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Apple Explains Interface Differences
WCityMike writes "This switch document for developers details the interface differences between Microsoft Windows and the Aqua interface used in Mac OS X. Written on a layman's level, it actually makes for pretty interesting reading!"
Look at the screenshot of the power settings in Windows. The reason it looks like that is because the computer that Apple happened to use for the screen shot did not have the "turn off disk", "standby", and "hibernate" features and as such those things were missing from the screenshot. Had those things been there, then the screenshot would have looked full. Just a little misleading
Well, why didn't the size of the dialog shrink if those features weren't there? That's Apple's point.
Most application interfaces are just a little more complex than a toaster.
Consistency is the most important part of a UI - a user will get used to the behaviour of certain controls/widgets, if your app comes along and uses it's own that behave differently, you just broke consistency and the user will have to waste time deducing the behaviour rules of your control.
Windows has become a hive of confusing and inconsistent interfaces, not only because people like Adobe write their own tab controls, but people like Creative and whoever wrote BlackIce discard the standard interface entirely and use their own hideous bitmap based monstrosities.
Not to mention the fact that using standard controls saves a hell of a lot of time developing custom ones. Obviously some controls simply won't exist and you'll have to make them yourself, but with a reasonable set of standard ones and a good canvas control you have most things covered.
Chris "Ng" Jones
cmsj@tenshu.net
www.tenshu.net
>By switching to OS X, Apple threw out 15 years of hard work, just to release an OS with an inferior UI on an inferior kernel.
Yes, a kernel that rarely crashes is indeed inferior. Likewise, a kernel that allows developers to build applications based on standards is a poor choice.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
Apple is just trying to ensure that their OS's reputation of being user-friendly isn't damaged by overzealous developers. New users don't know enough to distinguish between the OS and the applications that run on it, so an app that's hard to use reflects negatively on their OS.
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No, actually he does not say that. What I read there is that he doesn't necessarily agree with Apple's "new direction", and has decided that the difference between PC and Mac interfaces is now negligible. Obviously, a lot of people disagree.
Cocoa could not, no-way-no-how, have been ported to OS 9. While I miss my old spacial Finder too, I realize that it does not scale at all for the large numbers of files UNIX - and indeed, things like digital photography/music collections - requires.
By switching to OS X, Apple threw out 15 years of hard work, just to release an OS with an inferior UI on an inferior kernel. And their interface in many ways no longer follows the principles that Apple themselves set out so brilliantly back in 1984, and others tried to emulate with varying degrees of success (don't even get me started on the Dock).
Inferior kernal? Smoke another one, buddy.
I've heard these arguments over and over about the Dock. No one has a problem with the dock unless they are already thoroughly entrenched in some other mechanism. I'm convinced that it is the pain of un-learning something else that makes people hate the Dock. Try this - put some newbies in front of Mac OS 9 and tell them to launch the browser. They won't be able to do it. Where is the browser? 4 levels down, inside the Apps folder, with no visible way to get there. OS X solves this. The dock may have some significant limitations, but it's hardly the disaster some make it out to be.
As for throwing out 15 years of work, if you'll check the aforementioned Aqua UI guidelines, you'll see that it's not true. They have built upon that foundation. It's practically identical. I still have the original 10-book set of UI guidelines, and it really hasn't budged. If anything they've added to it - such as the new mode for dialogs (status, reason, action). Things like 'verb' button-labels remain.
But there's absolutely no point in buying a closed platform when the software, specially designed for that platform, sucks. At least with PCs, I can run BeOS on a laptop; with Macs, such is no longer an option.
You know, that is an opinion.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
They mentioned keyboard shortcuts, but the left out the most important thing that Windows gets right.
I haven't used a Mac in five years, but I have used Linux and keyboard support sucks. Sure, if you never run X at all you can do anything from the keyboard, but type "startx" and you're screwed.
In Windows you can do everything except specific drawing tasks without having a mouse. (Using Autocad I can actually do some drawing tasks without a mouse using keyboard coordinate entry.) And dialog boxes, I never reach for the mouse to answer a Windows dialog box.
The very first version of Windows I used was 3.0 and it got this right. I've never seen a non-Windows GUI OS that matched the keyboard support of any Windows OS.
Why can't Gnome and KDE developers adopt the simple standard of requiring a "hot-letter" for every menu item and every dialog box item including buttons and selection widgets.
It's ironic how MDI gets trashed and praised, often by the same people.
.fvwmrc file).
Tabbed browsing in Mozilla? Quicken's tabbed windows? That's MDI, too. And lots of people like it. It's MDI done right.
The problem with old-style MDI apps (e.g., icons in a big empty window) that it was a one-size-fits-none policy that all apps could use. The in-app window management was usually horrible: icons that could be overlapped.
The only different is that apps are using MDI nowadays and are customizing the in-app window management to the application. Most people love it; other control freaks don't (e.g., if you have a custom 9000-line
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
It's hard, typically, because the second you change the wording of a menu or dialog dox, all the keyboard navigation letters have to change.
The single best way to fix this stupid problem is for keyboard shortcuts to be automated but overrideable in GUI toolkits. When I write a menu item, it should scan the entire list of menu items, and generate keyboard mnemonics for everything. It's not a terribly complicated algorithm, but it is tedious to do by hand. Sometimes, it will come up with lousy results, and some menmonics can't be deduced from the text, but it would solve the problem of developers completely forgetting about them.
We've put a ton of work on making nedit keyboard accessible. Almost everything you can do with the mouse, you can do with the keyboard. It's a huge amount of work, but we wouldn't have it any other way. Alomst every GUI item can be hit with the keyboard, and vice-versa.
Want to know why I won't use Mozilla on Windows? When a yes/no dialog pops up, I can't type 'Y' or 'N' to dismiss it. Stupid things like this, problems that were solved 15 years ago, still plague us.
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
Because Apple provides focus and direction for developers, Mac applications (generally) behave in expected and "natural" ways. Consistency and simplcity make users happy. Windows sufferes from verbosity, backward compatability, and mixed metaphors. What works in one Windows application may not work in another -- even if the two applications were developed as parts of a single package, like Microsoft Office. There are too many ways to do things: different menu commands, keystrokes, and GUI components lead to confusion. Linux GUIs are, sad to say, even worse than Windows. No one imposed a look-and-ffel guideline on Linux, so apps run an behave differently depending on the whims of individual developers and teams. Even worse, Linux GUIs tend to focus on cloning Windows, instead of boldly trying to be better. What we get are incredibly inconsistent applications that have no consistency or common thread of operation. Put The Gimp, Abiword, and Evolution on the desktop simultaneously, and you can see very divergent philosophies in operation. This isn't a knock against the developers of these fine application -- it is a recognition that the chaotic Linux community lacks the cohesion that Apple can bring to Aqua. Give users a clean, clear, easy operating system, and they'll drop Windows like a rock. So why hasn't Apple conquered the world? Because their product is too damned expensive. Windows could be "defeated" if the Linux community were to produce a high-quality, consistent GUI with a quality set of application -- for free. The question is, are we too individualistic to work together as a community?
All about me
HTML was originally designed to work this way. Unfortunately, it's hard to convince peopel that this is a better system -- legions of hard-copy print era designers swarmed the Web design scene and pretty much decimated any hope of client-side UI control.
Now, HTML is pretty much an inefficient, hard to parse Postscript variant.
May we never see th