You know, software companies never cease to amaze me. Whether their products turn out mediocre or amazing, the decisions they make along the way almost always can be questioned. Pictured right, we have a good example of this.

For those of you not familiar, this is a shot of Apple’s Mail.app toolbar. It compares the original toolbar button design proposal to the final version. Guess which one is the proposal?If you don’t have Leopard already, you may think the left-most buttons are what was used in the final version of the OS. Unfortunately, you’d be wrong. Although it makes more sense for this style of button to be used, considering it’s metal appearance is very similar to the rest of the buttons in Leopard, Apple has an issue with consistency. As a result, they made it so all rounded buttons had a distinct look to the standard metallic buttons, and that look is shiny blue…aqua…thingy.

My point is, although Leopard uses a more consistent window style, which is a big improvement from Tiger and older versions of OS X, Apple is a company which will possibly be cursed with a knack of making inconsistent decisions on an almost constant basis.

Oh well?