iTunes 7 and the Scrollbars

Or where has all the Aqua gone?

If the use of all-cap headers didn’t stir up enough debate, the new-look scrollbars in iTunes 7 have certainly provoked a lot of comment. Actually there are two types of scrollbars in iTunes 7 — one used throughout the application, and one used in the Cover Flow view.

The most obvious change is that the scrollbars have lost their Aqua appearance, and have taken on a flatter, duller appearance that wouldn’t look out of place on a Linux distribution. Cover Flow, on the other hand, has gone for the black scrollbars often seen in Dashboard widgets, or in some of the head-up-displays in other applications.

That there are two different styles of scrollbar in iTunes 7 isn’t necessarily a problem — after all, the Cover Flow view would look pretty daft with a standard Aqua scrollbar slapped on top of it. But why did the Aqua get drained out of the remaining scrollbars? Why does iTune reject the built-in Aqua scrollbars in favor of a custom control? Is this new move a way of Apple saying, “Yeah, we’ve done bright and colorful, and now that Vista has caught up we’re going to make Mac OS X look more refined / serious / professional?”

Well, a good user interface should not obscure the content. That is, if the interface is too attention-grabbing then it will be harder to focus on the actual content, and harder to be productive with that interface. The fact that there is an option in System Preference to choose the Graphite theme instead of the standard Blue theme indicates that Apple knew that some people would find the bright blue controls of Aqua too distracting. Were the scrollbars changed in iTunes 7 because the Aqua ones were too distracting? If so, the choice of some of the background colors has had an unfortunate consequence: the new scrollbars are now too similar to the adjacent background, making the scrollbars hard to find.

The empty track of the scrollbar is now more noticeable than the part you actually drag — the exact opposite of the Aqua scrollbars — which doesn’t help.

Perhaps these scrollbars are a consequence of iTunes’ unusual nature: it is an application that runs on both Mac OS X and Windows, plus it contains a lot of web-based content when you go into the iTunes Store. Having to present a unified appearance with the challenges of cross-platform requirements, plus a mix of web-like and app-like presentation, required a non-Aqua approach. The scrollbars are probably the most immediately obvious change to the control colors within iTunes 7, but this approach is also taken with the table column headers, checkboxes, and so on.

Regardless of the reasoning behind the new-look scrollbars, the ripples they’re causing are getting quite intense.