Proposal: Messages Window Update

[George Lambrou]

A minor update to my initial proposal:



Contact Photo Gloss: Improves visibility against background, also a nice aesthetic touch (in my opinion, anyway). Photo shadow has been reduced slightly.
iOS-style Message Indicators: Enhances the visibility of the indicator, and provides a little more familiarity to those moving to Mac via iOS. Mentions in group chats would be indicated by pulsating/flashing indicators.
Message Bar: Background colours tweaked for rounder look. Text entry field border and shadow have been enhanced for greater overall visibility; stylistic cues taken from what we've seen in Safari 4/5, iTunes 10, and the Mac App Store (I'm assuming that this is the aesthetic direction that Lion is going to take).
Other Minor Stuff: Join Chat button glyph now looks more like the iPhone's merge calls glyph; close tab button has been redone; audio/video chat glyphs are given a subtler appearance, matching the style of the level glyphs in my previous group chat proposal.

And two more ideas, that you can't see in the mockup:

Resolution Independence: I've tried to maximize the use of vector graphics and certain layer effects throughout my entire design process. Considering Apple's recent move towards high DPI displays, I thought it'd be a good idea to try to use as few raster elements as possible, so the move to more pixels could be made easier. Pretty much everything in the mockup that isn't a contact photo (that includes the gloss) is a vector graphic; I think the message bar could even be drawn entirely programmatically.

Multi-Touch: I was thinking we could incorporate some touch-gestures into the interface; we know that this is going to be a focus in Lion, and as far as I'm aware, Snow Leopard already provides frameworks for this, so we may as well start planning for it, right? I was thinking something like a two-finger swipe on the Magic Mouse (three-fingers on a trackpad) to switch between tabs, similar to how Safari does it, but with some animation in the message view to complete the effect; we could even implement the slow-motion-on-Shift functionality that can be found in other areas of OS X.

Anyway, that's it for this mockup. Any feedback you can offer is much appreciated. Thanks!

George Lambrou
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