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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!"
Now, a developer may appreciate a large stock of standard controls, but sometimes the best controls are non-generic. I light my gas oven by turning the dial and pushing it in. This is not how I operate my toaster (single dial and slider to depress bread) or microwave (timer dial with separate on/off/pause button) or my fridge (single slider for thermostat, built in switch for the light.)
Do you know something? Despite their proximity in the kitchen, I don't find this plethora of different user interfaces confusing. I didn't even have to read the manuals, even though my new toaster is quite different from the old one. Contrary to what interface designers tell us, we can cope perfectly well with this sort of complexity.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Really nice idea I never thought of. Too bad I won't be writeing any OS X apps anytime soon. Are there more documents like this on UI design that arent' just about OS X, but more general?
You've got to be kidding. So when I switch tabs in the dialog, the window which contains the tabs should change size?
"We" don't. (If be "we" you mean "clueful programmers".) This article wasn't written for "any Mac developer worth his salt." It was written for very smart developers of other platforms that want to be aware of what the need to know to succeed on the Mac platform.
The article is interesting reading to see what Apple is currently telling coders who are new to doing a Mac port. Many companies have ported apps to the Macintosh without paying attention to Apple's UI guidelines, and were stunned to discover that the entire Mac community thought their app, which was a modest success in the Windows market, was universally dismissed as utter crap by Mac users. This info can help companies avoid repeating that mistake. It's not about conforming to what Apple wants it to look like nearly as much as what Apple users have come to expect from their apps.
One of my favorite differences is that I almost never see a dialog box with a button that only says "Yes" or "No" on it when I'm using the Mac. (Mozilla is one of the exeptions. The Mac 1.0 version is still lacking a lot of Mac-ness, but it pulls up /. pages a lot faster than IE, and doesn't break on as many sites or nag me for money the way OmniWeb does, so I'm not going to bitch too much about a "capitol-F" Free software product.) There are far too many Windows apps that pop up dialog boxes saying stuff like "You are launching proceedure $FOO without condition $BAR being properly set. Do you no longer wish to avoid autocorrecting the object status and reimplementing the enterprise settings? [Yes] [No] [Cancel]"
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
It really irritates me that in photoshop for OSX Command-H doesnt hide the application. As displayed by the length of the apple usability documents, the priority for this OS should be usability, and adhering to the maintenace of vital functional key groupings throughout the entire OS.
Great to see Apple promoting usability issues, something a certain competitor in the OS industry would do well to follow.
Apple's Developer site has more info. In fact, they say that xnu is not strictly a microkernel.
--
The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
However, OS X manages extensions with so much more inteligence than Windows (or any *nix windowing system I've used), that I've complety changed my tune now. I now like the way OS X uses file extensions, and don't want to go back.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
No, you are not the only one who sees that. You would also not be the only one to see the Virgin Mary in that oak tree that was in the news this week. In other words, I think you are seeing what you want to see.
This article was written for the benifit of developers who are porting Mac apps. It happens to also be of interest to geeks like the crowd here on /. who like reading about GUI design. If their intention was to "bash Windows" to sell people on switching to OS X, there are far more damning things they could have brought up.
If anything, the article might scare some developers away from doing Mac ports, because they are basically saying "jump through these hoops or Mac users will ignore your app and all the effort you spend on proting will be wasted."
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
XP is easier for you just because you are used to it. The OS X environment is easier for me because that is what I am used to.
Precisely. I'm not saying that everyone's the same, but since it's in Apples interest to attract Windows users, it makes sense to make the transition as painless as possible.
Is adding a menubar to a window really that radical a change? It's just an object - I'm betting the alteration to attach it to a movable window rather than fixed to the desktop is not a huge undertaking, and the apps wouldn't behave any differently aside from a thin strip across the top of the windows.
Again, this could easily be a choice; a simple checkbox ("Dock menu to window"), and not the default, but maybe mentioned in a getting started guide for Windows migrants. People can then choose whatever works best for them. Be interesting to see the percentages in any case...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
I know that you meant it as a joke, but I think Apple's statement makes sense.
The days of the skilled programmer (but unskilled UI designer) putting together the icons and user interface are over. Well designed applications are the key to making an application useful. I think SoundJam and iTunes are a great example.
Cassidy and Green built the original SoundJam MP3 application, and while it was full-featured, it was a bit of a pain to use, particularly the custom playlist feature. In fact, I never really used the feature since it was such a pain to create the playlist with customized criteria and keep it in synch with the songs I had in my collection.
When Apple bought SoundJam from Cassidy and Green, they renamed it as iTunes, and stripped the functionality down. The most important thing they added was the live searching feature, and the ability to support integrated playlists. Suddenly, the overwhelming SoundJam application became the much more friendly iTunes, accessible to any user. iTunes 1.0 had fewer features than SoundJam, but since its user interface was better, the application was better.
Icons are the same way. When you look at just the icons of 10 years ago, you can see how far we've come. Look at the winners of Icon Factory's Pixelpalooza competition, you can see how even the winners' icons from just five years ago, you can see although they were cute and clever for 1997, they look unprofessional compared to the look of the icons delivered with Mac OS X 10.2.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
No, they don't complain. They just don't use websites that are too different and/or confusing.
Tim
A Windows geek sees something he likes in the Mac OS, and says, "a good example of the advantage of having integrated hardware. However, I prefer the flexibility of being able to buy motherboard swaps on pricewatch."
A Mac user sees the same feature and says, "an example of good software design, which is why I put up with the vendor lock-in of buying an Apple."
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I force white on black text when browsing, and allow no background images. That usually removes the ugliness from most websites.
You know what would be sweet though? A Mozilla text filter (optional) that properly capitalizes all-caps or mixed-caps text.
if your new custom [widget] is well designed for its specific use, rather than merely cobbled together from generic components then any initial time-wasting will be saved
I disagree. I generally find that custom widgets charm developers, and annoy users.
Lets take a look at existing custom widgets. The big annoying ones are bitmap ones (on Windows, often using the standard button as an underly widget). These look different, add nothing to the application, amake the program bigger (esp. to download), slower, look less professional, and seem to frequently be written by interns or something, judging by the quality of them.
There are custom tab widgets. They usually aren't any better than normal tab widgets, especially the annoying reshuffling multi-row tab widgets.
There are animated widgets. Animated widgets are just plain annoying to a lot of people.
There are dials. Every custom widget library seems like it has to come with a dial widget. Dial widgets are about the most difficult interface to work with on a computer, given your input devices (keyboard, mouse).
A lot of examples of what custom widgets do and how bad they are can be found at the excellent Interface Hall of Shame.
There are a *very* few custom widgets that I've seen over the past few years that I think are honestly good and deserve being adopted. I haven't seen a single Windows widget that I like, and in all my years of poking around at human-computer-interaction, I've seen exactly three widgets on the Mac that were a good idea (all of which were pretty much uniformly adopted by the Mac developer community).
A) The slider. The MacOS never had a slider control. When MS copied the Mac's interface elements, this is one of the things they did right -- added a slider. Traditionally, MacOS developers have used scroll bars to fill in the gap, but a fair number of people have introduced a Windows-style slider.
B) The Mercutio MDEF -- this is a menu widget that supports more complex keybindings. The original Mac menu widget only supported Command-A, not Command-A separate from Command-Shift-A. This has been a fairly useful invention (and the UI was done right -- there was a shift symbol added, not just a capital "A" shown in the menu).
C) Windoids. These are the little palettes that vanish when you switch to other apps. They don't look like standard windows, they disappear on their own, but they're so useful that everyone uses them now.
There are also a few, high-level and very custom widgets that don't really appear to the user as widgets, and make reasonable sense. A calendar widget, or something along the lines of GnomeCanvas.
May we never see th
> The most obvious example of this, IMHO, is
> kicker. The K menu has, at least in 2.2.x, no
> keyboard accelerators at all. Bring it up with
> alt-F1 and scroll around with the arrow keys,
> fine. But why can't I hit "g" and jump to
> games, like Windows has allowed me to do in
> the start menu since 1995?
I just checked, and at least KDE 3.1 CVS lets you press a key to jump to the first kicker item beginning with that letter. The letters get underlined when you press a key. The developers are listening.
- Brent
Proposal 1:
I suggest every GNOME/KDE/... developer sets one day of the week where he will use X without using the mouse.
Proposal 2:
When above is no longer a problem... try using X without running a terminal emulator for anything.
This will really help improve linux GUI for non-hackers.
To defend Microsoft, which is a rare event for me... The window is the proportion the Golden Rectangle, as is most of Microsoft's objects and pattern. The standard Push button falls into this category.
Reflective displays are already being used in some handheld computers, so I expect to see full-size reflective monitors on the market in the next few years. I can't wait!
Things that web designers don't realize about why books are easy on the eyes and web pages aren't:
Until reflective displays are common, #1 can't be considered a factor in web design. But #2 you can take into account to some degree by simulating "warmth" in the color choices for your text and backgrounds. I wouldn't worry too much about texture because it's difficult to simulate texture subtly and with fine enough resolution.
#3 and #4 can be taken into account in your color choices to reduce the contrast just enough to keep the photon beams from burning up people's retinas.
It should also be noted that most people have their monitor's brightness cranked way up, such that they can't ever see true black, so I don't worry so much about lightening up dark text.
The example also shows Itunes on the desktop. Although it's not on top, it's not visually obvious that it's currently in background. Itunes clearly follows the convention that "Entertainment Apps Don't Use the Standard GUI but instead Look Like Consumer Electronics Products."
Productivity and ease of use? The whole purpose of Apple's Interface Guidelines is to make things easier to use and more productive. Take for example having one menue bar. The location of everything the you ned to access commands is in one spot, always. Or what about even something as simple as the window controls. In windows, all the menue commands are on the left, but all the window controls are on the right. How is that efficient? Or even the save dialouges. THe Don't Save button is off to the left and further spaced than all the other buttons. Why? Because it is the most destructive of the option, and because most people are right handed so they tend to look for the best options on the right (or something like that, it's psycological).
I don't know about the scroll wheel, whether M$ did that first or not, but I have not come aross a single button on M$ keyboards that is so useful it boosts my prouctivity.
You're right, they do play out differently. And in 99% of the cases, the mac OS is easier, more intuitive and faster.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
For another example... say Grandma has created her first web page, and because I was the one talking her through it, she did it in Notepad. Now, she can't see the file extension, but Notepad, being its usual *cough* helpful self, saved it as index.txt or something like that. So she goes and changes the filename (all of which she sees is 'index') to 'index.html'. Mac OS X does the Right Thing here: changes 'index.txt' to 'index.html'. Windows does the simpler, but Wrong thing: changes the filename to 'index.html.txt'. Double-clicking on it will still bring it up in Notepad.
There's one simple, slightly contrived, example. I'm sure others could be provided. Pray cease to comment on my intelligence, unless you actually know what I'm talking about.
"The best argument against democracy is a five minute chat with the average voter."
--Winston Churchill
It's not just about the menu (or whatever) target. Anyone can whip their pointing device across 3 screens to get to the top left corner. And it'll probably be faster than going to a File menu a few pixels away. However. (And Fitt's Law afficionados always miss this point.) After you're done clicking in your little top left corner menu, you now have to go back to your application, usually right where you left off. I'm willing to bet the (on average) longer distance from top left to the application more than makes up for the initial advantage.
When working in an application, your mouse will be somewhere near the top of the document, near to where the menu bar and toolbars are. The File menu is a couple pixels away. When you're done in the menu, going back to work is only a couple pixels away again.