Plastic.
Paul Thurrott’s Tiger revew has gotten some buzz this weekend because, well, Paul’s a Windows columnist. (Look at the URL.) It’s a balanced tour of the new OS; no obsessive fawning, and no knee-jerk loathing either. What stood out for me is that he points out that Mail 2 has no clothes (or, at least, no consistent UI):
The brushed metal apps are still there, but the pinstripe style has been replaced, for the second time, with the “plastic” style. The token plastic application, incidentally, is Mail 2 […] The toolbar buttons, however, are bizarre looking and unlike the icons found in any other Mac OS X applications, another case of Apple trouncing all over its own user interface conventions. It’s astonishing to me that Mac fanatics let the company get away with that.
I guess I’m not a fanatic, then, because the screenshots of Tiger Mail have been really bugging me since they were first released. I had held out hope that the early pictures were of prototype versions of the app, with further UI tweakage to follow; clearly, that didn’t happen, and this is what we’re stuck with. Here’s hoping the app isn’t too hard to hack (first order of business: remove the bizarre pale-green button backgrounds).