Apple's Minimise, Maximise and Close Window Buttons...

Did you read my small rant about Spotify back in October last year? If you didn’t like it I wouldn’t read this one, it is in a similar vein?

With the new release of iTunes 10, with it’s new icon, and iTunes Ping (remember that?) came a small, but huge, change to the application; the repositioning of the minimise, maximise and close window buttons (Windows users don’t have to worry about this one). These buttons have always sat in a horizontal line on the top left of the window, however for some unexplained reason the buttons in iTunes 10 decided that being horizontal was boring and became vertical?

Moving these buttons is a trend that is seeming to catch on too… the fantastic piece of software Reeder and Apple’s App Store have also slightly repositioned these buttons, nudging them to be vertically centred in the window bar, see the picture at the top.

Neither of these modifications are bad, however it completely breaks the uniformity of operating system’s interface. For advanced users this change at the worst is a little annoying, however for users who struggle to find their way to the power button computer this change can be really confusing.

The only justification I can see for these changes is that Apple is doing a bit of testing to see the feedback on the button change for their next release of OSX: Lion; if people like the change then it will head across to all applications, if users don’t like it then it simply won’t! Either way, I’m looking forward to some form of consistency restored to interface!