I’m not loving the new desktop. It’s hard to believe that after all these years of publicly mocking Microsoft and Vista, Apple appears to be aping one of the ugliest and most useless features of Vista: Aero.

The transparent menu bar is a disaster. Michael Tsai agrees, calling it “insane.” Looking around the conference it’s easy to tell which machines are running Leopard, they’re the ones with the horrid acid-pastel menubars. The first corrective solution, Non-Transparent Menu Bar, was posted a few hours after the keynote. Personally, I would have called it a de-uglifier.

The interaction of windows butted up against the menubar is also sub-optimal. In all previous OS X iterations, there has been a faint grey line at the base of the bar. That prevented windows from visually grouping with the menubar. Now that the bar relies on whatever incidental color is leaching through, window title bars appear to clump up with the menubar.

About the Dock’s new glowing blue LED blob: Didn’t we learn our lesson after putting the original iMac’s into Aqua’s menus? Or Brushed Metal? Mimicking physical elements do not necessarily make for good computer interface design. This is looking dated already and it’s only been a day.

The faux-perspective Dock floor implies the bottom edge of a portal into a 3d space. The problem here is that the windows go behind the furthest edge of the Dock’s floor. That means we’re sort of looking into a box and our windows, the most important content, are psychologically far away from us, all the way down at the bottom. Nevermind that the menubar doesn’t exist in that space in any logical way. Having seen Beryl’s true 3D windows, the Finder feels flat and dated. And that oversized drop shadow is so big it’s nearly comical, except that we might have to live with it for a year or two.

Stacks. Like so much else, they demo well. Beyond that they’re really strange, especially regarding usability. I guess it will be nice to see the icon of the last-downloaded item (or newest item in a folder), even if that means I’ll always have a DMG, ZIP or unremarkable text file down there. Most of the time we’ll be hitting the Downloads stack to get to the most recent download, but here Stacks defies logic and moves that icon to the farthest position from the mouse. (this seems to be a Leopard design pattern) It seems to me that the most recent thing should be closest to the mouse. Also, and I don’t know the exact number, but beyond a certain amount of files, stacks revert to a limited grid view which shows a few dozen items. My Downloads folder is a junk collector, currently there are 225 items crufting away in there. Stacks are mostly useless for me.