Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Kuler 2.0 Desktop Rant
Wednesday, July 2, 2008 
I liked and used the Kuler 1.0 Desktop AIR client. Not often, but I enjoyed it when I did use it.
I am completely not digging the 2.0 interface at all. The first version had this elegant eggy-shape to it, showing how applications could abandon system chrome for providing UI space display. Cool. The way 2.0 does this in my opinion is really ugly and harkens back to nasty old winamp skins from eight million years ago.
The notched close, minimize, and info buttons look tacky. If you have the desktop on top of any other windows, it adds to the nastiness. The kuler logo notched out on the left top side just reaffirms the ugliness of the UI. The dropdown @ the top of the UI is too prominent in my opinion, I think it would look better at the bottom, giving more visual weight to the actual stuff you're browsing.
You still can't resize this thing. Boo.
On OS X, when I give Kuler focus, my menubar up top in the OS is completely empty. WTF.
You can pull a swatch out of the main application to create another window with just that swatch... but you can only grab it by the swatch squares or below, not by the titlebar UI that fades up around it when you mouse over it. I LIKE how you can resize this pullout window though. Nice.
The default color swatch presentations make the whole thing look uneven. The top banner area is short vertically, and you've got this tall bottom area with really large color swatches, making the whole thing feel really heavy and uncoordinated.
The scrollbar is essentially a grey thumb bar (with an almost imperceptible track) - it almost looks like a swatch color itself.
Functionality aside, the desktop client for Kuler has taken a step backwards in my opinion. The UI isn't up to snuff quite yet.
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