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I am personally very happy with your explanation and I completely understand where you are coming from. Apple usually comes up with very elegant UX solutions an

I am personally very happy with your explanation and I completely understand where you are coming from. Apple usually comes up with very elegant UX solutions and sometimes it's just impossible (read, insanely hard) to figure out something different and better at the same time. If it was my duty I'd have come up with the same kind of switchboard design. However, you didn't comment on the mouse icon. Maybe the inspiration from OS X's in this particular (and very minor) case went overboard. I think that things like this give lots of ammunition to naysayers and people who are destructively critic in nature. Maybe it would be a good idea to make sure there are no isolated UI elements (like icons) that draw a high amount of verbatim visual inspiration from Apple's. ;-)

aroman 13y ago
Thanks for the followup -- I agree. I didn't comment on the mouse icon simply because I didn't make it. Switchboard does not ship with icons, it simply uses whichever relevant icons are available in the theme (e.g "preferences-appearance"). Personally, I agree with you that the mouse icon (and I've stated this elsewhere) is needlessly similar to OS X's. Frankly, the designer likes Apple' design aesthetic and probably liked their icon, and tried to create his own take on it. Which is fine, but yeah -- it probably shouldn't be something we ship with, given our long-standing history of perceived similarity to OS X.