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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!"
Aqua et al have been DESIGNED by professionals. Gnome was thrown together as a hack job by retards too stupid to comprehend how a real GUI should work.
Rule 3: Hire Professional Help
Well, at least they got one thing right. If you think you can make money developing MacOS software, you really should get professional help!
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
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.
1: always use the users default colours and fonts
don't use things like:
body BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" ALINK="#008000" VLINK="#800080" LINK="#000099" MARGINHEIGHT="0" MARGINWIDTH="0" TEXT="#000000" TOPMARGIN="0" LEFTMARGIN="0"
2: avoid making you windows fixed width.
3: aviod using graphics to represent text (expecially in menus)
I may not agree with Apples 'legendary design' but the windows to mac porting document seems quite good (even if it's poorly designed)
I believe that QT has a equivilent document
oh an 4: never spell check, it hides you thought pattern.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Many of the points brought up in the article are good points, that could be applied to any program not just one for Mac OSX. One of the complaints I have with a lot of open source software is that it has a sometimes cluttered, non-intuitive, and unprofessional/unpolished feel. If developers in general followed general guidelines like this: use informative error messages and debug messages, or dont cluter the application with lots of small undescriptive icons, but instead make panels grouped together then this would make, I think, the entire computer experience a lot more enjoyable. You wouldn't have to spend as much time learning a particular applications layout and interface just to be able to do something useful.
...for an Apple Dev site to chide "poor" UI designs when their own site needs dome fixin'. For starters, the tips menu items hang over the boundaries of the box beneath them. Also the text is forced to a smaller size than is comfortable to read on screen and by using this size text the bold headline sbecome blurry and even more difficult to read. To be fair, I'm guessing they designed their site to be viewed on Apple systems and there is a difference in screen metrics because Macs are basedon a 72dpi resolution while PCS use 96dpi (though they can be changed to anything from 72dpi-144dpi).
I'm not even going to get into some of the innacuracies used to make the Mac UI look better or the complete lack of professional advice being utilized. Much of these arguments are based on the premise that "Mac users like it this way" and assuming that the typical Mac user is a UI expert.
heavy research. proven. better. These words imply that you have citations to provide. Provide them.
I once had 'ONCE', a cooker that could only have been designed by a left handed person.
the dials were left handed (clockwise i think), and the four dials didn't operate the expected plates on the hob.
As you can imagine, a could of nobs were broken by somoen turing them the wrong way, and somone finilly killed the cooker by turning on the wrong hob plate and setting somthing alight (no more cooker).
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
They forgot to mention that OS X does not have the most confusing design flaw of Windows: In order to shut down, you need to go to "Start" then "Shutdown". Mentally its like telling a driver "In order to turn off your vehicle, step on the accellerator" (previous versions of Mac OS had the similar design flaw because to shut down you had to go to the "Special" menu, which to me didn't make much sense either - OS X is the most sensible of all - much like Gnome & KDE).
Sound waves should be free!
In addition to this being common knowledge among Apple developers well before now, everything said here was said better by MacKiDo. Take a read here. It describes very well how the Mac interface is better than just about any other.
Of course, if you go to MacKiDo's main page, you'll also notice an introduction note; in summary, it says that OS X was a mistake, as Apple's primary focus is no longer on the UI. And you know what? I couldn't agree more. Say all you want about OS X bringing Unix to the masses, but the fact is, the masses would have been better off without Unix. OS 9, despite having less eye candy than OS X, was architecturally better for the home user in just about every way than OS X - the only significant development X had was Cocoa, and that could easily have been ported into an OS 9 upgrade instead.
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).
I still love the PPC platform; it's no Alpha, but it is the most popular RISC platform for the desktop. IBM, at one time, had the CHRP platform; it was the PPC answer to x86's open hardware, and it would have allowed a PC user to upgrade to PPC by simply throwing a new motherboard and processor into their existing case using their existing components and peripherals. If IBM releases their new Power4 processor for CHRP, I'll be the first to buy it, and install PPC Linux. And if the planets are all in alignment, and Apple decides to design OS XX based on a completely new design, scrapping all development environments but Cocoa and going back to the old OS9-style user interface, then I'll buy a Mac.
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.
was to kill off the windows MDI-- with it's horrendous, ugly grey root window. My ability to use a third party editor with a third party hex editor with my compiler shouldn't be hampered by one designers misguided attempt to use MDI.
Apple has found that using one menu at the very top increases productivity. "What? You're crazy!" you say. No seriously, the theory is (and it is not Apple's theory, they just adhere to it) is that in order to get to a menu item a user can simply throw their cursor to the top of the screen and 'overshoot' the menu because it is at the very top, in this sense the menu is located at a place of infinite height and is very easy to get to. Now think about a Windows setup where the menu is at the top of any respective window, a user must provide a bit of care/control to get to the menu item because it is possible to overshoot the menu. It doesn't take EXTREME care, it is a minor point, but even with distance and proximity involved (menu at top of screen vs. menu at top of window), you'd have to agree that it is easier to simply 'throw' your mouse to the top of the screena and not worry about overshooting it.
Because Apple's HCI guides work very well, no matter which OS you apply them to. Yes, some things will be specific to the Mac. On the other hand, I still stick by many of the principles outlined in the "Apple Human Interface Guidelines" book published circa System 6.
Oh, and that's for Java, C/C++ apps and even web pages to a small extent. Haven't had a Mac since the original LC.
Cheers,
Ian
I agree to a point, I've never been a fan of it either. The one good thing about it though, is that you can just shove your mouse pointer to the top of the screen and you'll *always* be on the menubar. Having to aim for a specific area in a window does take longer.
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?
Wrong story, buddy.
This space intentionally left blank.
"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.
From the article:
One of the most visible and important parts of the Aqua interface are high-quality icons. Mac OS X icons have rich visual characteristics: They are often displayed at a sizes varying from 128 x 128 pixels to 16 x 16 pixels, can contain millions of colors, have very realistic qualities, and are professionally rendered.
Someone help me with this. If I have an icon that's 128x128, how can it contain millions of colors when it only has 16384 pixels? Does it have color cycling or something?
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
I've never understood Apple's reliance on a single menubar for everything on the screen. Ok, it may make sense if you're only running one app on the screen but I always found it confusing, and other's I've shown it to have had the same problem. For instance, I open app A, and the menu appears - all well and good. Then I open apps B,C,D and E then click on the desktop by mistake - oops, the menu now has nothing to do with any app. This means going back to find it, click to give it focus, then go back up to the floating menu bar at the top of the screen.
At least with a menu-per-window you know that that's the menu for that app; there's no confusion. The paradigm breaks with OS-X anyway, since they allow toolbars in the windows, which makes matters worse - is an option available here, or up at the top of the screen?
Giving the OPTION of having the menus for each app in its window would go a long way toward helping people migrate from Windows, in my view.
This is just my opinion though, I use OS-X,XP and KDE pretty regularly but if I had to order them by ease of use, I'd have to say XP,KDE then OS-X...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
I havent used Aqua at all..
But is it realy fair to compare
standerd save dialog with that of Notepad?
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
The decision was made because of considerations about aimed movement, which was originally codified as a mathematical relationship by Paul Fitts, who stated that times for aimed movements were related to the distance and size of the target in a logarithmic fashion. "Fitts's Law" is not about infinite height, however. It is about the mathematical relationship, and for any new application of the law, the coefficients of the formula need to be estimated. These coefficients will depend on many things, including the acceleration and rate settings on the mouse, the experience of the user, and probably things like how bright things are, the color scheme, how big the monitor is, and how far they are away from the monitor. Thus, it may be possible that in the days of black-and-white ten-inch monitors with big clunky mice, the parameters of Fitts's Law worked out so that you would get an advantage for edge menus. In todays world, with optical mice, 21" LCD displays, multiple monitors, and mouse acceleration, the parameters would be different, and there may no longer be an advantage for edge menus. And if you change your mouse rate, you might just negate any benefit for these menus as well. Of course, the formula is also affected by target size, meaning that the larger icons probably do more for 'productivity' than anything else.
The point is that the research and user testing this design decision was based on is from a different age and time. To believe that it is still a good decision, one would have to show that today's users with today's technology have an advantage. This must be done empirically, because without such testing, we are all just speculating.
Did you even read that article? It was nearly a recommendation to the software developers/porters to maximize the impact of the application through the GUI. They are giving away free tips on the niche market which they helped to create. At least be thankful they give a rats ass about the developers and users.
Microsoft users don't seem to understand that most basic concept; that the computer should adapt to THEM, and not make them adapt to it.
the writer was complaining about the many ways to close a window in windows. don't they realise that by providing a variety of way to acomplish a task, the user can choose the way they like best? i.e. the user is not constrained by the computer?
mac-philes are fucked up. sorry, but when it gets like this, it can be true.
On the other hand, if you just let yourself get used to the idea that everything you need to do is on the top of your screen (and always in the same order: Apple, Application, Edit, View, App-specific stuff, Window, Help) you might find that Mac users worship the top menu concept for a reason. It makes your life easier, in the long run.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
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.
I do user support of win 98 and MS Office, and the controlls arent the same across all of Offices programs. AS I recall, outlook is horribly inconsistant in how things are done, compred to the rest of the Office suite. ANd if you go from 98 to XP, they change all the interfaces around, generally for no good reason as far as i can tell. Walking users through doing something that they used to do on their own is really annoying, especialy when at the end, they wind up with the same interface screen as they had before, only there are 4 extra steps to get there. For a comparison, try setting up a new exchange server mailbox in outlook 98, then try it under xp.
I dont even bother trying to explain Microsofts stupidity. My responses now are , well, its a bad design to confuse you and keep me employed, and It wasnt my decision to force this change on you, sorry.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Which one is the best? I wouldn't know I use all 3 and I really like all of them, well I like Mac OSX and KDE3 a little better because they're a tad more customizeable, but with a little tweak XP and other tools it's all a matter of time before you feel at home with your box.
The one thing that they are all missing is one very simple thing. Not everyone runs at 1200x1600 resolution. None of these new GUI's look good in 800x600. When the menu bar takes up 10% - 20% of your window then you really have problems. Win98 and MacOS 9 took low resolution into account and put less crap on the screen. I definantelly think that enlightenment and blackbox have the right idea about how to appeal to the entire market.
But how does Linux and MacOSX make it possible for me to have my enlightenment or blackbox directly on top of the core OS? Simple they use standard tools and binary compatability, Linux and BSD. Windows however just plain sucks at anything less that 1024x768, but also windows XP's minimum requirements are a Geforce2 and like 512 megs of ram too, so windows assumes you also went out and barfed out another $300 for a monitor.
I prefer Linux, but I don't mind Mac OSX and I get by using windows XP. All-in-all they are all starting to share a common theme. "Be appealing to the eye and place the common tasks within easy reach, with as little fluff as possible."
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
Imagine coding a OpenGL application. You have windows for the compiler controls and debugger. You have source code in another couple of windows. In another app, you have a three-d rendering of some object that will be incorporated in to the app. In yet another app is a pdf rendering of some API reference. And, you have a third party hex editor that you're using to view a texture file.
Without MDI, you can arrange the windows in any possible manner. With MDI, some applications are guaranteed to take up a rectangular are of screen. If the MDI application has more than one window, it's almost guaranteed that some screen real estate will be hogged by a empty, useless bit of root window.
MDI assumes you want to work with only one application at a time. That's an assumption taht may or may not be true. On the mac, if you get confused, you can "hide" the extra apps, or minimize the windows into the dock...
Here is one example where they've gotten it wrong. Having two 22" monitors. Traveling to menu bar from second monitor ... ... ... it's aaa looooong waaaaay toooooo goooooo.
And if I'm not wrong. Most of my Mac users have two monitors. I have four on Xinerama on my Linux workstation, so personaly I can't imagine my self travelling all the way to menu bar. It would be the same as buying airline ticket to select a menu or a lot of 'throwing' in the next room.
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
UI research is precisely the kind of thing Microsoft thought was a waste of money until a couple years ago. Apple did alot of the basic research on usability throughout the 80's and 90's. Microsoft did not. They have turned that around and are spending on research in a big way now, but to say that a UI is tested and usable simply because it is running under Windows is a bit of a stretch. Some Windows apps are great, but the Windows universe of apps sorely lacks consistency.
"I don't mind the swelling, it's the itching I could do without."
This was not a Win vs. Mac OS comparison. It was an article for the specific purpose of telling developers what common Windows application misfeatures one should avoid when writing a Mac port. The fact that Win95 (which is where I assume where they pasted those images from) showcases some of these misfeatures was just convenient for them.
I don't know how many Mac users I hear saying that the Mac "Launch bar" (name?) sucks.
If you are talking about the Launcher, that was a shareware App that Apple liked and offered as an optional tool in System 7, as a way to let your young kid run apps on your Mac without being able to delete your system files. Since many schools who used Macs used the Launcher to lock down their desktops and prevent studens from hacking their boxen, a lot of teens in the 90's assumed that the Launcher is what MacOS was, and wrote long screeds on message boards about how "restrictive" the OS is.
On the other hand, maybe you are talking about the Dock. The Dock is an application bar, which behaves a lot more like the one from NeXT than the menu bars from Windows and Gnome, which a lot of old-skool Mac users don't care for. I've grown to really love it, except I wish there was either an option for locking up the Dock's screen real-estate, or else a better implimentation of the window maximization feature, so windows would not sometimes extend under the Dock when I maximize them.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I tend to agree with you about MDI. On the other hand, I love Mozilla's tabbed browsing. Does that make me a hypocrite?
God is imaginary
Why does it require filename extensions? If it is based on BSD, then why can't it use the file(1) utility, which can determine file type using algorithms rather than by something as malleable as three letters at the end of a name?
For those of you that missed the link at the beginning of the article, take a look at Apple's full Aqua HI Guidelines (or in PDF format). It has *tons* of specific examples and screenshots useful for some of the theory and design behind the current GUI.
I have to agree with the earlier post that OS X is somewhat of a step backward in usability overall. Although I do appreciate some of the innovations (sheets,...) I still find the standard OS 8/9 "platinum" interface to be easier to understand. (It's an interesting comparasion.)
I don't know -- once Apple gets its butt in gear and gives me a SPACIAL FINDER and uses METADATA PROPERLY I might feel different.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
...but their hipocracy gets, at times, a bit hard to swallow. This document speaks, rightly so, to the "simplistic-beauty-through-UI-consistency" factor of Mac OS X, thanks to the Aqua Human Interface Guidelines. And, it should be noted, I've got no beef whatsoever with the Aqua HIG as a concept, nor (for the most part) as far as the execution of that concept is concerned. However, did anybody else notice the glaring absence of any iApp from this Switch Document?
.rsrc file full of bitmaps defining very, very custom interfaces! Sure, all the buttons are still Aqua, but they've got this goofy "brushed metal" .pict texture and they toss the button placement guidelines out the window.
The iApps (iDVD, iMovie, iPhoto, and iTunes) come together like Voltron to form the ease-of-use flagship of the iMac/Mac OS X/"Digital Lifestyle" movement. And do the iApps even remotely follow the Aqua HIG? Hell no!
Apple dedicates a whole subsection to this point: "Avoid Custom Controls." However, each of the iApps contains, in the app package contents, its own
Just like Apple created all sorts of "special exceptions" to the rules of the Carbon layer for Finder.app, they seem to have written a myriad errata to the Aqua HIG pertaining to developing an iApp (but kept this updated copy of the Aqua HIG for themselves).
Again, I should say that I would love to see Apple succeed with their "Switch" campaign... but for once I'd like to see some practicing to go with the preaching!
I like to think of it as improving scalability across multiple windows - if you have an app (like a browser) that has many windows open, then you loose the space the menu bar takes up in each window. That leaves you more room for things like tabbed interfaces!!
The only thing I don't like about having the menu at the top of the screen is that I wish a menu bar would appear in each display an app is located in... or perhaps a "menu follows mouse into display" feature that would migrate the menu bar when the cursor changed screens. As it stands other monitors besides the primary are mostly good for storing palettes from active apps or apps that are pretty much self-contained on screen and need little menu interaction (like iTunes).
Good keyborad acess helps a lot though. There are a number of apps I use where I almost never use the menu bar, so it's OK to be out of the way.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The point is moot since everywhere else, which is probably 9 times out of 10, you have to aim. Simple as that. If a user doesn't have the dexterity to aim without thinking about it, he or she shouldn't be using a computer, or perhaps even driving or using public restrooms. I'm serious.
To believe that it is still a good decision, one would have to show that today's users with today's technology have an advantage.
Now that you mention it, I do notice that when I go up to the menu, my mouse is more often at the very top of the screen than elsewhere in the menu. I also recall that the Dock used to have a 1 pixel "edge" in an early incarnation of OS X, but they pushed it all the way to the edge because of the number of user complaints. It seems clear to me that the Apple advantage is still there.
Personally I hate XP from my guts, as all Windows versions. But at least you have a choice to select colors. AQUA IS WHITE.
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I know most of you guys are thinking that apple's PR machine is just cranking out the crap. Which could possibly be true... but after the post/article about apple maintaining an x86 version of OS X (http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/08/31 /195208&mode=thread&tid=179)
it makes me wonder why they are only comparing the UI of the two OSes. It's like.. wow.. the windows behave differently... which really doesn't matter to too many people. And their target audience(developers) don't care too much about the minor differences in UI.. just as long as someone pays them to develop applications. What I was surprised about was that Apple's article did not mention supposedly key differences in hardware that made Apple "so much faster"... which has been their key selling point before.
And honestly, I wish OS X would be released for x86 platforms.. i would buy it.
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.
"The best argument against democracy is a five minute chat with the average voter."
--Winston Churchill
If you really hate the 'XP Look', but setting it to classsic seems too boring, try Windowblinds or Hoverdesk, two great apps that will skin your entire interface and hardly use any system resources, if you have the time you can make your own skins, or you can get one of thousands at sites like deskmod.com or lotsofskins.com, i change my windowblinds skin about biweekly just to keep things fresh, the great thing about windowblinds is you can have lots of extra buttons, i have some skins that have lock on top buttons, buttons to launch notepad or the screen saver and some even have winamp controls built in, another cool feature of all windowblinds skins is that you can roll the entire window up into just the top bar, saving some space without minimizing, i've never taken the time to configure hoverdesk, but its interesting, easily customizable, and makes your desktop nearly incomprehensible to anyone else, but if you love that aqua mac interface so much, theres a windowblinds skin called OSXP, http://deskmod.com/?state=view&skin_id=2643
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
There is a reversed font, it's called RSTimesMirror
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.
Ok, then if its not a "Win v. Mac OS Comparison" then why not find some example in there own OS. Don't tell me that there are no faults in, current or past, Mac OSs to point out.
;)
This article is just put out as fodder for their "Switch" campaign! Am I the only one who sees this???
I admit Apple does have some of the best PR people out there. Kudos to them.
And yes, I meant the dock.
Ha I must be the only doofus in the world who consistently undershoots the top menu bar. I probably shouldn't even be admitting this in public. Haven't adjusted to the iBook trackpad yet I guess. Anyway if I undershoot but accidentally click, then usually some other app becomes active (I most commonly end up clicking in the desktop, making the Finder active) and its menu bar takes over from the original app. Then I have to mouse back down to the Dock, or to ASM on the right, or install FruitMenu, or hit Command-~ just to get back to the original program. That's my (opposite) annoyance with top menu bars...
Apple's trash can.
You don't eject disks, you throw them in the trash can.
Doesn't that strike you as odd given Apple's criticism of virtually every other UI over the years?
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Well, apart from this document being for developers, and not for the 'layman', I have a couple of issues with it, and they're mainly due to Apple's "Don't do as I do, do as I say" attitude.
For example: #4 Avoid Custom Controls, and #7 Aqua Is In, Grey Is Out.
Go try out iTunes, QuickTime, etc to see how much Apple thinks "Grey is out" (the window background is non-standard, and grey). iTunes and Quicktime also have custom title bars, and custom resizing gadgets. All of these things are already implemented perfectly well by the standard GUI, so why doesn't Apple use them? It's like when Bill Gates exhorted developers to use the common dialogs to keep the user experience consistent, while MS Office didn't use them.
And #5 - Use A Single Menubar is particularly ironic - I doubt very much that anyone porting a Windows app to MacOS would add a menu to their main window (mainly because it's probably quite hard), while Apple should really read and inwardly digest the main points of this article - i.e. when in Rome, do as the Romans do. Anyone remember QuickTime 4? It had a single menu bar on MacOS - and on Windows too! Of course, Windows doesn't have a 'menu bar', so in one of the most impressive displays of pigheadedness and 'not getting it', Apple decided that QuickTime for Windows should create a floating window whose sole purpose was the have a menu on it. Genius - they managed to get all the disadvantages of both systems, and none of the advantages (the menu wasn't attached to the player window).
And #10 - Reconsider Toolbars still has me puzzled. I never have worked out why Mac users are so insistent that palettes are superior to Toolbars. I always find floating palettes to be a pain in the neck to maintain (as a user) and they're always getting in the way of what I'm trying to do. However, I appreciate that both forms of UI are useful, and wouldn't really be able to honestly state that one is better than the other. Besides, run MS Word, drag a toolbar into the middle of the screen, resize it - looks kinda like a floating palette doesn't it? That said, I can understand why they say not to use toolbars - they're not really a part of the MacOS feel, so they tend to stick out. On the other hand, it is interesting the way half the windows in OSX/Finder use toolbars all over the place. I guess if you make the toolbar icons R-E-A-L-L-Y B-I-G then it's ok for some reason.
Don't get me wrong - this is a useful document, if a little preachy and arrogant ("well, clearly, our UI is better than the crap you poor Windows developers have had to put up with, you sad losers..."), but I just wish Apple would follow their own edicts a bit more closely.
However, the best thing to come out of this slashdot article is that I found out that Mr MacKido (the master of reasoned and unbiased argument) doesn't like MacOS X. The thought of him gnashing his teeth about OSX had me chuckling away for ages :)
Tim
PS. For the record, and to pre-empt some formulaic replies to this posting, I mostly use Windows, but also use a Mac, and I don't always have good things to say about Windows.
From the captions:
... the user is restricted in her ability to position document windows on the desktop. ... the user is free to move her document windows around the desktop.
In Microsoft Windows
In Mac OS X
MS is just a bunch of chauvinist pigs. Buy Apple, support Women's Lib!
I have MAC OS 10.2 and instead of using Apple's useless 1 bouton mouse thingy I opted for a Logitech cordless optical 3 button wheelmouse.
Guess what? It all works, the buttons, the wheelmouse, etc.. The right mouse button works just like a PC user would expect.. context menus.
People should look into an issue before just spewing crack out of their mouths.
Nick Powers
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
must be just a matter of opinion. I see the single menu bar as somewhat counter-productive. I've used Macs on occasion, and it gets annoying because I have to ensure the correct window (if you call it) is on Focus before navigating the Menu. Ever try saving a document, only to find out you got another window selected instead? I *THINK* KDE (2.2) had an option of a single top menu, and it wasn't for me.
$cat
Anyway, it seems that Apple's got a swath of new Switch ads available and they've conveniently left the old Ellen Feiss one there (probably because it's so damn popular. Enjoy. :)
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
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.
If you are talking about the Launcher, that was a shareware App that Apple liked and offered as an optional tool in System 7, as a way to let your young kid run apps on your Mac without being able to delete your system files. Since many schools who used Macs used the Launcher to lock down their desktops and prevent studens from hacking their boxen, a lot of teens in the 90's assumed that the Launcher is what MacOS was, and wrote long screeds on message boards about how "restrictive" the OS is.
The restrictive interface was "At Ease." (I remember using the built in file deletion features of Microsoft Word to delete the "At Ease" preference file , thus exorcising the broken interface from the computer. Ah memories...) Launcher was an attempt to bring the "single click to launch" feature of "At Ease" to users of the Finder. It was kind of clumsy compared to third party application launchers.
(Why an application launcher? The standard mac technique of storing apps within folders made some sense organizationally, but searching through folders to launch a program is a bit of pain. So after "System 7" most mac users had an aliases folder containing references to frequently used applications. The various application launcher organized such "aliases folders".)
By the way, Apple doesn't produce shareware. Some Apple things are "free as in beer", though. I think "At Ease" was actually sold as a commercial product.
The emergence of the Web proved them both wrong. Each website (atleast initially) had its own color schema and navigation mechanism. Users never complained. I rather like the fact that each application has its own look-and-feel identity rather than a communist approach to how an app should look.
Even on the desktop, the popularity of skins is proof of that (to some extent).
The bottom line is that the application should be intuitively easy to use - having a uniform look and feel does not necessarily guarantee that.
All your favorite sites in one place!
It's not fodder for the Switch campaign - it really isn't. It's to let developers know the headline issues they should be aware of when porting their Windows apps to MacOS.
As for choosing Windows - well, it's the one I would choose if I were Apple - a document telling Gnome developers how to port their apps to MacOS would have a much smaller target audience.
However, the fact that the document can't just give you the facts, and has to exude the usual insufferable smugness and arrogance that you usually get from Apple PR doesn't really help, I agree. Most developers know when you're trying to bloke smoke up their proverbials.
Tim
The basic GUI is fixed and any innovations originates from the respective companies or developers based on their understanding / thinking about users behavior and preferences.
Why not try and turn this on its head and use a Darwinian development model. Start with a very simple IU and Meta Configuration files that has to ability to be combined with other Meta Configuration files and thereby create a "derived" or "evolved" IF. Then use the net to exchange the Interface DNA if you like. The "Survival of the fittest" will be measured in "usage time" for the specific phenotype of that GUI.
There should be a lifespan of any Interface after which time it will die and the user needs to procure a new. The new could be a derivative from the original.
This might or might not work but I think its worthwhile to try and see if it has merits. We would probably see clusters evolving based on typical usage. The clusters would not be normal tops down thinking like Office / Game station / Development but rather reflect the real world mixed usage.
Radical new ideas could be introduced as "mutations" and their survivability could be ascertained effectively. Second the radical new ideas need not be perfect initially and they could evolve via usage tweaking. (Kind of a LaMarckian approach in a predominantly Darwinian world).
I am a bit further along on this and if anyone has an interest drop me a line. (lamarck@s-tadil.com remove -)
Help fight continental drift.
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.
The consistent menu bar at the top of the screen is probably the single aspect of the Mac interface that I most appreciate. When I want a menu, I don't even have to look for the appropriate menu bar--I just whip my mouse up blindly, and I know that the pointer will end up in a menubar that is appropriate for the window that I was just working in.
So, don't read it.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
The Windows version is better, but not for your stupid reasons. First look at the tabs, like the dock the dumb-asses but them in the center, breaking fitz Law. Next their design is actually bigger than the Windows version, although you would almost not notice based on the scaling of the images. Third, they waste even more space than the windows dialog, its a window in a window. Basically all their critiques are wrong. Plus they violate the same principles in thier design. The only thing that is better in the apple dialog is the radio button for never. This lets the user know this option is there while the first only indicates that other times will be listed in the drop-down selector.
Well, we don't expect pigs to read it either... Go play doom and think you're superior, at least when they play in the mud they don't think they're smarter than the farmer...
Nope. Still works. Even with the largest monitors, Apple's mouse acceleration parameters are such that a flick of the wrist puts the pointer instantly in the menubar from anywhere on the screen.
OMG your so full of #$%#. Never any complaints come on.
I USED to own a Mac (OS 7.39l2.394.3 - 9.374.37 - Note sarcasm) and I could never understand why a supposedly great OS could not dial a modem without letting you do something else. I guess the time wasted waiting for the modem to dial out was intentionally put in so you could sit back and appreciate Steve, Waz and that pretty fruit colored case.
I guess I am bitter because I bought a $4000 lemon.
BTW, Did Steve Jobs himself program you???
So can I select green and everything is green. Wouldn't bother to edit preferences file
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
Thank God...I was afraid I was the only one.
It took me a couple of years of forced mac use in college before I realized this one my #1 complaint about the single top menu bar. I knew I hated it just couldn't figure out why.
The problem is if you misclick all the rules suddenly change - at least in OS's with menus within their respective windows everything dosen't shift on you.
The single menu works OK if you're not multi-tasking (like original macs) but once you start running multiple apps simultaneously (something most mac users still don't seem to do probably because the OS makes it inconvienant) it's a MAJOR burdon and creates a LOT of confusion.
I've seen quite a few experienced and inexperienced users trying to figure out what happened after misclicking on a mac.
--- Juggle juggle@hitesman.com
MacOS has had context menus since MacOS 9 (or possibly MacOS 8 - I'm only a part-time Mac user).
You control-click (e.g. on a file in the finder) to get them - or if you have an MS mouse, the driver converts* a right-click to a control-click, so it works pretty much like Windows/X.
Tim
* Although MacOS may actually just support the right-click natively now - I don't know.
The Apple HIG strictly state that a Mac OS X application should never sit behind the dock. If you look at all of Apple's apps, they will automatically resize their windows if you change the vertical size of the dock. Applications that maximize to behind the dock are in violation of Apple's HIG, another reason that a lot of ports of windows applications are considered crappy.
It's not a matter of consciously thinking about it. Even if it goes on at a subconscious level, hitting a particular point takes more cerebral processing time than simply snapping to an edge. In fact, it is the unconscious nature of the processing that makes it insidious--because we aren't aware of "aiming," we don't perceive how much it slows us down, although objective tests show it.
Well, I disagree with the Mac comments, but I won't disagree with you about the general decline of interesting pieces here. Add in an increasing uncivility by many posters and you've got an uninteresting and unpleasant place to visit.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I can resize the root windows to be side by side or overlapping. Easy and painless and usually only needs to be done once in a work session.
With macs I don't have a choice to work in a way that works smoothly without too many interface arrangements.
I can use alt-tab fast (in linux/windows). Going to the menu, hiding my current app, selecting to next app is time wasted.
Time is what I want to use working, not clicking through the gui.
A very clear example is browsing the internet on a os-x. Damn. You'll never find that window you had opened amongst the other 20+ windows. It's an absolute nightmare.
I spend a lot more non-productive time on macs than on linux or windows. The mac interface is just designed, not designed for work.
I'm not saying that just using MDI is solving all problems. That still takes a good program gui.
There are countless other stupidies in OS-X.
This desktop mess is just one of them.
I've become very disappointed with OS-X and consider it a toy for home use.
...you still have to shell out extra cash for an unencumbered mouse.
The included mouse is perfectly un-encumbered. Unlike on Windows, on the Mac the contextual menu is not required for ANYTHING. By design, there's *nothing* you can do with a contextual menu that you can't do in some other fashion. It's there for those that would like an additional means of accessing functionality.
Furthermore, the "official means" of accessing contextual menus is "modifier-click", specifically Control-click, not "click in some other way." Most people who decide to purchase multi-button mice map their second buttons to a Control-click, but it's not required.
Once you get used to it, Keyboard+Mouse control is actually a little faster than Multibutton-Mouse control.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
ordered list tag.
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
Because Apple provides focus and direction for developers, Mac applications (generally) behave in expected and "natural" ways. Consistency and simplcity make users happy.
Windows suffers 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
I was going to respond that it didn't sound that convenient to me, but then I remembered that this is just one of those personal preference things that some people will like and some will not, so why try to convince someone they're wrong.
So oh well, another long, thoughtout email cancelled after being typed...
I say...Enjoy your top of screen menu if you want!!!
Kevin
Under the section 'Use Clean Layout', the Mac OS X guidelines state:
In a book called "The Non-Designer's Design Book", author Robin Williams explains some of the principles of visual layout from the field of graphic design. On the topic of alignment, Williams states that items aligned on a page create a strong cohesive unit. An "invisible line" gives order and organization to the elements on the page. She goes on to add that a centred alignment is the most common alignment that beginners use, and often creates a sedate, ordinary, and frankly quite dull appearance.
The book contains many before-and-after designs where the alignment of elements is modified. Most of the improvements arise from moving elements with a centred alignment to a flush-left or flush-right alignment. Williams doesn't say you should avoid a centred alignment altogether, but does add "...please try very hard to break away from a centered alignment unless you are consciously tring to create a more formal, sedate (often dull?) presentation."
In fairness to Apple, some of the examples they show in their guidelines demonstrate that their recommendation for a center alignment works by making elements next to each other (such as labels and their controls) flush with the "invisible line" that separates them (as in the sample application preferences dialog). Perhaps the best way of looking at Apple's recommendation is to appreciate that non-centred alignments are not an inferior alternative to centred layouts, and may in fact offer an improvement in dialog design.
Presumably because Mozilla, Java and StarOffice are seen as fully-fledged platforms on which all kinds of apps could be developed.
Hopefully Dotnet will make it clear that only one of these really qualifies, and that doesn't mandate any particular l&f.
A simple reference to an Apple developer interface guideline article and it brings out such immature condescension from people who aren't interested in the article to begin with!!! Sure you can find some nit-picking in the article but the venomous anti-Mac rants are completely unwarranted for the actual topic at hand. Some of us are platform agnostic and try to learn best practices wherever we can.
Are you Windows-only developers really so childish and spitefully smug as to waste your own time trolling uneccessarily? Slashdot is getting very old.... Time to find a site with grown-ups.
However, Macs have traditionally done an outstanding job of dealing with file types. You *can* trust the file type to be correct. It's never been the nightmare experience that the concept presents in Windows. Those who have been long-time Mac users would scream bloody murder if they suddenly could not double-click on a file and have the correct application open it without any further hassle.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I've been a Macintosh Administrator for roughly four years now, and this has been my BIGGEST gripe the entire time. But I've come to understand their reasoning. If you watch an everyday Mac user, they never take their hand off the mouse anyway - not even to type, because they so rarely type anyway. There isn't really a need for keyboard shortcuts.
However, there probably are more keyboard shortcuts than you're aware of. You can navigate Finder by typing the file name in the view you are currently in and it will jump to it. Command+O will open it (why they didn't use ENTER is beyond me), and Command+W closes it. For popup and dialog windows in most Apple applications and many other major producers you can Command+[first letter of the button you want to *click*] and it will activate that button. Though you don't have nav arrows and an enter key like you do in Windows.
I think there are more keyboard shortcuts with the Mac OSes than people give Apple credit for (due to lack of use/knowledge of the OS), but it's still true that Windows can be completely controlled via the keyboard. I've done everything from the first part of the install to daily use without even a mouse plugged into the computer. Some people would say this was crazy talk and why would anyone want to, but as I'm flying through popup windows and navigating my OS while you're moving your mouse around to click a silly button, you'll understand.
~LoudMusic
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It looks fine to me on 4 different browsers and Win, Mac, Linux machines I just tested it on...
I find that most Yes No type dialogs make me want to say No!
If these programs had more sensible defaults they would not need to ask me so many stupid questions.
Thankfully Esc can be consistantly be used to dismiss the current dialog whether the label say No Cancel Done or Whatever, so despite the need to reach a little further on the keyboard i usually use escape (and since it is in the extreme top left i can easily hit it without needing to look).
I think tools like Glade are invaluable as they not only encourage people to develop lots of Applications they allow people to easily do the right thing and reuse code as well as follow standards.
Er...have you actually ever used KDE? KDE apps are as controllable from the keyboard as Windows apps. GNOME might be a different story, but I can't say for certain.
OMG, you're right, the only way to really
free my mind is to use windows,
then when the whole Palladium initiative
finally locks the user out of any real interface
or OS tinkering, I'll be used to it.
-milo
There are quite good newsreaders for the Mac. I suspect that you can probably run the terminal-based newsreaders a la BSD. I use pan on Linux, but I never had a problem with YA-NewsWatcher on the Mac (which evidently has become Thoth).
Take a look here for other newsreaders.
May we never see th
Why? I question every statement you make.
"People who think POSIX is the best thing since sliced bread agree that Mach sucks"
Have you no opinion of your own? Just because other people think Mach sucks, you think Mach sucks? Did you know 95% of the population also think that the Mac sucks, even *before* OS X? Okay, so 95% is an exaggeration. But 'experts' also disavowed the Mac. What's new, the difference between you and them?
"The least Apple could have done would be to use a better microkernel"
How or why? What would be better about this new microkernel over the XNU-macho microkernel already in place? The macho microkernel has been tested across 16 years and 5 hardware architectures (68k, x86, PPC, Sparc, HP-UX), as well as 4 OSes (NeXT, Open, Darwin, and OS X), so it's fairly good, no?
Also, I would like to point out that the *Linux* kernel is deficient in regards to latency. Only recently has low latency and pre-emptive patches have made Linux reliably low latency. Not a problem with OS X; in which case, how do you define better?
"or to design a POSIX-compatible kernel from the ground up that was legacy-free and more similar to how Macs have always worked, no?"
You're going to have to define legacy free for me. What legacy does OS X have that burdens it. You'll also have to define how or why the classic Mac had an advantage that would make a different kernel an advantage.
The current kernel has several advantages over the classic Mac OS;
low latency: As evinced by CoreAudio
multitasking: No application can take 100% of the CPU to the exclusion of any other application.
multiprocessing: This is given 'for free' to any multi-threaded application.
multithreading: The classic Mac OS could not handle multithreading, and as such, could not handle multiple processes, multiple CPUs, and multiple tasks gracefully.
robustness: The classic Mac OS was not nearly as stable, reliable, or dependable as the current Mac OS, thanks to preemptive multitasking (to ensure no thread or process because CPU starved), protected memory spaces (to ensure that no application or process can intrude and disrupt any other application or process, including the kernel), and a much better virtual memory system to allow more efficient use of available, virtual, and shared memory. Of course, to counter this, one requires more memory than in the classic OS too.
GPL Deconstructed
Huh? It's written for DEVELOPERS. Did you even read the page?
Visual C++ 6 (the last version before Visual Studio.NET) is the standard development tool where I work. When I started, they gave me a nice, new Windows XP box to play with.
The great thing about this is that Visual Studio looks like a fish out of water. Microsoft's developers obviously used a whole load of non-standard controls to set up things like the docking windows. Sometimes, they even look the same as the real thing, but aren't; I assume they had some reason for this at the time. Unfortunately, what I now have to look at is some horrible mixture where half the scroll bars on a basic development screen are WinXP style, and the others are "classic Win2K". Same goes for tabs, dialogs, etc.
This is an object lesson in why, as Apple rightly points out, you should normally try to avoid custom controls, and if you do use them, they should be for something clearly unique, and not just a drop-in replacement for the standard issue.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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
I find that this is especially bad with KDE. Some actions have well-chosen shortcuts, and I use those a lot. Others are totally lacking in keyboard shortcuts, have hard-to-rembmer shortcuts, or have shortcuts that are totally unadvertised.
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?
There are even bug reports on bugs.kde.org under the kicker package dealing with this. I seem to remember seeing one where the submitter was flamed mercilessly by the operator of the KDE bug tracking system, though that bug seems to have since disappeared. More recent bugs point out that KDE 2.x removed the capability to even define your own menu shortcuts.
On the other hand, licq is an example of a program that does this well. Most operations have convenient and well-indicated keyboard shortcuts.
Note to the authors of KDE and GNOME: Just because its a graphical environment doesn't mean you're not allowed to use the keyboard for anything!
the same.
I believe even *with*, and maybe *because* of 21" 1600x1200 resolution screens, Fitts law holds even more than before.
The 90 pixel tall menu is an even smaller target; your mouse, as precise as it is, has to traverse over hundreds more pixels than in the original 4" screen, making targetting menu bars even harder. Which is the reason why OS X icons scale up to 128x128, taking into account an expected increase in resolution in the future (larger icons are easier to see and hit, than traditional 32x32 icons). In fact, though it may be a hindrance now, that explains why *everything* in OS X is slightly larger.
GPL Deconstructed
> 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
e've put a ton of work on making nedit keyboard accessible.
There's the problem: "a ton of work". KDE has a really great infrastructure for keyboards and keyboard shortcuts. But it's a ton of work, and boring besides, to make your app use keyboard shortcuts properly.
When you're starting out on a new program you delve right into the meat of the cool new stuff you're going to do, arguing that you'll get the keyboard accelerators (and toolstips, what's this, and other GUI stuff) done once you're application stabilizes. But by that time you're stuck. The users are busy submitting wishlists for more cool new features, and you're spending a lot of your time in maintenance mode.
It would be great if some UI guy came along and started working on the KDE interfaces. This doesn't take a lot of coding expertise, just someone with an eye for consistancy and the fortitude to slog through a really large code base.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I think people are missing a more important subject that this discussion calls attention to. I don't see Apple as being perfect in any sense, but its their mode of process and willingness to evolve is generally more progressive and open to the end-users experience. The fact that they even post such articles to help guide potential developers for the OS X platform is something of a curiousity. This article brings up issues that stand alone of any os... I work for a company that does interaction design, and from experiece I can see that Apple realizes that under all the "apps and machinery" of the system, the end UI has an emotional connection with users. There's something about an interface that has cohesion and consistency; it becomes an experience rather than a mechanical operation of clicking mouse buttons and dragging windows. I know for a fact that MS is following Apple's lead at this very moment...
For god's sake, the last time I was on a windows machine, I started up WinMX and nearly screamed at the interface... I've never had such an experience on a mac... There's a level of comfort in knowing I can expect an intuitive interface on a mac... Windows? Its the best crapshoot I've ever played with!
I'm a recent switcher and can't speak very well for OS 9 or prior, but in OS X there seems to be a fair amount of keyboard shortcuts, some more useful than anything in Windows. For example, if you want to open up your home directory just hit shift + apple + H; if you want to view your applications folder do the same but hit A. To mount a network drive press apple + K. Most applications have keyboard shortcuts for commonly used operations.
One thing that was awkward for me at first was Apple + C/V to cut and paste, instead of using Control, like on PC's. It actually makes more sense to me now, since the Apple key is a shorter distance than Control from C and V; it feels more natural. Cutting and pasting in Linux I've always found to be a little bit clumsy; a lot of times I'd end up making mistakes, copying or pasting things I didn't actually want to.
Unlike Mac OS 9 and earlier, Mac OS X supports and utilizes file name extensions. However, if your application allows users to create documents, such as PDF files, that may find their way onto earlier versions of the Mac OS, be aware that you must write Type and Creator information to those files in order to make them usable on Mac OS 9 and earlier.
.txt or .html endings to their names (i.e. virus.html.exe) to trick the user. Anyone have any ideas on why they would switch to an idea as old as DOS?
Mac OS X is going from the unix meathod (file types with the data writtin in the file) to the windows meathod (file extensions) While making things slightly simpler for apllication makers, why would they do this? One of the big problems with file extensions is that virus makers use fake icons and
Only dead fish swim with the stream...
I'm typing this on a powerbook using 10.2, but I still think the trashcan should be removed from the whole UI.
I understand all the points people are making, but I don't find the GUI particularly intuitive (or unintuitive).
The real reason I prefer 10.x these days is that underneath all the UI stuff is BSD, the GUI is beautiful, but nothing earthshaking.
But I love my powerbook.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
The spinning beachball only appears on applications that are busy
I'd like to see the "busy cursor" die. It's really annoying in a modern windowing system, where you have multiple windows open with different busy states and need to move the mouse around to see all of their states.
The "busy cursor" was developed for application-modal systems, where only one application was ever in onscreen at one time. The user was usually looking at the cursor, so the cursor was the best place to put a busy indicator -- and if they weren't (possibly using the keyboard, you'd make the cursor visible and then start animating it).
These days the "busy cursor"provides only a partial view of information on the system and requires the user to switch to the mouse to check busy statuses on various apps. It would be much better to provide a "busy" titlebar indicator on each window (since these days windows, not screens, are the smallest unit across which a "busy" status might differ).
Of course, minimizing UI modality is also important...
May we never see th
The point of this document isn't to say "our interface is right and Windoze blowez". Notice that the url for the page includes the words "developer" and "switch". That means: THIS IS FOR DEVELOPERS WHO ARE STARTING TO DEVELOP FOR MAC.
Its a set of guidelines to make the porting of a windows application smoother and better received on Mac OS X. Its not an easy thing. The fact is that most ports of Windows software to macs are quite annoying because they flatly refuse to follow the "standard" interface (okay yeah, the iApps don't really follow it either - and I find them annoying too).
Yes, Apple does somewhat ignore it. But that's not the point at all. Have you seen Matlab 6.5 for OS X? Developers who are thinking about porting their apps to OS X need to realize that Mac users will not be infinitely grateful to them just for doing it. We want our apps to look nice, and feel responsive and familiar when we use them. If you aren't interested in taking the time to put a decent interface on your app, then you should consider letting your competitor "have" the mac platform for your field.
I'm not saying its easy. But I don't think porting an application is easy at all. And interfaces are SOOOOO easy to build in OS X. Just drag and drop with the available buttons/widgets in Interface Builder. It needs to be done. Mac users have just enough choice in software that they can pick a competitor's product over yours given the same price range and feature set...just because one doesn't look as nice as the other.
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.
Yep, I'm with you. What's the strongest and most obvious graphic element of OSX? It's those blue glass scroll bars. My best thinking is that an OS should recede, not conflict visually with the application. I like the basic look and feel of OSX, I just wish it was 'skinnable'.
I've had the (dis)pleasure of training a lot of the staff members in our school district to use our collaboration software, for which there are Mac and Windows versions (and soon, a Linux version!). Whenever I tell them to use a certain menu (i.e., the "Connection" menu to change their password), people using Windows look all over the screen to find out which window they're in, where the menu bar is, etc. On the other hand, Mac users always instinctively look to the top of the screen and find the proper menu, where it always was and always has been.
The breaker in this deal, however, is how Mac OS X changes the standard Mac UI to get rid of the application menu in the upper-right corner of the screen in favor of an application-specific menu in the upper-left corner of the screen (next to the now-nearly-useless Apple Menu). This makes it only slightly less obvious which application you're currently running, although Aqua uses lots of subtle hints to try to make it stand out (putting the new application-specific menu in bold, making all of the other window title bars in the background slightly translucent, adding drop shadowing to windows). I wish they'd just make the active application icon pulsate or glow in the Dock - then there would be no question.
Anyway, if you ever wonder why User Iterface guidelines seem so silly and written for the lowest common denominator, you should spend some time teaching computer-illiterate people how to drag-and-drop an attachment onto an email message. The more consistent the UI, the better.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Gandhi
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Gandhi
OS X is nice, but it has inconsistencies that show poor design. Closing a window might just close a window, or it might close a window and close its application. Many preference dialogues do not have an explicit "Save" option, and no explicit way to revert the settings to what they were: the way to save is to close the window.
So closing a window might mean "close the window," "quit the application," or "save and close the window." There is no explicit interface to tell you what will happen when you click that little red ball. You have to have a good bit of a priori knowledge to guess what will happen.
Here are just three observations that come to mind:
There are other problems with the Aqua UI. But the most basic one is perhaps that it is just another toolkit-based GUI--a system in which people produce the same kind of inflexible applications that people produce in the other major toolkits on the other major platforms. The fact that Aqua looks a little prettier and crashes a little less does not get around this basic fact.
Overall, I think what makes Aqua most useful is a desire to keep applications simple. Unlike Windows, Gnome, or KDE, it comes with useful applications are not overburdened with zillions of options; developers of those desktops should take notice.
Anyway, MDI adds a second level of navigation that's a pain to deal with, even if the app has a clean doc-window navigator -- and most MDI apps don't. I've always hated it. I guess I'm not alone, because fewer and fewer apps use MDI. Even MS Word and Excel no longer use it by default.
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.
Oh, excellent. Can't wait for KDE 3.1, then!
Thanks for the tip, BTW... Do you happen to know if KDE 3.0 lets you do this too, or is it a new 3.1 feature?
I can't back this up or anything, but from working in a university computer lab for a year or two I've noticed that many Mac users -do- routinely have one hand on the keyboard and the other hand on the mouse. Combined with the ease of Command-(key) combinations, I've generally seen those users perform tasks quicker than those using keyboard-only or mouse-only methods.
Also, anecdotally, ask any first-person shooter gamer what the best interface is and most will say that keyb+mouse is the most efficient.
YMMV...
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
"No, no, no. Don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to."
They didn't use enter or return for, as far as I can tell, two reasons.
First, within any app other than the Finder, you'd still likely have to use Cmd-O for open. It's pretty nonsensical to imagine hitting the Return key in Word and getting an Open dialog. Thus, consistancy demands that the one app people will ALL use a lot not be dramatically different from ALL other apps.
Second, when you're renaming an icon in the Finder, you signify that you're done by hitting Return. (there is no rename dialog -- it's all inline) Since modality is not exactly looked upon favorably -- though sometimes tolerated -- on the Mac, it makes sense for Enter in the Finder to mean "toggle the renaming function" rather than "stop the renaming function" with some other key meaning only to start it.
As for the general worth of keyboard navigation, I suggest you have someone actually time you with a stopwatch using the keyboard, and again while using the mouse. Apple did this and to their surprise, the Mouse was often objectively faster, contrary to the subjective experience of the people being tested. This doesn't ALWAYS hold true, but it is apparently common enough.
Don't believe it: then give the experiment a try. There's no other way to be sure, when your personal experience is called into doubt.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Damn right you haven't used a Mac in 5 years. Find an OS X box, go into Preferences, Keyboard section, and turn on Full Keyboard Access. You can now manipulate all standard interface elements with the keyboard. Admittedly this feature is not perfect and doesn't work everywhere (try it out in the Preferences app itself if nowhere else), but it's a hell of a lot closer to what you describe than OS 9 ever was.
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."
And even when there is adequate hot key support, it can be a pain to use. Ever try to use a web browser without a mouse? In theory, it's quite simple -- a web browser doesn't have that many actions, and all the browsers I've seen provide hot keys for every possible action. But many are context-dependent. You can't, for example use arrow keys to scroll the text unless the doc subwindow has the focus. And be careful not to use Backspace unless you're editing text, or really want to go back to previous page!
Bottom line: you can have proper keyboard support on any platform provided your app designer (including web page designers) are willing to sit down and think the problem through. Unfortunately, most aren't.
Still, most setting boxes in windows have multiple save/OK buttons, and it's not always clear which ones do what. Not to mention the OK and Apply buttons. Some apps, OK means apply and close, some OK means close just like cancel does, other won't let you click OK till you've clicked apply. That gets annoying.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Yeah. As a million people have said before:
Any two button USB mouse is automatically supported by MacOS X, and right clicks work like control-clicks (that is, they invoke contextual menus).
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
OS X does support right-clicking natively. It also supports scroll wheels (in Cocoa).
For the record, apps were faking contextual menus on the Mac long before they were an OS service.
You just need to increase the tracking speed a little. Once the mouse is properly calibrated it's the easiest thing in the world, a quick flick of the wrist takes you to the menu every time, and you never overshoot and have to back down slowly to hit the menu.
Seriously, give it a try, once you get used to it it's hard to go back.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
You can't do anything like this in the windows UI. And although windows keyboard shortcuts will give you the ability to arrow your way through the start-menu, just use LaunchBar once, and you'll see that Windows' solution was good in Windows 3.0, but not anymore.
Granted, Microsoft has done some awesome things with keyboard support (I love context-sensitive help). And you're right, in OS X, some program menu tasks I can't do any other way but a mouse. But when it comes to typing Alt+F and arrowing my way through the menus, it's really not getting me any improvement in speed or functionality. I don't miss it at all.
If we're talking about OS X, I think its a moot point--I can close dialog boxes from the keyboard. I can rename files in the Finder from the keyboard by simply hitting RETURN (try doing that in Windows Explorer). And I can open any application or document on my system simply by holding down Apple+spacebar and typing in the first couple letters in its name.
LaunchBar is truly the most innovative program I have had the pleasure to work with for years. It brings the speed of the shell into the GUI. And like tab completion in the shell, once you have it, you never want to go back.
Notes From Under *nix: blas.phemo.us
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
It doesn't "acknowledge" this because it's not true. As you say, your Mac OS knowledge is way behind the times. Mac OS X has better keyboard support than Windows, any version - and better than an *nixes, too. OS 9 and previous versions were lacking in this regard, but at this point it's a non-issue.
Take-away: don't criticize features you've got no familiarity with.
i'm sure they're just reminding everyone that windows copied apple, not the other way around. hopefully they hide that information about the XEROX GUI
Jesus saves souls and redeems them for valuable cash prizes
Ya know, some of us are using a Mac, regardless of gender, because we've grown tired of all that tweaking you find so bloody interesting. If interesting means it doesn't work out of the box, requires hours of setup, and is still a pain to use, well then, I guess I'm getting boring myself. I did it for years with Linux. What do I have to show for it? Nothing. It was a complete waste of my time.
For me, OS X is good because I can use the traditional Unix tools I'm comfortable with, without having to put up with the half-baked semi-pro attempts at interface design pawned off by the open source community. I've got better things to do than trying to massage KDE or Gnome or whatever into something that doesn't annoy me. Maybe someday they will be up to par, but I don't want to wait.
So, obviously, I don't care if Macs aren't as "tweakable" as PC's. That's a good thing. It means I found something I can use without wasting time. If the ever-so-strident open source crowd had managed to market a Linux-based PC with similar attributes, I might have purchased it, instead. But, they won't do that because half of them are off building UI's and "themes" that look like a cross between a teen-ager's wet dream and rejects from Design 101. The other half are off whining, whimpering and worrying about preserving their so-called right to "share" music and movies with the entire planet.
Nor are Macs "ridiculously expensive". More expensive than a $699 Dell or a $400 no-name white box? Sure. But some of us actually have an income and can make our own decisions. There is no "geek" market to speak of, so why should Apple care about Slashdotters whining about price? Every self-described Slashdot geek could disappear tomorrow with no impact on industry revenues.
No one has to buy from Apple. If they want to tightly integrate hardware and software, that's their business, not your's. There's no reason why they should do anything different.
As for why Slashdot is posting Apple stories, perhaps it has something to do with attracting readers who actually have some discretionary income to spend. I'm sure their advertisers would appreciate that.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Then click the disk and tap command-e
that stands for 'eject'
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
Someone should tell apple that when you insert "you" instead of "your" in a document, it appears to be unprofessional or unfinished.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
As for the interface comparison, that power settings panel looks and works EXACTLY the same on Win XP as it does in 98, ME, 2K, etc. XP just made everything gaudy, in addition to its ineffectiveness.
Strangely enough, the Mac dialog box seems to be verbatim from the Windows 2000 one! Except for the fact that Apple Photoshopped out the system standby and system hibernates combo boxes.
That's an AutoCAD feature--not a Windows feature. You could do the same thing with AutoCAD for the Mac (when it still existed).
*command-e *drag to the trash (which morphs to an eject symbol) *hold down f12 for a sec. *open the terminal and use unmount ...and that's not enough? Is there no pleasing people?
that said, I wish we could press the little button on the front of the drive...
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
*command-e ...and that's not enough? Is there no pleasing people?
*drag to the trash (which morphs to an eject symbol)
*hold down f12 for a sec.
*open the terminal and use unmount
that said, I wish we could press the little button on the front of the drive...
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
Yes, Apple natively supports two button mice with separate left and right click actions. A right click works the same as a control-click (it calls up a contextual menu if available, if not it acts like a left click), plus it still has the control-click. It also supports 3, 4, 5, and more button mice, but those buttons don't have any pre-defined operating system actions associated with them, they need to be defined by the current application or by third-party utilities.
Sapere aude!
How old is your Linux box? I've been able to just hit the key I want for whatever menu shortcut I want for several years now, out of the box.
Humor me, try this:
See? You can assign and remove any meny accellerator you wish, in any application (that supports it of course, like stock gtk+ applications, XUL code (i.e. Mozilla, Galeon), and so on.
Your FUD doesn't help the cause.
Funny you should mention this. One of the critcisms that was levelled at Windows (it must have been ealier versions such as 3.0) by some user interface experts was that it essentially a keyboard driven interface with mouse support bolted on. However I've seen one of my friends using just the keyboard under Windows and he is far faster than me using both the keyboard and the mouse.
It is good to see open source desktops such as GNOME 2 starting to get improved (and consistent) keyboard navigation.
It's all about being user friendly. If you've never used a computer before, or are just starting out, a single button mouse is worlds easier. Apple relies on the idea that if you are accustomed to having a 2 or more button mouse, you already own one and therefore it is not nessesary to include one.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
>No one has a problem with the dock unless they
>are already thoroughly entrenched in some other
>mechanism.
Bingo. You've inadvertently hit the nail on the had when it comes to the UI wars.
Consider the following:
All human-computer interfaces are awful. NONE OF THEM ARE ANY GOOD. You have to learn how to use them, you have to remember what things do, what order to do them in and be able to predict how they will function under different circumstances.
So what do humans do? They learn them, and become familiar with them to the point that they convince themselves that they are not only the best way of interacting with computers, they're the only way. Typical. Humans are very stupid.
I personally think that the QUERTY keyboard layout is the "best" one because I'm stupid. I think that a CLUI it the "best" way of interacting with a server OS because I'm stupid.
But I don't force this down people's throats because I know that both systems are fundamentally stupid, and I'm tooo stupid to think up anything better.
However, they work fine for me and I can use them to get things done.
Mac? Windows? Gnome? OS/2? Next?
Here's the punchline:
IT DOESN'T MATTER! USE WHAT YOU LIKE! YOU'RE STILL GOING TO GET THE JOB DONE STUPID!
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Once again with the sad and pathetic attempts by lonely dead ednd slashdot posters to associate sexuality with a computer. TH emore I see these posts, the more I think it's a reflex of die hard Wintel weenies to deny that it's actualy becoming cool to once again own a mac.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
It says "Microsoft Windows-based applications often implement a Multiple Document Interface (MDI),... " As far as I can tell, very few Windows apps use MDI - at least under Win2K/XP. Only Excel does as far as I know. Word doesn't, MSIE doesn't, dunno how you'd class Outlook or Explorer (not document oriented at all probably).
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
(since I'm running 3.0.3 and don't have that) it seems to be 3.1 only.
The close button, like the most destructive button of any set of options, should be further away from the other options. I don't care for the new design in OSX nor for the design in window. Even less so in windows becasue the menu is on one side and the controls are on the other
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
With those options turned on you can do everything you want without needing a mouse.
-braxton
I still can't stand the default position of the dock at the bottom of the screen. It doesn't go well with windws that resize from the bottom-right corner, or with horizontal scroll bars.
But I understand why Apple put it there. Windows has a lot of people conditioned to look to the bottom of the screen for an application menu/launcher. Similarly, the great big icons make it hard to miss for the new user.
Fortunately, they also included a lot of customization. I am much more comfortable with the dock since I stuck it to the right side of my screen, reduced its size way down, and turned the magnification down. And to my suprise, I find that those high-res icons still look good, and remain recognizable when reduced to the same size as the old small icons.
Perhaps the Apple GUI tools should be set up with defualts to force this behavior, unless the developer deliberately breaks it.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
This is really something that depends upon whether your generally work in one program, or are always switching between programs. Apple really should have made this a System Preference. I use a shareware utility called ASM, which allows user control of this behavior.
these aren't exact screen shots. They are examples used to convey a point. In the same way a survey is not an exact representation of the US opinion, it's used to get a point across.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
I was always able to do other stuff while my modem dialed (though I often just used the time to catch a snack). Did you ever try clicking into another application? Or did you just look at the watch cursor and go "Aw damn"
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
I remember using the built in file deletion features of Microsoft Word to delete the "At Ease" preference file , thus exorcising the broken interface from the computer. Ah memories...
Now why did you bother doing that? You should have done what I did, and built up trust with the teachers. After helping fix a dead file, convert PC to Mac and back again and remove a broken floppy 4 or 5 times, the librarians just gave me the administation passwords to do as I pleased, so that I could work with my programs and with others without calling them over to remove a lock.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Because by learning different ways to approach a problem you are better able to make a better solution. Not to mention that most of the HIG are portable to other platforms and make a hell of a lot of sense. And if you ever want to continue to maintain the hope that someday maybe when hell freezes over that you will be able to run OS X on your computer, you better show Apple you and your fellow developes can conform to certain HIGs or your programs will fail miserably.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
How many PC's come with a 5-button optical mouse? I always have to buy a new mouse anyways..
What it really comes down to is choice and preference. At least Apple designed an OS that is fully operational using a single button interface -or- a 9-button Tri optical, force feedback, Microsoft H@x02 Explorer.
There are plenty of computer users out there who are virtually computer illiterate (my parents included), and it's taken them YEARS of hand holding to get them to use multibutton mice correctly. Strangely enough, both my parents are multiplatform*, but they both have shiny macs at their respective work places.
* They both use a PC for stock/investor related stuff. Mac support is horrific in that venue. Apple's own employee stock purchase plan is run by E-TRADE, which have no mac support *boggle*
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
1) File extantions are a resul tof switching to the UNIX underlay.
2) What does it matter wheather it's called COacoa, Carbon, Darwin, Java, C++ or Pearl. It's just a name. And acronyms are annoying more often than not because they aren't pronounceable so how do you indicate tham verbaly? i.e. GUI (yeah you can say Gooey, or G-U-I, so how is it worse that just saying Aqua?
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Define Nerd....
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
So what you're saying is that Microsoft can take a screen shot of the Mac Desktop, Photoshop out the hard drive/mounted disks and the trash icons, along with the toolbar and control strip and then claim "How difficult the Mac is to use!"
I think it's all a bunch of malarkey.
All that fun fun teaking. Like wastng an entire saturday fixing a sound card because it broke when Win2k updated. Or like following Billy Bob Tech's guide to over-clocking. Or trying to figure out why despite everything you've tried, your monitor still flickers every half hour.
Macs are computers you can tweak when you want, not because you have to. And it's more challenging therefore more fun. What the hell is so fun about over clocking your computer from the BIOS? Nothing. Now do it on a mac, and you need to get out your soldering iron. That's fun. So tell me what wonderful tweaks I can do to my PC that are any where near as fun as they would be on a mac (I dare you to get a mac classic running a color monitor, or get an LC up and running OS 9)
As for cost, too fsking bad. Maybe if you stopped buying $500 sound and video cards every 6 months, you would have enough money for a mac.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Appple assumes that the mouse has only one button. In that case a single menu at the top of the screen might be more productive.
Two buttons allows instant access to a menu without moving the mouse. If this was standardized like the menu bar layout then I would expect the right mouse button menu to be much faster than the one menu at the top.
- AndrewN
It will always be as small as is possibly can, which sounds like what you want.
Some hints. command tab switches apps, command ~ switches windows within the app. Hide an application by option clicking outside that app (i.e. on another applications window)
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
>> 7. Aqua Is In, Grey Is Out
What other reason do you need?
"Once you get used to it, Keyboard+Mouse control is actually a little faster than Multibutton-Mouse control."
Tell that to my friend who has little to no control over his left hand.
The whole idea of mixing inputs is revolting - mouse inputs should come from the mouse keyboard from the keyboard. It's HIGHLY unintuitive to have to mix the two.
When I was taking a course in Director I'd occasionally let friends come use my decked out PC to work on their projects - once I showed them how to right click to bring up context menus most of them were hooked and started complaining about how the mac did it.
And these were people who just about had to be bribed to touch a PC.
--- Juggle juggle@hitesman.com
The difference of course being, the screen shot apple used was to demonstrate the errors present in many dialouges into one picture, where as your example is just blatent lying.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
But the parent post was informative? Right...
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
How about OS X? That seems like a nice reason to buy a mac. Pluse the machines look nice. And I don't have to deal with microsoft, or intel. And I don't have to worry about drivers breaking. And I prefer the system? I use both macs and PCs, and when I have the chance, I rather use a mac.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
The single menubar at the top of the screen is faster to access because of an ergonomic principle known as Fitts' Law, which states that the time to access a target is a function of the target's distance and size. A at the top menubar is infinitely large because there is no possible way to overshoot it vertically (i.e. you can slam the mouse up to the top of the screen really fast and don't have to correct for any vertical error because you're running into the top of the screen). On the Windows/GNOME/KDE interfaces it's possible to vertically overshoot the menubar, which makes that layout far less usable than the layout on a mac. For a more in-depth explanation of this phenomena, check out this article by UI guru Bruce Tognazinni.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Well, I do have a lot of familiarity with OS X and it's keyboard support *sucks* compared to Windows .
Apple do not believe in keyboardability, plain and simple. Support for using the keyboard in OS X is a crutch, not an integral and well thought out feature.
My main problem with Windows keyboard acceleration is that it's often HARD to find out what you need to know. For instance, why isn't there a little thing beside the 'maximize' option in the Window menu? I don't know how to maximize my Window, and I really wish I did. :)
So far, EMACS is the only thing that I find gets it right. Yes, yes...things are cryptic and a bit hard to learn, however, if you know the command, you can ask what key it's bound to. If you redefine a key, it shows up differently in the dropdown menus, and if you run a command with a keyboard shortcut without using the shortcut, the system will pop up a little message (in a non-modal fashion!) to tell you what the shortcut is so you know for next time.
For most apps under Linux, though, I agree. There's really no good reason for it.
Or even the mousewheel at that?
I really can't understand why so many Mac users object to multi-button mice and the mousewheel, outside of dogmatism. I will concur that there is a limit past which increasing the # of buttons on a mouse generates convenience, but on the other hand, there are several perfectly valid logical flow for adding at least one extra button to the mouse.
So enough blowing smoke... just grow up and package a 2 button mouse with the Mac if you're interested in increasing effective usability... and throw in a mouse wheel, I'm addicted to mine
http://liquidben.com - Aspiring to an 'under construction' gif
I've heard this argument so many times and it has merit, but at the same time its just not true. There is more to life than the amount of time it takes to click on an item that the MacOS single menu bar approach breaks:
1. Graphical Organization. As was touched on by the parent post, the single menu bar design causes confusion when more than 1 application is running. Having 1 windows focused, when you are attempting to perform an action on another will result in that action being performed ON THE WRONG WINDOW. There is no way around this.
2. Switching between application. If I'm working with an IE window, and then decide to save a file in another I first must focus the window I want to perform the action in, and then use the menu. I'm doing 2 things here, where as before I could just do one.
I think it would be interesting though, to create a menu bar approach like the one in Windows, and then make life better according to the sacred Fitt's law by making the mouse accelerate slower over the menu (or even give force feedback) than the rest of the window. This might be disorienting at first, but after someone got used to it, I imagine it could speed things up even more than either the MacOS or Windows style alone.
The fact that so many people find the single menu bar so annoying should tell you something. UI interface designers have become so high up in their towers they forget to listen to the people that will use it.
------ 24.5% slashdot pure
Half the fun of owning a toaster oven is modifying the heating coils so you can smelt your own iron.
Half the fun of owning a ceiling fan is tweaking the motor so it can suck cats off the floor.
Most people however buy things to use them. Macs are very usable, that's why people buy them.
If elegant design offends you, just rip the guts out of a Mac and epoxy them to a piece of sheet steel. You'll have all of the functionality without any of the prissiness you seem to associate with good design. And...it'll look right at home in your garage next to that disassembled carburetor : )
Why doesn't apple seem to understand what it will take to be a real player? They have the best OS, but their hardware is limited and grossly overpriced. After 20 years, they should realize that a great OS will only sell if it can be installed on the hardware of the user's choice. They would crush Microsoft within 5 years if they would port Mac OSX to Intel/AMD based hardware, sell copies of the OS at $50/ea, and help get software designers to include binaries for both OSes in every box they sell.
Apple is killing themselves by getting entrenched in the hardware side of the market when they should be focused on putting high markup CDroms onto store shelves. Steve Jobs' goal should be to see every x86 based PC sold 'naked', and for people to purchase the OS of their choice to install on it. Apple can go on selling upscale PCs with built in flat screens and dual-processors to yuppies and professionals with 'special needs', but most people just need a cheap PC that is easy to get online with and type papers.
Apple needs a clue.
Some of these are in the menu at the top of the screen, some aren't.
Either way, contextual menus don't replace the main menu.
dalamcd
moer liek CELtroid prime!!@1!
What about "Show Package Contents" for an application bundle? It's in the context menu in the Finder, but if there's a menu-bar item for it, I haven't found it.
And in an astounding piece of dumbheadedness, Windows retains that one pixel edge in a few places.
Maximize a windows (IE will work) and move to the slider on the right-hand side. You have to carefully move in a couple of pixels from the edge to hit it.
And so you're welcome to you're opinion. I just think personaly a mac feels better than a PC. Maybe it's because I grew up on them. But I use both, and I always feel more at ease with a mac. It's a feeling of personality and understanding. It sounds lame I know, but I see it all the time, and you see it even with PC users and their computers. The computer just doesn't perform the same for anyone else except the owner. I don't know how to describe it or why, but I feel it more with a mac than with a PC. And in honesty, I've never felt deprived by a lack of games on the mac.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Nonsense, that's like saying its harder to add on a scientific calculator compared to a plain one.
You can easily ignore the second (or third, fourth, etc) button just as you can ignore all the special functions of a scientific calculator when you're only adding.
I know this place is filled with anti-microsoft people, but please notice that this isn't a flamebait.
I like being able to change the file extension of a file and have it open in different programs or behave a little differently. I constantly due it for many different reasons. When I used a mac os for the first time, this was a really large pain for me.
Also if for some reason you are changing file extension of a file with the file extensions set to hidden well that really does kinda say something negative about ones intelligence.
All in all, I'm glad that OSX allows people to more active use file extensions. I am also happy that Windows has always allowed one to do it. I personally choose flexibility on a computer system more then a little convenience. Isn't that why many geeks also use os's like linux?
Hmmm... Pie...
I also noticed in the screenshot the iTunes window is tiny and shows just the bare essentials rather than displaying the library. My biggest UI complaint with iTunes has always been that the window is too big and can't be reduced to a small enough size that it doesn't dominate the display. So can anybody tell me how to get the view of iTunes that appears in this screenshot? Is there some really-well-hidden UI element to do that, or is it a third-party hack?
And I miss windowshading.
I play Nerd-Folk!
What does this have to do with a single menu bar? The MDI parent window is there primarily as a container for the application menu bar (and perhaps to hold a bevy of toolbars, which Apple rightfully dismisses). It's also there because a non-MDI application in Windows does not remain running when there are no open documents. In Mac OS X, this is no problem, since the menu bar itself indicates which application is in the foreground.
If what I say doesn't make sense to you, hold on to that Mac for a bit longer before you hawk it on eBay. I'll bet you will grow to appreciate the benefits a shared menu bar provides.
There ain't no rules here; we're trying to accomplish something.
"on Win2k Pro"
That's your problem. Win2000 doesn't have a native skin engine. XP does (uxtheme.dll).
Hey Coward,
So you call a random user, programmer, astronaut, doctor, lawyer, governor, or president "he" or "him"...
Do you do the same for a random nurse, or secretary?
By the way, the "established format" is to have unworthy scum like you (and me) working for the aristocracy. Don't stop turning the clock back just because you're on top of the heap.
They would crush Microsoft within 5 years if they would port Mac OSX to Intel/AMD based hardware sell copies of the OS at $50/ea, and help get software designers to include binaries for both OSes in every box they sell
So you base this assumption on what, exactly?
Perhaps you would like to be able to buy a dirt-cheap PC that Mac OS X to boot on. But I don't think the end result for both you and Apple would be nearly as picturesque as you describe.
Windows is Microsoft's core business. It's hard to imagine Apple crushing Apple on standard wintel hardware, especially in five years. Apple has a considerable product development advantage when working with their own hardware. A lot of the ease-of-use and simple management aspects of Mac OS X come from intergrated hardware.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Keep in mind that Apple's article was not to bash Windows, but to help developers switching to Mac OS X develop consistent and user friendly applications. So, if they say MDI is a bad interface design, it's not entirely relevant whether Microsoft continues to use it or not; they are simply saying, "Don't use MDI on the Mac."
There ain't no rules here; we're trying to accomplish something.
"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]"
Uh, yes????
[Click]
NO! NO! I meant NO!
....
SHIT!
[Alt-F4]
[File....New]
I disagree. I generally find that custom widgets charm developers, and annoy users.
Personally, I don't think that programmers should be given that much control over their apps. I mean for a full screen game sure, but a standard window enviornment? One app I use regularly has an "about" box that fades in and then out. What crap. I know that the programmer could very well choose not to create the app if they weren't given the option, but come on. An analogy: If I donate to a charity, I don't expect to be able to demand what direction their cupbard doors open. Giving programmers more control often means the user has less control. The user should have choices over how their apps look and work. They should be the ones who decide where the "preferences" option goes, whether it be File -> Options or Edit -> Preferences. What if I wanted to designate that a program will have no write access anywhere but the directory it was installed in? How many programs tolerate this? What if they were written for an operating system that won't have it any other way?
I'd like to see web pages take this route, too. Not user design, but raw data. The user decides where the email is to be shown on the screen if there is one. If there is an [email] tag, put it here. Otherwise it would read "none". Repeat for [last updated], [external links], [internal links], etc.
I'm sure many here would recoil at the idea of not being able to choose every aspect of how their baby runs, but I certainly don't. It would be nice to use an operating system that rips control from the anus of a programmer and lets the advanced user choose to make it simple. This doesn't mean letting the user compile their own, it means leaving it up to the user in the first place.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
I used to be a big OmniWeb user, but the lack of full JavaScript and CSS support finally got to me. After a short stint with Mozilla, I'm finally going to give Chimera a more serious look. Chimera is officially at 0.4.0, with nightly builds showing 0.5.0. It's basically the same Gecko rendering engine of Mozilla/Netscape, but it's a Cocoa app. When this finally hits 1.0, I predict that it's going to be an amazing application. Definitely worth a try at this point.
You mean Fitt's Law, of course.
And it doesn't 'break' Fitt's Law at all. Fitt's Law is related to the distance to, and size of, targets, not their absolute position.
Positioning the tabs in the middle of a dialog or to the left makes no real difference. You are mistaking the fact that Fitt's Law says that putting things at far edges of the screen improves the user's ability to target them. But.. since these tabs are not at the edge of the screen, the target area is the same whether they're in the middle or not.
Forgetting Fitt's Law, the Apple dialog is actually better in this example, since the drop down box in the Windows dialog encompasses a range of different options (hours, minutes, don't switch monitor off), whereas the Apple dialog splits the actions into logical parts.
mogorific carpentry experiments
... I have not come aross a single button on M$ keyboards that is so useful it boosts my prouctivity.
:)
I certainly have.. ctrl-alt-del
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
Nonsense, that's like saying its harder to add on a scientific calculator compared to a plain one.
When I was in school I had people ask to borrow my calculator, and when I handed them my TI-82 they looked at it for a bit, then handed it back and asked somebody else for a "normal" calculator. Naturally, anyone who knows how to use it can use it for simple addition with no trouble at all.
Let me tell you, the one-button mouse is a godsend to anyone in tech support. You'd be amazed how many Windows users have trouble figuring out the difference between a left-double-click and a right-single-click.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
You have a VCR and you can afford to rent one movie every week for the rest of your life. Let's say you have 60 years left to live.
This means you can watch a total of 3,120 videos. But does that mean that a video store that keeps 3,120 would keep you satisfied? Of course not. You'd want a wider choice than that, even though you wouldn't want to watch every film.
mogorific carpentry experiments
Next time someone asks you for a calculator, hand them a TI-83 and see what they do. It does the same things the same way any other calculator with the same button presses, but people look at it and go google eyed and don't seem to know what to do. Why do you think most calculator programs (like the ones on palm pilots and on your computer) come default in basic mode? So as not to confuse people.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
What's the shortcut to paste?
Yeah, Windows users will whine about how of course it has to be this way. On the Mac, though, Command-V always works. Always. Everywhere. In all applications.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Slightly more realistic dialog boxes:
Do you want to save changes before closing? [Yes/No]
Are you sure you want to close without saving changes? [Yes/No]
I haven't noticed Mozilla giving me Yes/No buttons; I've noticed giving me Mac-like Don't Save/Cancel/Save buttons just like the Mac standard, even on Windows and Linux. Not to mention the Edit/Preferences standard (Mozilla/Preferences on OSX).
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
All this UI crap...I knew there was a reason I still used shell access.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
One thing I dislike in Mac GUI is the order of buttons in dialogs.
Unfortunately GNOME 2.0 inherits this problem. I am totally unable to use it until I find the option to reverse the order.
Not saying it's a waste of your time at all. Some people enjoy "tweaking" their car, other people just want to drive.
/Liquid setup -- ever pleased me.) Did I pay a premium for that? I suppose so, but that's OK. It's my choice.
I don't use Office or Photoshop, games bore me, and I could care less about downloading music and movies to my machine. (Boring junk stays boring junk after you download it.)
For several years, I ran machines with Linux and its brethern as well as Windows. Linux was/is fascinating, but one day I realized that most of my time on the machine was devoted to constant adjustments and readjustments of something. Optimize this; download that; futz with libraries; compile this, then fix what broke.
My frustration grew, and one day I just had enough. This was all input and no output. I wanted to stop playing with my car and just drive someplace.
So I bought a Mac, something I wouldn't have considered prior to OSX and Aqua. First, I want access to Unix (that's why I used Linux in the first place; I've used MKS Toolkit on DOS and Windows for years), and second, because the quality of the image displayed on the screen is very important to me. (Perhaps more important than to most people; no Linux desktop -- even an antialiased KDE
Like I said, if I get could what I want on a cheaper Intel box running Linux, I'd still be there.
Is Apple selling a brand, an image? Sure. So is MS, IBM, Dell, Gateway, and all the rest. Even you local no-name beige box vendor can't avoid having an image.
And, yes, I read Slashot daily, and have for a long time. What I don't understand is why Mac stories provoke reams of vitrolic posts by people who seem to think Apple is a direct threat to their personal wellbeing. Some people need to walk away from the keyboard and get a life.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
There's this wonderful little button on our keyboard that ejects CDs. Hell of a lot quicker than reaching up to hit the eject button on the case (or reaching under the desk in the case of most PCs)
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
The Dock isn't larger than the task bar --- by default it is, but I can squish my dock down to a height of 32px.
MS quite often breaks their own rules. There are guidelines that a developer must follow in order to get the silly Windows logo on your product, and most of MS's own software break these rules.
They encourage developers to use the common dialog boxes (Open, Save As, etc), yet most of Office 2000 (and probably other versions) do not. It looks to me like they wanted to add some of the stupid features from Win2k to Office 2k, before Win2k shipped (IIRC, the buttons on the left of the dialog for Desktop, Network etc).
As a result, one annoyance I have with Office and Visual Studio is this: I keep my "MenuDelay" to zero, eg, I can't stand the 400 millisecond delay between the time you hover over a popup menu and the time the menu shows. It's a simple registry hack (or use TweakUI) to change this. But Office and Visual Studio apparently use their own menus, and ignore this setting.
There are probably a million other examples (many things in Media Player come to mind).
I agree, sometimes you do need custom widgets for specific tasks, but one should never replace the OS-provided ones if it can be avoided. This is about my only real gripe with Mozilla honestly... I don't care if it looks the same across platforms, and browsers do not need to be skinned IMO... Not to mention this god-awful buggy text box they created (though better than it used to be, it seems like an unnecessary waste of dev time).
NGWave - Fast Sound Editor for Windows
Apple went even farther with MacOS X. While a file may be associated with a primary program, it can also have a list of programs that register the file type. This way, you can open that .JPG in Internet Explorer, Preview, Photoshop, or anything else that told the OS it handles JPEGs.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
A rare rational statement, for the most part. I doubt that I'm a typical Mac owner, per the reasons I've given elsewhere in this thread. Apple's closed and tightly controlled hardware-software integration brings advantages and disadvantages. Right now, the advantages tip the scales for me. And, for those who don't remember the 1980's, hardware-software integration was a common approach -- in particular, see Amiga and Atari. IBM's open PC architecture changed all that (and also open the door for Microsoft's closed software platform.) There was more variety and competition in the PC market before IBM released their first PC than after. All Apple has done is carefully nurture their brand in order to carve out a tiny sliver of the overall market.
By the way, I'll trade you the Apple stories for all the "Game Developer Fires Staff", "Video Card Cracks Terabyte Barrier", and "Linux Powers Server in My Boot Heel" pieces.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
yes, but command-v is a stupid combination.
Old truckers never die, they just get a new peterbilt
While I am convinced that the default option on InstallShield is to prompt the user to reboot, cause it seems almost every win install does just that - needing it or not, the windows install process is still a major pain that doesn't need to be.
/opt/whatever"
I am trying to think why you would need to do anything other than move the files in place. On the Mac you just drag and drop. While install scripts may complicate things on Unix systems somewhat, they basically boil down to "move these files from the CD or this location to the final location." If it wasn't for the whole make process, most software installed boil down to "cp -R .
Simplicity.
So why are windows installs so horrendus? I can see driver installs needing to do something special, but registry settings can be setup the first time the program is run, registrations/proof-of-purchase/warez-serials can be done at the first run of the app.
In fact, if decompression from a file is the only reason to run an install program, I'd prefer it if they just left the files on the CD as they need to be. That way, if I was to hose photoshop.dll, I could just recopy it from the CD and not have to reinstall.
If you need to dumb it down a bit, make the autorun say "you just put in this CD - wanna install it?" and if they choose to do so, then make a directory and copy the files there...nothing arcane needed.
"Not a flame, just an observation." :)
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
"Fitts's Law" is not about infinite height
No I suppose not directly BUT that "infinite height" obviously has the advantages of large size that (more than? partially?) compensates for the lack of proximity under Fitt's law.
It is certainly not emperical research but I just spent a few minutes experimenting with hitting screen-top menu items as opposed to window-top menu items (the home and back buttons on my browser) And I played around with my mouse settings. I found that unless my mouse was set to be quite slow or I was at the very bottom of the screen a single careless flick of the wrist got me onto the top menu and usually right onto the menu I was aiming for. By contrast unless I was painfully slow and deliberate in my movements I always overshoot the window-top buttons which take up twice as much screen real-estate. And if my window was near the top of the screen (where they usually are) that overshot was almost always onto the screen-top menu bar (recalling the billboards saying - "if you lived here you'd be home by now")
Changing my mouse settings to be much "slower" than I usually set them or disabling acceleration I did lose much of the advantage of a screen-top menu. It took two or more mouse movements to hit the top menu bar. The slow speed also seemed to help a little in not overshooting the window-top elements. So certainly mouse settings & screen size could destroy any "Fitt's law" size advantage the screen-top menu has by making the proximity effectively much farther away. However for me at least the easiest of all combinations was to hit a screen-top menu with the mouse configured fast enough to do so. I found a mouse that was set so slow as to decrease the edge menu's "proximity" enough to negate the edge menu's "size" advantage was also inconvenient on a large screen for other reasons. I suppose If you are using a large screen for many different apps that you are NOT working with at the same time - each one in it's own quadrant there might be advantages to setting you mouse slower and having all your menu's at the top of each window. My guess is that this is a relatively rare way of using computers but I could be wrong, my own use of a large screen is so I can use all of that screen at once not a piece of it at a time - a situation for which multiple smaller monitors seems better suited than a single large monitor.
I don't have multiple monitors at the moment BUT I think this is the one scenario that Apple does NOT address well. But that has nothing to do with the placement of the menu bar at the top of the screen but that it is only at the top of ONE of the screens - duplicating the screen-top menu at the top of each screen would work nicely.
The Windows dialog box in #9 looks perfectly normal to me. It asks a question and lets you enter a response. But in the back of my mind, something always bugged me about it, and not just because it gives you three ways to answer a Yes/No question. Now that I see the comparison with the Mac version, I realize what's wrong with it. The Mac version makes more sense and is guininely easier to use. It's not a coincidence that these are also two phrases that describe a Mac (compared to a PC).
One of the things the Mac dialog box does that the Windows box doesn't is converge everything about the action into the dialog box itself. In other words, it gives you enough information so that you can focus on the immediate issue (saving the file) without having to think how you got there.
As the text says, dialog boxes interrupt the user. When the user is interrupted, his train of thought is interrupted, and that usually forces him to think unnecessarily harder about what he's doing.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
The two button mouse, where the second button is restricted to doing just one thing: bringing up a context menu -- is a huge improvement in usability over a single mouse button.
The scroll wheel on the mouse, eliminating the need to ever hunt down and manipulate a scroll bar in well-written apps, is the greatest thing since the mouse itself.
The Mac has neither. The Mac UI seems to be ruled by religious precepts that were finalized in the 1980's and no longer open for discussion.
Yes, you can buy a 3rd-party mouse with the extra button and wheel, or use both hands and type/click (ctrl-click) and it may work with 3rd-party Windows apps ported to the Mac, but not (or very little) with Apple's own software. Try finding context menus in the Finder or iTunes, etc. On Windows, every visual item would expose the useful operations that could be performed on it via a context menu. You want to know "how do I do...?" for some item? Try right-clicking it. But that's a Windows idea that Apple didn't invent, so they don't believe in it.
The standard Mac has a single-button mouse, so Mac developers have a lot less incentive than Windows developers to create context menus. Apple doesn't tell developers not to do it, but they never recommend a good, thorough set of context menus as part of their UI guidelines.
Apple's early studies of mouse buttons compared single mouse buttons with complex functionality vs. multiple mouse buttons, each with complex functionality, and tested them on an audience that had never used a mouse or a GUI before.
They looked at lots of different placements of scroll bars, never considering the idea of a scroll wheel that could make scrollbars unnecessary.
How many ways does a study have to be out of date before Apple will reconsider their "I can operate the mouse wearing an oven mit" religion? Almost all computer buyers today (in major markets) are buying a replacement computer, and 95% have experience using a 2-button Windows mouse. Many of them don't use the second button, but the Windows UI doesn't require them to. It's merely a convenience, albeit a huge one. The Apple studies were looking at 2nd mouse functions that were both complex and required, and decided that they weren't a good idea, and now there's no changing their minds.
Until Apple catches up and starts using a "normal" mouse (or something better), I'll find the process of hunting down scroll bars and selecting followed by menu spelunking too annoying to consider a Mac.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
You are confusing accelerators with keyboard navigation:
Keyboard navigation (things like Alt-F to post a "File" menu) are completely different beasts than accelerators. Mnemonics are visible, modal keyboard navgiation items, are not customizable, are complete, so that you don't have to go out of your way to create them. Accelerators (like Ctrl-S to "Save") are hidden modeless shortcuts into common features of the application, are almost always incomplete, and must be user-definable.
A completely nonobvious and invisible way of assigning your own keyboard accelerators is not the same as having a visible and complete set of keyboard navigation.
You are also taking the classic open-source argument that Makes UIs Suck: well, just go fix it yourself if you don't like it! Just press Ctrl Alt Meta Shift CokeBottle, then edit >~/.foobarrc, add "MakeMyAppLessStupid=True" restart X, and you're good to go!
Consider an older, disabled person (or even myself with a hangover) with shaky hands, who doesn't have the fine motor control to do pixel-perfect placement with a mouse. Accessability is another reason for good keyboard navigation. Are you saying that they have to assign every interface element to a shortcut? (How many hours would that take? Dunno about you, but I'd run out of keys and wouldn't be able to remember them all.)
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
... is accessibility. I have a friend who is blind, who is a perfectly competent user of Windows 98, as long as applications use controls understood by his screen reader of choice (Jaws). The moment an app writer gets creative and uses a non-standard control, he's flying blind (literally).
The most annoying thing about use of non-standard controls is that 99% of the time it's completely gratuitous eye-candy, and usually bad eye-candy at that - the new controls do exactly the same stuff as the standards, and typically badly. It's particularly galling when Microsoft themselves does this, in (say) a password-change dialog for MSN. which loads some funky ActiveX control that hoses the screen reader and forces my friend to make his changes by phoning customer support.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
"They" and "their" as singular pronouns have been in popular use for over 200 years.
;-)
I am too lazy to verify the length of the time "they/their" have been in popular use as neuter pronouns, but I am surprised. I have not run into it. What am I missing?
Come on - if you can write a sentence like this: "Given that language is a set of arbitrary rules which shifts along with culture and usage, why do you have a problem with this?" surely you have a few holdover prescriptivist tendencies yourself!
As long as intention can be clearly conveyed and interpreted, there is no right or wrong in language, especially English.
That is the descriptivist view, to which I adhere, for the most part. However, society imposes a standard upon the language. This dialect, as I'm sure you know, is called "Standard American English (SAE)" or as I like to call it "Tom Brokaw English."
There are lots of reasons society imposes these standards. Some of them are good reasons. Many of them aren't. In any case, everyone who wants to be taken seriously in any formal context needs to know them.
When I get an e-mail from a vendor (usually it's a vendor) with an apostrophe-s for a plural, or a "their" instead of "there" I lose a lot of respect for that person. Is that fair? Probably not. Is it going to happen? Yes. And we can't stop it, so we should teach our kids SAE in addition to whatever non-standard dialect they speak at home.
Still I contend "DEATH TO 'THEY/THEIR' AS SINGULARS"
Yes, it's a blog. Sorry if that offends you.
I would REALLY love to know how many hours of developer time was sunk into the monstrosity that is the text box in Mozilla. Even in the latest daily builds is still does not work right: random highliting of text, weird reformatting and reflowing, broken JavaScript interaction (inserting text at cursor position always appends to the end), and I'm sure many more anyone willing to torture text this wonder of programming would find.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
You have good points, but what lacks is the consistency for really common keystroke tasks (closing a window, or quitting a program). Still nothing like the horror of loosing your mouse in x-windows!
You don't have it quite right. There is also position to indicate what they do, and little "X" "+" and "-" symbols do appear when you hover the mouse over the buttons.
That said, it would be preferable if the symbols were on all the time for the color blind (having to hover the mouse over the buttons to figure out what they did is annoying), but it's not as totally hopeless as you implied.
Control and command are different keys.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
To give credit to Apple, the window-control widgets in MacOS X are spaced apart, so you're not likely to press one by mistake. Compared to Windows' jammedUpNextToEachOther mess, X is better by far.
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
A counterpart to that is that I'm typing messages to Slashdot in a little window in a Web page, and my spelling mistakes are being underlined red by Mac OS X (the system), not by OmniWeb (the application). It's important, because I told Mac OS X some extra words to watch for (like "Slashdot") and I don't want to have to tell the computer about those words again.
Time and again geeks excuse bad computer behavior by saying "well, that's a different application" or "that's a different codebase", or "it was originally written for Windows 95, not XP", or WHATEVER. There are a bajillion geek excuses left over from when computers were slow and stupid and rare and expensive. Microsoft speculates on a market for technological stupidity and they come up winners because so many people are so ignorant about the state of the art. Guys puff their chests out in their blogs about the fact that their Windows system only crashes once a month now and I'm truly saddened by that. Yeah, I know it's better than the daily crashes they used to have, but still. Windows 2000 was supposed to be XP but wasn't because they were going to send the coders in to install security and stability instead of features, and years later look what we have.
I've tried them all, and I love my Apple Pro Mouse and its one button simplicity. My left hand stays on the keyboard, where it does modifier keys all day, so Shift+U and Control+click are the same thing, while my right hand just points and clicks at things. Point, click, point, click. Gets ingrained in you like a musical instrument.
you can partially thank my brother for contextual menus in system 8.something.
I make these: http://beatseqr.com
>> Apple has found that using one menu at the very top increases productivity.
... so much has changed in the last few years that I can't believe there was any impassable technical obstacle that kept them using a single menubar. The Mac didn't really used to have toolbars, and now there is a standard toolbar available for any window to use ... couldn't they have provided a menubar there, too? An optional one, maybe? I really don't think anything stopped them from going with multiple menus except that it is not better in real use. When I see someone working on Windows today they look very cautious in their mousing to me ... they are carefully targeting everything, they are looking a lot and waiting and then clicking ... they are not operating in the intuitive, playing-a-musical-instrument way that I and others do on our Macs.
> They found that out 20 years ago using a tiny 7" screen and a GUI that only allowed one
> application on the screen at the same time, with test subjects who had never been exposed
> to a WIMP interface before. I would have to say that research simply does not apply in
> current times where multitasking operating systems are standard, all current GUIs display
> more than one application at a time, and even the cheap 15" displays support 1024x768
> pixels of screen resolution. The single menu bar is an annoying relic.
Apple quite publicly remade itself between 1997 and today. Mac OS X is a complete rewrite. I am sure the single-button mouse and single menubar were the subjects of many conversations and much research and demonstration inside Apple between then and now. What went on in the 1980's may still be important to you, but I doubt it had too much influence on Steve Jobs et al as they planned Apple's place in the world in the 21st century. Steve Jobs was fired from Apple in 1986, remember? He left with Apple's "Big Mac" project and turned it into NeXTSTEP. For the single menubar to survive the OpenStep > Mac OS X transition means it must have impressed somebody recently. They didn't do all this work to get to now and suddenly say "oh, shit, the MENUBAR! How did we miss that?". If you've USED both methods, the Mac way will likely feel better to you. It's also AMAZING for newbies (you teach them where the File menu is ONCE) and right now most of the world barely qualifies as newbies when it comes to computers.
I don't buy that there's a single thing in Mac OS X that isn't either how Steve wants it or it is on its way there. You can say you don't like it, but I don't think you can say it has anything to do with the 1980's. All the widgets and controls changed their appearance between 10.1 and 10.2
Why total bunk gets modded up as "informative" is beyond me.
-- thinkyhead software and media
When my wife switched to a Mac, she got a two-button mouse and tried to do all the same things as in MS Windows until I told her that all of the commands are just in the menus at the top. She expected that only some commands would be there and some wouldn't. She started using a one-button mouse and going to the menus for every command and she was much faster and happier with that. You don't have to pick a method first, and the mouse hand just points and clicks so it gets a "mind of its own" (our hands have more brains in them than many animals, actually) and the cursor starts to seem like it just appears in the menubar when you want it. She is totally disinterested in context menus and key commands now. It's all menubar and drag and drop, which were both invented by Apple and were both in the original Mac.
No, the image was not doctored. This is exactly what appears for Windows users on systems lacking power management.
Apple suggests that such a dialog should be made smaller. For this particular example I believe it would be more appropriate (by Apple HIG) to display the power management options - but in a disabled state. The dialog should then (Windows-style) have a yellow warning icon with some explanatory text saying "No power management features are available on this computer." (Of course this would make the dialog larger, but Windows users just love lots of explanatory text.)
-- thinkyhead software and media
Then you use the keyboard, tab and the spacebar, like every other person has been using on Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and Unix for decades. Did you manage to decouple that ability somewhere? I still have it in every OS I've ever used.
No at all. Input is input, and I certainly do NOT want any application overriding or inheriting the binding preferences, input modifiers, accelerators or navigation elements that are set by my window manager, desktop, or OS itself.
Unlike you, I see this as adding flexibility, not taking it away. I don't want 'Y' and 'N' to be a default choice in a dialog box for Mozilla (when you can easily get to either of those through XUL, or with the normal keyboard without changing a single binding anywhere in your OS). What if I have 'Y' set as a watched binding in my window manager? What if my 'N' key is broken and I've mapped it to a different keystroke through xmodmap?
Again flexibility. You want a GUI wrapped around those human-readable files? Go ahead and write one up in the favorite toolkit of your choice. Qt, Tk, wxWindows, Xlib, Motif, whatever.
I take that stance because Open Source works, and has been proven to work well for over a decade. As Linus has said before, If you don't like it, you're entitled to double the purchase price back.
Why does everyone expect the Open Source community to just cater to them? Why do they think we do this for THEM? We do not work for you. You aren't paying my salary. You have the code. Here's how this works:
I should write a HOWTO or whitepaper on this, the attitudes of everyone treating the Open Source and Free Software developers as a big pool of "free" development talent is really getting tiresome.
This vomit has to stop, and it will only take force or persistance to bend the newbies back into shape. This is not our problem to deal with.
Just because a screwdriver could be used as a chisel, doesn't mean it's the best tool for the job. Use the right tool for the right job.
In my original reply, I said I am an open source developer. However, I also believe in usability for non-experts, which means that keyboard navigation has the be there by default. That means keyboard navigation has to work for people who don't know how to recode and recompile applications, learn XUL, or manually edit config files to make things do what they want.
My point is that if it's done inside the toolkit, then things will Just Work even if the developer doesn't forget.
User-hostile attitudes like yours ("bend the newbies back in shape") will do nothing to get open-source more widely accepted by a larger, nontechnical audience.
Further, a proper set of default keyboard mnemonics will not override any shortcuts you have setup in your window manager. Window managers rule the roost in X programming, and if it binds a key, then it simply doesn't deliver the key to the underlying application.
It would save developer time manually doing it, not effect power users who manually need to override things (quite easily done via X resources, wm configuration, etc) and help people who are used to Windows where you have better keyboard navigation.
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
But actually I don't think so. I think we, users, have already decided that don't care too much about what styles will be delivered by default in our OS, especially, when we can change them. We care more about available applications, stable work and interoperable integration.
Mac OS before X has real problems with with available applications, compare to Win32. Mac OS X is even worse. Go to te nearest shop and check out yourself. Then double check on the web. Mac OS before X was terribly unstable and very crashing - it was the most unstable GUI on the market. OS X is not perfect either, compare to *n*x. With death of OpenDoc (thanks, Steve) nothing close to COM or CORBA.
So, what's left to Apple in attempt to save Mac OS? As usually - appealing to style and to snobish users. Mac OS was, is and will be pretty useless expensive (because of hardware) toy until Apple will done or both of the following:
- either will fire Steve Jobs, the man who failed to bring any market succes to Next, and think more about applications, stability and interoperability (back to OpenDoc?),
- or will give up Aqua source code, letting OSS to migrate it into X11, and keep as a hardware vendor.
Meanwhile I advise to use Linux/PPC (YDL, RH or others) as much better OS than Mac OS (including OS X).Less is more !
However, windows often takes the right-click stuff too far. Some things in the Windows interface (some tray icons, network status comes to mind) can *only* be operated with a right-click. A "normal" click does nothing. Stupid stupid stupid.
As for keyboard navigation, Windows has been ahead on that front for far too long. It wasn't until the most recent release of OSX that keyboard navigation can be made to work the way it ought to.
-zack
>Launch any gtk+ application, like say...gimp.
[ snip ]
>Now hit Ctrl-N
>Now hit Backspace
>Now hit Ctrl-Alt-Shift-N.
Wow. How INTUITIVE!
That's much easier than having logical consistent shortcuts in the first damn place.
-l
Ditto with what the other replies said.
Also, it's not obvious what the two buttons do. Which one is the "plain" button and which one is the "scientific" button that I can ignore for now?
A possible solution would be for both buttons to default to the same function (normal click) unless the user goes into an option panel and enables contextual menus (or whatever) with the 2nd button.
Constitutionally Correct