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!"

Comments

Use verb buttons instead of 'yes/no'

[kiltedtaco]

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?

Re:Jesus christ.

[Golias]

Why do we need apple to tell us that we should only use one menu bar in Mac apps?

"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]"

agree.html

[Golias]

I was one of those people who was really dreading OS X's use of file extensions. I liked the old MacOS way of handling file types so much better.

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.

Re:Hire Professional Help

[sg3000]

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.

Re:Windows File Extensions Usages are Awesome

[billbaggins]

Ok, normally I wouldn't bother with a reply to this, but you attacked my intelligence, so I'm gonna have at you. The situation that I described took place when I was using SOMEONE ELSE'S COMPUTER. I was not at liberty to set 'show file extensions' to True.

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.