Apple TV is now on sale at Costco, according to a report from Ars Technica. This follows other recent reports that Apple TV would be sold through Target and Best Buy.

Apple is a consumer electronics company. As a friend said, what’s surprising is how un-newsworthy that is today.

Steve Jobs first admired Sony as a role model for Apple, then began to implement that vision step-by-step with steady progress, including a corporate name change to Apple Inc. and now Wednesday’s revealing conference call announcement that revenue from iPhone and AppleTV will be amortized over 24 months, effectively adopting a subscription model while stabilizing control over their quarterly numbers.

Like a deftly executed magic trick as mysterious as it is delightful, Apple changed itself into a consumer electronics company right in front of everyone, and now we barely notice.

Expect Leopard to surprise and delight with Core Animation, but animation itself has always been at the core of the Mac OS X user experience. Remember the first time you tried to log in with the wrong credentials and the Login Window shook? The window shook, the credentials disappeared, and you understood. That’s good design, made possible by animation.

Think of the many other ways you’ve seen designers try to solve that problem. An alert pops up saying invalid user name or password, or maybe that text appears directly in the window, perhaps near where you typed. A little yellow triangle adds a warning, and sometimes there’s a rude beep.

Solutions like these often add things and clutter the experience, complicating what was already a troubled interaction. The wonderful thing about animation is that, done right, it lets the designer replace clutter with an elegant simplicity.

Good animation is also fun in a way that can be hard to describe but unmistakable when you encounter it, perhaps because good animation builds on what we already know of the real world and how things behave. Recognizing familiar behavior helps us model in our heads what’s happening onscreen and leads to a stronger sense of mastery and confidence. Recognition → understanding → confidence → fun.

The animations in Mac OS X range from obvious to subtle and from tiny to enormous. They range in quality too, but the good overwhelmingly outnumber the dubious. Surveyed as a whole, they represent an impressive though under-appreciated investment by Apple, and a confidence that while you might not notice the individual details, you’ll certainly notice their combined effect.

And you do notice. It’s part of why you like using a Mac. And from what we’ve seen of Leopard, Apple TV, and the iPhone, it’s about to get…

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Mail adds a nice design touch to multiple address selection. Here’s a simple email message with three recipients: Jefferies, Lisa, and Stella.

Select Lisa and Jefferies, one after the other, and watch what happens:

Look at the To: field.
Hover over Lisa. popup arrow appears  background darkens
Select Lisa. popup arrow remains  background goes dark  text goes white
Hover over Jefferies.
Select Jefferies too. popup arrow disappears

The current implementation includes a design flaw. Although Mail displays the selected addresses as a single visual element, it doesn’t treat them that way when you right-click on them. When you right-click on an individual address, a contextual menu appears featuring actions you can perform on that address, like Remove Address:

Right-clicking anywhere on the combined selected addresses should display a modified contextual menu with actions appropriate for the combined addresses, like Remove Selected Addresses. Instead, the same contextual menu appears, tailored for the particular selected address you happened to click on:

This violates the illusion that the selected addresses are now a single element, weakening the feature.

And there’s one curious aesthetic decision involving the comma used to separate the selected address names. As addresses are selected, they retain their original positions relative to their unselected state. This makes sense since it keeps the address names from jumping around as you select them. Apple inserts a comma between the names to separate them, which also makes sense:

But what makes less sense is that extra space before the comma. Maybe it was added for visual balance to help bridge that wide gap, or maybe it was a simple oversight. Either way, it looks a bit odd.