Leopard’s Dock and the HIG
Craig Hockenberry has a great post about how the Leopard Dock violates the Apple’s own perspective and lighting guidelines:
The floor displayed on the Dock does not use the perspective of the desk in front of you, nor does it appear as a shelf. Because there’s a difference between the floor angles and the traditional desktop icon angles, many icons look wrong.
An example is the Trash, which has a slight tilt forward. The Transmit truck also looks like its pirouetting on the front-left tire.
Lots of Apple and third-party applications have never actually followed the Mac OS X icon guidelines. In most cases I think this is OK because the result is often prettier or more easily understood than it otherwise would be. The new Dock, however, makes the majority of existing application icons look wrong, for no particular reason. What good is eye candy if it makes things look worse?
