Paleta El C-apple-tan

I think my favorite feature so far of El Capitan is the newly-redesigned spinning wait cursor (colloquially known as the spinning beachball, SBOD, or pizza wheel).

Since the 2002 release of Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) the SBOD has looked like this (magnified):

WaitCursor-300p by Source. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia

With the release of El Capitan, Apple flattened the spinner’s design to match the rest of the UI, taking cues from the UI colors introduced in iOS 7 and OS X 10.10.

“OS X 10.11 Beta Beach Ball” by Apple Inc. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Here’s a close-up of the El Cap spinner. Pardon the hipster Instagram filter.

But wait…

I noticed that the colors carried through to other elements in the UI:

The new About This Mac window in El Capitan, now sporting a unified toolbar window style. Call me old-school if you will, but I think this is going to take some getting used to. I miss the “About This Mac(intosh)” title. Extra bonus retro points for those that remember the Silicon Valley easter egg that existed from System 1 through Mac OS 8.

After looking at this for admittedly longer than one might expect, it dawned on me that these colors looked familiar. While the order is rearranged, the storage graph’s UI colors map eerily well to the original rainbow Apple logo colors.

By Rob Janoff [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The new UI colors seemed to pop more and be brighter than those in the logo. I took a quick detour into Photoshop to confirm my suspicions:

Original rainbow Apple logo colors vs. El Capitan beachball colors (sampled with Photoshop’s color picker tool using the 11×11 average setting)

In a nice nod to its origins, Apple has come full-circle in design language. The classic six-color Apple logo exemplified “flat design” before it was a thing, and now it’s back in El Capitan, in spirit, anyway.

What’s in a name? (or: FTFY, Apple)

El Capitan represents a fine-tuning of Yosemite’s bold change in direction, much the same way Snow Leopard improved incrementally on Leopard and Mountain Lion was a refinement of Lion. To go along with the old naming strategy, recognizing that El Capitan is an iteration on Yosemite (both named after mountains), I propose that we call El Capitan “Mountain Mountain*.” (hey, it beats OS X Weed, right Craig Federighi?)

*or, if you prefer, OS X Spinal Tap: “This one goes to 10.11”. (thanks, @JonyIveParody)