Rounded Corners

October 26, 2007

Funny thing about rounded corners. You either love them or you hate them; I’m quite schizophrenic on the subject. When I first built the Andrew’s Mac Tips site everything had rounded corners.
 

 
Lots of people liked them and wanted to know how I did it. I liked them too, otherwise I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble; but eventually I decided that they didn’t really serve any purpose, and they looked a little too “whimsical.”

Then I went all sharp edged and simple and square.

Mac OS windows have rounded top corners as a rule and I can understand that; there’s a lot of history to them, and they — in a subliminal way — suggest that if you want to resize a window: don’t look here, do it at the bottom-right corner.

As for the menu-bar: I was a little peeved — when I first saw Macs — that it too was rounded, but I came around. When Panther gave way to Tiger they went for a shiny title-bar, but it looked (and still looks) more like a smudge than a sheen to me.

Now Leopard has a new title-bar; all the focus has been on the fact that it’s semi-transparent. But look! No more rounded corners!
 

 
The Mac OS just lost its trademark. If the new title-bar reminds me of anything, it’s the title-bar of the iPhone. Are we slowly transitioning to the iPhone paradigm — one notch at a time?

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