Waiting for Review Day 8: Redesigned Crayon Picker

Apple deemed it important enough to put it on the “here’s the rest of the new features in OS X 10.11 that we didn’t have time to talk about” slide, so one of the first things I did after I installed El Capitan this afternoon was check out the new crayon picker. I’d post a screenshot of it, but I don’t think I’m supposed to under Apple’s NDA (that’s a top secret crayon picker, thankyouverymuch). Instead, I’ll describe it to you.

Imagine the old crayon picker. Flat design, colors, crayons. Now imagine it with—wait for it—colored pencils. Yes, that’s right. The new crayon picker is actually a colored pencil picker. If you need to take a moment to grieve, I understand. I too feel like my childhood has been torn violently away from me. I too question this new direction Apple is taking. What’s next? Pens? Markers? [shudder] I guess we can comfort ourselves with the fact that the picker has been smartly reorganized: the shades of gray are all in a neat horizontal line at the top, followed by rainbow rows of varying brightness. Thank goodness.

Another visual tweak I’ve noticed so far is that the spinning beachball is…well…rainbowier. Like… [RAINBOW INTENSIFIES]. I’ve noticed that because I see it quite often; El Capitan isn’t exactly speedy on my Early 2011 MacBook Pro. I’m hoping that continued optimization throughout the summer will make it a little snappier, but if not, I can live with it until my long-awaited re-designed 15″ Skylake Space Grey Retina MacBook Pro is unveiled in all its thin, Jony Ive-ified glory. <3

The San Francisco font, like Helvetica Neue (and pretty much everything else), looks terrible on my non-retina screen. It makes me a little sad, actually. On the other hand, the desktop picture included with El Capitan is flipping gorgeous. I’m weird in that I love using Apple’s included desktop photos instead of personalizing with my own. Ergo, my desktop will likely be showing off El Capitan for many, many months.

Anyway, I know this post wasn’t about my new app again, but there’s just so much to talk about in light of WWDC. I watched a couple of the live-streamed sessions today about Xcode and Swift and it seems like there’s a lot of really useful new features in both. It’s a great time to be an Apple developer: especially for a beginner like me!