I mentioned last week on Your Mac Life that I’d like to see some changes in Leopard to make the interface more consistent, and that there were some windows I had seen with two different kinds of drop-down selection boxes. I ran across one just a few minutes ago, so I decided to quickly post it here.
The “all”, “Feed”, “is”, and “Aaron Adams…” drop-downs each do the same thing, but they look different. (I prefer the “Feed” type.) I know there’s another combination of drop-downs similar to this in Apple Remote Desktop somewhere.
Is it a nitpicky thing I’m pointing out? Maybe. Most people don’t notice and don’t care. I’m an attention-to-detail type, and I think a new OS release is the time to smooth off the edges. The interface is a user’s first point, and later, primary point of contact with the machine as long as they own it, and making it sleek, professional, and consistent, especially in the face of Windows Vista’s dark dinginess, certainly couldn’t hurt Leopard.
Addendum: I’m writing this in response to Obi-Wandreas’s comment because I can’t post pictures in comments.
Here’s a Smart Mailbox dialog from Mail:
It does the same thing, but uses only one type of drop-down control. Let’s be consistent everyone! 
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August 16th, 2006 at 1:05 pm
Just to play devil’s advocate, from another perspective, you see three types of interface with specific ideas.
Up top, the buttons (in this case “Smart Feed”) takes you to the panel with everything about “Smart Feeds.”
Below, you’ve got the “Big Pull-down menu” which is really eye catching, and has complete dominion over the behavior of everything below it.
The smaller menus define the details of precisely how it’s going to work.
I actually kinda like that better than the single pull-down menu type in Mail “Rules” & iTunes “Smart Playlists”