I guess I should have seen this coming. During the last round of Portal GUI design (see Take 5), I decided officially to move the design of the application to the smaller, more widget-like option. This means that all the small, blue windows used in the mockups on the Portal Website and in the more recent Portal Forums are images of the actual main window design.
I realize now that making the window look like a widget implied to many people that Portal had become a widget. That is not the case: Portal is not a widget. I simply want Portal to stay as small and uncomplicated as possible: easy to use, easy to push out of your way.
I believe the main areas of confusion were the lack of glass close/min/max buttons in the top left corner and the use of the little italics “i” in the top right corner. I made it this way on purpose, since I think swapping the two out makes the window look funny. But then again, I’m not a GUI designer (and I honestly don’t have a clue what I’m doing). I like the flip capability of widgets, and think it makes a lot of sense to put the preferences on the back of a window, and I’d like to see that be a part of a real application window some day. I guess I figured since Core Animation was pitched as a way to add cool graphics to an interface, it would be able to handle window flipping like this.
Anyway, I just wanted to clear that up ASAP. To help you visualize Portal as a real app, here’s a mockup done by MDA Forum member Anima
And here’s one of my own, an UNO-fied version:
