| Shame to see you're being poopoo'd — there are clearly huge similarities with the upcoming OS X Lion — although, to be fair to your detractors, you did pick the worst example. The new Application Launcher looks exactly like Launchpad. Darken the wallpaper, display installed applications as icons with the names below them, just as in Springboard.app. The window selector looks exactly like Exposé — not even a new feature of OS X. Darken wallpaper, windows appear in a miniaturised form of themselves to give you an overview of all open windows. The workspace manager looks just like Mission Control's space selector. In Lion the spaces are shown horizontally at the top of the screen, but both Gnome and Lion show the spaces on the opposite side of the screen to the default dock position. I have to say, the space is used more effectively in Gnome by stacking them vertically. The switches (instead of checkboxes) as visible in the YouTube video embedded (0:04) are clearly inspired by iOS' ON|OFF switches. As are the sliders (visible at 0:05). (Tenuous one, but the Close buttons used in the Exposé view are very similar to the "Remove Widget" buttons used in Dashboard when holding Alt.) (I don't know what the old System Preferences window of Gnome looked like, but it does look awfully similar to OS X's.) Now, admittedly, there are of course differences (such as being able to close windows from Gnome 3's exposé view) and I don't expect everyone to invent an entirely new UI — I acknowledge that the use of a windowed environment isn't Apple's invention. But I do refute the idea that this UI hasn't taken inspiration from Lion and I refute the idea that it simply doesn't matter. |
Really for each example we'd have to consider it's history, and how it relates to similar elements and features. Perhaps both OSX and Gnome were inspired by a third party? Maybe it's just the most obvious way to implement that feature?