I actually found the various design upgrades to Apple’s website as interesting as the WWDC Keynote. Someone’s been hard at work over there.

One of the slickest items is how the search bar in the upper right corner behaves much like OS X’s Spotlight. It’s also live updating, so as you type strings in the field, the results change in a drop down, complete with thumbnail images.

Several pages have a static image, horizontal scroll treatment, kind of like Cover Flow but without all the crazy animations. It does present the subjects covered in the page in a nice visual manner. Note the slight transparent reflection, as if the products were photographed on a glass table.

The sidebars are made up of collapsing areas to minimize the amount of information on the page. A click has the titles slide away to reveal the contents. Nice idea, and the animation adds a touch of class.

Clicking on thumbnails brings up a larger image, not unlike the JavaScript “Lightbox” plugin used on many sites. But what’s really slick is the large image size takes your browser window size is taken into account. There’s also a diffuse shadow around the large image, really making it seem like it’s hovering over the page.

All in all, cool stuff, and possibly an even better redesign than the other Web 2.0 ones I’ve seen recently. I might actually say Safari wasn’t the only thing Apple updated to 3.0.

Disclosure: I own a tiny amount of Apple stock.

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