Path Finder 4.8: now with new duds

September 22, 2007

As Sasha alluded to in the previous post, we have lots of cool stuff coming soon for you to play with. I’d like to talk about a couple of them to give you an idea what we we have in store for you in the upcoming Path Finder update, version 4.8.

Depeche Mode

One of the trickiest things for OS X developers is designing how their application looks. Like or hate it, every time Apple releases a new version of OS X it’s like the designers at Fashion Week in Milan trotting out next season’s hot new looks. Will it be a new version of aqua? Will brushed metal get called back from the minors? Or will the spinning beach ball get a high fashion makeover?

From what I can tell there are least three major window styles in Mac OS X 10.4: aqua and the unified toolbar, brushed metal, and the newish “dark aqua” as seen in iTunes and the iLife applications. (Let us not talk about the weird wood panelling found in Garageband.) For the most part, though, there’s two major window styles: aqua and brushed metal.

Path Finder has historically straddle the divide between these two window styles by offering a preference to switch between either one, with a recent Path Finder update swapping in an approximation of the iLife dark aqua look for brushed metal.

In some ways this is great - the aqua lovers get all of their unified toolbar goodness and those who prefer the darker, more manly brushed metal / dark aqua look can have their macho and eat it too. This made things difficult for us, however, as we were constant tweaking and fussing with two separate but equal visual styles.

The Style Council

In Path Finder 4.8 this dual technicolor dream coat is no more. We are now introducing a new, single look for Path Finder based that closely follows the Mac OS X 10.5 window style. This means that we no longer have to split our efforts across two separate visual styles and as well Path Finder 4 users running Path Finder under either Tiger or Leopard will get the same visual experience.

Pictures speak louder than words, so here’s a couple of screenshots:

Here’s Path Finder 4.8 running under Mac OS X 10.4:

And here’s Path Finder 4.8 running under Mac OS X 10.5

Having a unified look means we can start really optimizing Path Finder from a visual standpoint. We know Path Finder is far from winning any interface beauty pageants and this is something we want to start addressing as we continue to refine and improve its interface.

There are no bands I can think of with the word “leopard” in their name

If you haven’t sussed this out by now, the fact that we’re showing Path Finder 4.8 running on Mac OS X 10.5 means that this upcoming Path Finder release is our first to officially be considered “Leopard (unless Apple changes something before the October release) compatible”. Things still may break when Apple finally gets OS X 10.5 into our grubby hands, but from what we can see we are Leopard ready.

So you get OS X 10.5 compatibility (with a caveat) and a brand-spanking new interface, and we’re just getting started. We’ll be posting more information about the upcoming Path Finder 4.8 release in the coming days, so check back for more details soon!

Posted by neilio at September 22, 2007 7:44 AM