have to click the Share button in the toolbar, and here you’ll find the option to add the page to your Bookmarks…

Oh look, from here you can also add it to your Reading List. Why exactly can these actions be found under a ‘Share’ menu? Am I sharing this with someone else? It makes no sense, but it’s done this way because that’s how Share sheets work in iOS and iPadOS.

And if you want to add that page to your Top Sites Start Page? Unless I’ve missed something, you can’t do that directly. You can add the page to your Favourites, and then it’ll show in your Start Page.

I think this is enough of an example to show you how clunky and haphazard certain parts of Safari’s UI are under Big Sur.

Mail

Remember when Mail integrated support for RSS feeds? I used to find that useful. I never used Mail as my sole RSS client, of course, but it was great for following selected feeds and keeping an offline archive of all their articles. Even better: a searchable archive of all the articles. Back when Snow Leopard was the newest Mac OS release, I used to have Mac OS X Hints’s RSS feeds in Mail, and searching for specific articles or tips was sometimes quicker than using the website’s Search tool. And when Mac OS X Hints was shut down and maintained only in a read-only form online, having a few years of archived RSS feeds in Mail was certainly handy for searching past hints and tips.

iCal

Let’s draw a brief comparison between iCal in Snow Leopard and Calendar in Big Sur.

The old iCal is yet another example of how the user interface in Snow Leopard was consistent system-wide and throughout the various built-in apps. You have a main app window with clearly distinguishable colour-coded areas, well-placed controls and generally unambiguous icons. Everything you can click on is plainly visible, no discoverability issues. Here are iCal’s Day view and Week view:

If you look at the bottom left corner, when you click the ‘Mini calendar’ icon, only the mini-calendar will show/hide within the sidebar; the sidebar won’t go away.

Now let’s look at the same Day and Week views in Big Sur’s Calendar app:

Calendar looks minimalistic in comparison; maybe some will say it looks prettier, and I may agree in part. But apps should be more than just pretty to look at — they should be functional as well. In Calendar’s Day view, the UI is terse, and the elements appear placed without structure or consistency.

For instance, why does the mini-calendar appear on the right in Day view, but on the left in Week view? It’s as if Calendar isn’t sure whether to have a right sidebar or a left sidebar. And when, in Week view, you click on the ‘Mini calendar’ icon on the top left, the whole sidebar goes away:

Also, every button in iCal has a tooltip (usability wins here), while Calendar’s buttons don’t. And the placement of those icons near the semaphore controls in the top left corner still makes me cringe. Of course, now that in Big Sur the line between Title bar and Toolbar has been blurred, we have cases like Calendar where those controls in the top left of the app window — whose place should be in some sort of toolbar — find themselves in a sort of UI-No-Man’s‑Land. And why does the [+] button get separated when the sidebar appears? For logistic reasons, but not for logic reasons.

And why doesn’t the upper part of the app window have a fixed colour or appearance? In Day view without the sidebar, the top of the window is in a light grey colour, and it’s separated from the rest of the elements much like the Title bar/Toolbar in Big Sur’s Finder windows. But in Week view without the sidebar, the top of the window becomes white and blends with the rest of the app window. When the sidebar is visible, of course, the top of the window changes again, because in Big Sur the sidebar covers the whole left side of a window, including the top left area with the semaphore controls.

System Preferences

From a user interface standpoint, I’ve always liked how the older System Preferences’ main window had the preference panes neatly organised in categories, and while Big Sur’s ‘Show All’ button is not particularly cryptic, I always prefer the clarity of using text in buttons, especially when there’s enough space. I’m annoyed by the current tendency to iconise everything in an app’s interface, especially when the icon that replaces a text label is really not as self-explanatory as the designer thinks.

I also like that in Snow Leopard, the ‘Show All’ button is clearly a button, while in Big Sur, like in many other places of its UI, you realise it’s a button (and not just a decorative icon) only when you hover over it.

This may be more of a personal preference (pardon the pun), but I find the icon design to be more consistent under Snow Leopard than under Big Sur. If you look at the icons of the various preference panes in Big Sur, they appear to have been drawn by different people who never communicated among them during the design phase. They don’t seem to adhere to a unified æsthetic or icon language you find elsewhere in the system. Instead, the icons in Snow Leopard are similar to icons you would find in other application’s toolbars or Preferences windows.

When it comes to individual preference panes, comparisons between Snow Leopard and Big Sur become hard, because over time their features and functionality have changed and expanded. The one pane which has been extremely simplified, however, is the Bluetooth pane. Here’s the main view of such pane in Snow Leopard:

Details worth noticing:

• Under Snow Leopard you had the option of toggling discoverability without turning off Bluetooth entirely. I suppose this was useful to keep using the Mac with your paired devices without exposing the machine to other Bluetooth devices.
• For each device, added to the list on the left, you get a detailed view indicating what kind of device it is, which Bluetooth services it provides, and if the device is paired and connected.

This is the main view of the Bluetooth preference pane in Big Sur:

• The left side of the pane is pretty much a waste of space.
• In the Devices list, the only information you get is that the devices appearing on top are paired devices, and their current status, which can be Connected or Not connected. That’s it. Granted, for most people that’s probably all they have to know, but a more detailed view (maybe with a Show/Hide toggle) wouldn’t hurt.

As for the Advanced Bluetooth options, I’ll let the images speak for themselves:

Preview

Preview is a strange app for me. In the past I really didn’t use it that much, finding it pretty basic both as an image viewer/editor and a PDF reader. In later iterations, I’ve come to appreciate the added features, especially the Markup Toolbar and the well-designed Signature functionality. It’s very easy to create a signature and manage different signatures in Preview, a reminder that Apple still does something right, UI-wise.

But when we compare how the user interface was organised in Snow Leopard’s Preview, and its treatment in Big Sur, Snow Leopard wins another round. See for example how the sidebar used to work under Snow Leopard:

When the sidebar is visible, first you notice it has the same background colour as all the other sidebars present in the system and applications. Then you find some handy buttons at the bottom: you use them to quickly change the sidebar’s view — you can switch between Contact Sheet view, Thumbnails, Table of Contents, and Annotations.

Here’s Preview in Big Sur:

When the sidebar is visible, there are no visible controls at the bottom. Peculiarly, when you choose View → Show Markup Toolbar, a small toolbar also appears at the bottom of the sidebar, with a fairly cryptic (+) button you really have to click to understand what it does; it shows a menu with two entries: Insert Page from File… and Insert Blank Page:

Okay. Now here’s a usability detail that drives me nuts about the sidebar. There isn’t a simple button to toggle the sidebar on and off. The button is a menu and it shows Hide Sidebar as an option but not as a command or toggle. Same with the application’s View menu. At first I kept clicking on Hide Sidebar in order to make the checkmark go away and therefore show the sidebar. After a few attempts I finally understood that in order to make the sidebar appear, I have to select any other option from that section of the View menu (e.g. Thumbnails, Table of Contents, etc.).

 

Now, I might be slow, or tired, or stressed, and blame the user interface for something I should have realised sooner, something that is more intuitive than I think. But let’s have a look at the same menu in Snow Leopard’s Preview:

First of all, the menu’s hierarchy — while a level deeper than in Big Sur — is also clearer: you want to hide the sidebar? Select View → Sidebar → Hide Sidebar. If you want to change what’s displayed inside the sidebar, you can do so from the same submenu.

But when the sidebar is hidden and you want to show it, here’s how that menu changes:

A‑ha. Now the menu becomes: View → Sidebar → Show Sidebar, and of course the other sidebar view options are greyed out because currently the sidebar is hidden.

Yes, when you get the hang of the View menu in Big Sur’s Preview, it’s fractionally quicker than in Snow Leopard, but how that same menu is organised in Snow Leopard is more logical and user-friendly.

Disk Utility

The difference between the user interface of Disk Utility in Snow Leopard and Disk Utility in Big Sur can be summarised like this: one is functional, the other is pretty.

This is the main Disk Utility window in Snow Leopard:

And this is the main Disk Utility window in Big Sur:

Let’s forget about the quality and reliability of these two iterations (spoiler alert: Snow Leopard wins here, too), and let’s just focus on the user interface.

Like the iCal example seen above, Disk Utility in Snow Leopard is a clearly well-structured and organised application. We have general commands in the main toolbar, and five main sections in the bigger pane, related to the most important operations users may need to perform when managing disks: First Aid, Erase, Partition, RAID, Restore.

When you enter each of these sections, the pane clearly explains what to do and clearly shows what the options are. It’s a sophisticated UI, but well thought-out.

Big Sur’s interface feels like Disk Utility for Dummies: the main toolbar is gone, and those five sections are essentially gone as well. Now we have a unified, simplified toolbar with these buttons: Volume, First Aid, Partition, Erase, Restore, Mount/Unmount, Info. When you click on those entries that took an entire, detailed section in Snow Leopard, you now have a simple modal dialog or panel. Look at the difference between selecting First Aid in Snow Leopard and in Big Sur:

Detailed explanations, clear overview of the available options.

Just a Yes/No prompt. With terrible visual contrast on top of that.

One thing that always bugged me in more recent versions of Disk Utility is that View menu — specifically the option, in that menu, to show/hide the sidebar. Why, why would you want to hide the sidebar in an app like Disk Utility? Its purpose is to show you an overview of all disks detected by the system. You need to see them at all times. Yes, even if it’s just the internal volume — especially in Big Sur where the internal volume is not a monolithic item.

AirPort Utility

As I said on Twitter, I don’t think the current version of AirPort Utility is particularly bad, and I like its graphical view of how the wireless network is organised. But overall the older UI required fewer clicks to access the various options.

Other odds and ends

Browsing the Web

If you want to use Snow Leopard on an older Mac, or you manage to create a Snow Leopard virtual machine on a more recent Mac, you will need a more modern browser if you want to surf the Web with a modicum of security. Safari 5.1.10 is obsolete and incompatible with many popular websites and services like Twitter and YouTube.

Two usable browsers in Snow Leopard are:

• Firefox 45.9.0ESR, downloadable from here.
• Opera 25.0.1614.71, downloadable from here.

You can still do content blocking in Firefox by installing the legacy Ublock Origin extension from here. To install an unsigned extension, you’ll have to access the Configuration file by typing about:config in the address bar, search the xpinstall.signatures.required preference, and change the associated value to false.

Messaging and chat

It’s very limited, at least with first-party apps. Snow Leopard came with iChat, and you should be able to download FaceTime from the Purchased tab of the App Store app if you purchased it back in February 2011 when Apple made it available for $0.99. (FaceTime was included for free with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and later releases).

Both iChat and FaceTime don’t recognise your login with Apple ID, complaining of server errors, and so forth. You can still use iChat with a Google account, either by adding a ‘Jabber’ or ‘Google Talk’ account in the iChat account wizard. But since FaceTime only works with Apple accounts, in Snow Leopard it’s basically useless.

iCloud

Predictably, iCloud (still called MobileMe in Snow Leopard) doesn’t work either. Login fails in the System Preference MobileMe pane and when setting up an iCloud account in Mail. The only way to access iCloud is therefore via the Web.

The Mac App Store

I want to take this opportunity to complain about a specific aspect of dealing with an older version of Mac OS: installing older versions of third-party apps. Via the Mac App Store it’s not possible unless you find (either in the current catalogue or among your Purchased apps) an application that still has Snow Leopard as minimum requirement, which generally means an application that is still available on the Mac App Store, but no longer updated.

Otherwise, you’re out of luck. Now, if you have an older iOS device — even obsolete devices like the first-generation iPad or the first generations of iPod touch models — when you try to install an app you previously purchased (or, in some cases, even apps that are still currently available), you’re often given the option to download the last compatible version for the (older) iOS release installed on your device. That doesn’t happen on the Mac. You either can install an app, or you can’t, and a dialog box will inform you that the app can’t be installed because a certain newer version of Mac OS is required.

This is especially annoying, considering that a lot of Mac apps still work fine in Snow Leopard when you manage to install an older version. Why not offer a “Download the last compatible version” option on Mac OS too? Kudos to those Mac developers who have always offered their apps both via the App Store and their own websites, and even more kudos to those developers who still make older versions of their Mac apps available for download on their website.

Conclusion

This has been a fun ride, and while my reexamination of certain parts of Snow Leopard’s UI has been far from exhaustive, I hope I’ve offered a decent overview of what I consider the peak of the Mac user interface, and why. I wasn’t misremembering: Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was truly a solid release, both in terms of user interface design, software quality, and system stability. Three staples of the Mac experience that have all been declining, in various degrees, over the last decade.

One more thing…

• A retrospective look at Mac OS X Snow Leopard — Addendum