Retrospective on Backup

First new Mac UI screenshots

I said that I'd share some early (unfinished) screenshots from our upcoming Retrospect X release for Mac OS X, and I'm here to make good on that promise.

These are the very first public views of what we're working on, so be warned, everything you see here is subject to change, and there are definitely rough placeholders in places, like all the icons, for example.

Here we go...

The image above shows a portion of Retrospect X's new Dashboard view, which will be the default view upon launch. In the left navigation area, you can see the main object containers where you will select/add/forget various objects related to backup. This main Dashboard view will display all Retrospect operations, whether backup, restore, or administrative, such as a disk grooming operation. Above the contents view in the right pane, you can see the scope buttons used for narrowing the context of the view. Scope buttons will provide a sort of instant reporting capability in various sections of the UI, and we're excited about the way they'll allow users to dial in to see very specific information.

This screenshot shows how pre-defined scope buttons can be combined with user-defined scoping criteria to provide highly-focused reports and views. Lots of customization will be available here.

Well, that's what I have to show you today. I hope that you found it interesting, and that you feel free to comment on what you see. I'll share more screenshots soon.

New Retrospect UI Meeting @ Apple Today

When it comes to developing backup software, several factors are critical:

• Reliability—reliable, accurate restores are paramount
• Performance—software shouldn't be the bottleneck
• Features—must meet the needs of the market

Though not a feature per se, an application's user interface ties all the features together and through its intuitiveness (or lack thereof) can increase performance and reliability. On the other hand, a bad UI can make a reliable, fast, and feature-rich application totally lame.

We're taking Retrospect X's UI design very seriously. We started by hiring a UI engineer who had never before worked on or with Retrospect, and we took a good long look at the applications we love, like iTunes and iPhoto. We made some mock-ups in Photoshop, and then we hit Interface Builder with a passion.

About two weeks ago, we went over the UI-so-far with Apple's interface guru, John Geleynse, plus a couple of other Apple folk. That meeting generated some great thought processes and new direction for specific areas of the UI...and a flurry of activity in both Interface Builder and Photoshop.

Today, we're getting some more of John's time. Once we've groked his recommendations and made more improvements to Retrospect X's UI, we'll share some screenshots here.