Sebastiaan has summarized a bunch of the UI changes in Snow Leopard. The roundup has some nice observations of little things I had not noticed yet.

Here’s a great article on spatial thinking as it applies to software usability. Now I wonder about where I can use this to improve things in my own software, which is a sign of a good article.

Apple has improved their Software Update dialog on Windows. This addresses people’s issues with ‘forcing’ Safari on people who didn’t want it.

Jesper at Waffle posted about Apple and their Windows apps. I’d been meaning to give this some thought and list my annoyances with how Apple software behaves differently on Windows. I think this sums it up:

Apple knows how to behave on their own platform. When I talk to Windows-using friends, Apple is legendary for being bad Windows citizens. I do not think that’s the case myself. iTunes, for example, is often brought up as a slow resource hog, something that I never saw after the initial dog-slow iTunes 4.1 or the initial dog-slow Safari 1.0 beta. (Maybe Apple’s Windows QA leaves something to be desired.) But Apple’s certainly not doing their best to be a good Windows citizen.

As noted by Macworld, the 10.5.2 update to Leopard is an amazing response to customers. It addresses most of the issues people had with the UI of Leopard. The most visible being Stacks and the Translucent menu bar. The one remaining UI gripe was the 3D dock appearance, which is not a usability issue.

I’ve been expecting this update since before Leopard was released. Small changes made during the beta cycle showed that Apple was listening, and now comes one big response. I’m glad they did, and I’m hoping they continue this trend.

via Daring Fireball