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I promised myself I'd stay away from this thread, but...
Let's see just how the proposed design changes impact usability:
1) The search bar is hidden which means extra clicks to use it
2) The reflections on the cover mean there is less space available for the actual book details, which means that people will have to scroll to read them, more extra clicks
3) The icons have been split into two bars and the lower bar has been made smaller. That means that a new calibre user is going to have to:
a) Notice there are two sets of buttons
b) Hover her mouse over every button in the bottom set to find out what it does
3b) There is no way to logically divide the buttons in the main toolbar into two groups, if we use the OPs suggestion, then there will be three buttons in the top toolbar and 7 in the bottom, which means tons of wasted space on the top.
I can't think of any positive impacts it has on usability, beyond highlighting one set of features at the expense of others. Feel free to point out something I missed.
About the only thing I like in that mockup is the "native" OS X look and feel (colors, fonts, spacing), which means that calibre will integrate better. But to achieve that in a cross platform application means writing a separate UI specially for OS X. As I told user_none, I have nothing against that in principle, but I am not going to waste my time on it. My calibre TODO list has about 300 items on it. If someone else wants to, feel free, I wont refuse the patch.
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