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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.
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.
Look at the screenshot of the power settings in Windows. The reason it looks like that is because the computer that Apple happened to use for the screen shot did not have the "turn off disk", "standby", and "hibernate" features and as such those things were missing from the screenshot. Had those things been there, then the screenshot would have looked full. Just a little misleading
Well, why didn't the size of the dialog shrink if those features weren't there? That's Apple's point.
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.
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.
Am I really the only one who think that it make sence to "start a shutdown" ?
Martin Tilsted
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?
"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.
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.
Geez, you know what they meant. The icon is rendered from a palette of millions of colors, e.g. each pixel uses at least 24 bits. You're just being pedantic.
This is why they caption calls it a "Windows-like dialog box," and not "a dialog box from Windows." It's just an example of things they are saying you should avoid.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
The dialog didn't autosize because there is a tradeoff between attrctiveness and usability. The Apple design assumes that users don't care what's underneath the window they're looking at. Basically, that design depends on the assumption that if my application has a modal dialog up, then you should look at the dialog, and not at the underlying app.
Fair enough -- except that it turns out to not be true. One frequent action that users take is to move a modal dialog out of the way in order to look at their document, and then navigate the dialog based on what's on the screen. Having dialogs of constant size facilitates that user operation; altering dialog height to fit the dialog's contents its workability inhibits it.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
No, it just proves a point from Gnome human interface design. MDI should be used very rare with extreme prejudice. But when MDI is used that way (and it should be used), MDI rules.
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
But is it realy fair to compare
standerd save dialog with that of Notepad?
Certainly... shouldn't Notepad be using the standard save dialog? (That's one of the other things mentioned. Why create your own dialog when the system-standard ones already exist?)
Even SimpleText (the old Mac equivelent to Notepad) has this right.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
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.
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."
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.
three letters? hah! At least in macosx, you can use more than that. For instance .pbproj is the extension for "Project Builder" project files.
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...
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"
Instead of using the terms 24-bit color and 16 bit color, Apple, (and therefor mac users) uses the terms "millions" and "thousands". (For lower bit depths, older macs used "256 colors", "16 colors" "4 colors" and "Black and White")
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.
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
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.
I know that you meant it as a joke, but I think Apple's statement makes sense.
The days of the skilled programmer (but unskilled UI designer) putting together the icons and user interface are over. Well designed applications are the key to making an application useful. I think SoundJam and iTunes are a great example.
Cassidy and Green built the original SoundJam MP3 application, and while it was full-featured, it was a bit of a pain to use, particularly the custom playlist feature. In fact, I never really used the feature since it was such a pain to create the playlist with customized criteria and keep it in synch with the songs I had in my collection.
When Apple bought SoundJam from Cassidy and Green, they renamed it as iTunes, and stripped the functionality down. The most important thing they added was the live searching feature, and the ability to support integrated playlists. Suddenly, the overwhelming SoundJam application became the much more friendly iTunes, accessible to any user. iTunes 1.0 had fewer features than SoundJam, but since its user interface was better, the application was better.
Icons are the same way. When you look at just the icons of 10 years ago, you can see how far we've come. Look at the winners of Icon Factory's Pixelpalooza competition, you can see how even the winners' icons from just five years ago, you can see although they were cute and clever for 1997, they look unprofessional compared to the look of the icons delivered with Mac OS X 10.2.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
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"
Actually, this all makes me want to throw My Computer into the Recycle Bin - but they won't let me.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
A Windows geek sees something he likes in the Mac OS, and says, "a good example of the advantage of having integrated hardware. However, I prefer the flexibility of being able to buy motherboard swaps on pricewatch."
A Mac user sees the same feature and says, "an example of good software design, which is why I put up with the vendor lock-in of buying an Apple."
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
...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,
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
Translucence doesn't solve the problem -- in fact, it doesn't even help. The contents of the underlying document are obscured and distorted, and the user is not in control of what is shown on the screen.
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
The article was obviously not meant to be a full HIG document for all Mac applications. Don't take it to be such.
There is a separate guideline on the appearance of "device" applications. Apple's guideline is that any application that simulates or interacts with a hardware or "real life" device should have the aluminium look/feel, which can be applied to any application the developer in 10.2, from what I've read.
Ummm, no. In OS X, when one begins to drag a disk around the desktop the icon of the trash changes into an eject icon.
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
12112
INTEROPERABILITY!!!!!! .jpg extension and it works fine on the macs, and as soon as it ends up on the linboxen or pcs the said machines just don't know where to start. .AppleDouble nests to find the right mime type, it just is a pain in the arse.
I maintain a site that has , a linux server, a coupla win pcs, a coupla linbox pc's and a shiteload of macs.
One of the biggest problem is the mac's reliance on metadata to determain filetype.
Far too often I've had one of the graphic designer fluffheads panic because the've saved , like, 1000 jpegs with no
Short of apache developing a mod to look in the
3 letter file types solve this whole metadata problem perfectly.
It's a perfectly good idea.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
This is a common misunderstanding. It wouldn't matter if it was only one pixel. It means millions of color choices, not millions of colors simultaneously. For truly high-quality color, you need more colors available than even the entire screen is able to display simultaneously.
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.
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!
Exactly. I went to the PA Governor's school for IT two summers ago where I had a course on Human-Computer Interaction, and one of the things we discovered was out of the entire class, no one liked windows auto-sizing like what Apple suggests. I'll agree that the extra space is moderatly annoying, but it's still FAR less annoying than having the window change size on you. Apple is usually better at intuitive UI stuff (the "verb button" suggestion is a very good one and one I'll be using henceforth), but in this case they're wrong.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
Or Apple? Let us not forget where this came from... the Apple Menu, which is where you shutdown and reboot in OS X.
-- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
To defend Microsoft, which is a rare event for me... The window is the proportion the Golden Rectangle, as is most of Microsoft's objects and pattern. The standard Push button falls into this category.
You can still do this, but you can also press Command-E for eject, choose Eject from the File menu, or press the Eject toolbar button, if you added one.
The point is that you are unmounting a volume, not putting the contents in the trash. Once new Mac users got past the first instance of dragging a disk icon to the trash they knew what it did. I think Apple leaves it there because old timers are used to it.
It also makes no sense to drag a DiskBurner CD icon to the trash to burn the disk, but the icon does change to show its state, so it's really no longer the trash.
-- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
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.
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.
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
How many times do users loose these dialouge boxes behind other windows though? I can't tell you how oten I've been working in a document, called up a dialouge, had to check a couple other things, and never found the dialouge again till I minimized all windows. That to me is not efficient
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Umm, that's in all versions of NT, including 2000 and XP. (Not sure about 3.51 though.)
The reason for that is to keep your password secure. Let's say someone is running a "fake" login dialog box that will capture your username/password. Well, they can't because ctrl-alt-del is written into the keyboard driver, WinNT always intercepts it, so NT's dialog box will be the only program that can be activated by ctrl-alt-del. Make sense?
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"
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.
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.
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
I think the re-sizing thing is supposed to make sense because Apple dialogs favor a "center-biased layout" standard. Visually, the important stuff is always or near the center of the dialog, right where your eyes expect it to be and can most easily recognize it.
The dialog can safely resize to eliminate wasted screenspace (by only taking up enough space for the relevant options) because the information you're looking for is always in the same location regardless of dialog size.
In theory, anyway. Dislike of window autosizing may have been due to Microsoft-centric habits, lack of time to truly familiarize onself with Apple's way of doing things, and limited understanding of Apple's design goals in this context.
Knowing what I know now, I'd happily accept autosizing dialogs, and blithely spend the few cycles necessary to become used to them.
Of course, it would also be nice if Apple's OSX platform (the hardware) was reasonably affordable, user-moddable, compliant with my employer's corporate technology standards, and able to run the games I like to play...
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
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
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
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
then hit command w, or go to file-> close. Or if it's the last window open in an app or you want to close all an apps windows, you could hit command Q. How many more options do you need?
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
You can put whatever fucking drive you want in your mac. Period. The onyl difference is, the eject button will not work to remove a disk. Why? Because unlike windows, Mac OS automaticaly mounts a disk when you put it in. ANd in order to eject a disk, you need to un mount it. It doesn't become un mounted just because you closed the window. So go buy your nice cheap hAcme Drive and put it in your mac. It will work. Have fun.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
And where as in the windows community your program would most likely be used because in actuality it isn't much worse than some apps out there, in the mac community it would fall flat on it's face.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
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!
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.
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 : )
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
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).
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.
For another example... say Grandma has created her first web page, and because I was the one talking her through it, she did it in Notepad. Now, she can't see the file extension, but Notepad, being its usual *cough* helpful self, saved it as index.txt or something like that. So she goes and changes the filename (all of which she sees is 'index') to 'index.html'. Mac OS X does the Right Thing here: changes 'index.txt' to 'index.html'. Windows does the simpler, but Wrong thing: changes the filename to 'index.html.txt'. Double-clicking on it will still bring it up in Notepad.
There's one simple, slightly contrived, example. I'm sure others could be provided. Pray cease to comment on my intelligence, unless you actually know what I'm talking about.
"The best argument against democracy is a five minute chat with the average voter."
--Winston Churchill
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
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;
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;
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
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"
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.
Control and command are different keys.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
> Hire Professional Help
... imagine a command-line app that used ":" instead of "/" as the separator for directories and you'll understand why a Mac user resents the "wrong" key shortcuts or window or menu behavior. YOU JUST INTERRUPTED MY WORK. Think about it.
This is SO IMPORTANT for independent coders to understand before porting to the Mac. Hire an artist or make a collaboration with an artist or designer. GET ARTISTS TO MAKE THE ARTWORK! Sheesh. You might have the best algorithms and amazing data, tight code that runs fast and doesn't crash, and functionality that is in high demand, but it will go for nothing in the Mac market if your application doesn't have an interface that respects the history and experience of the Mac user base. If your app has a Find command and it isn't Command+F, you might be the only such app that a particular user has ever run into that does that. They have 20 apps that all do Find when you press Command+F, and yours doesn't. They are not going to assume that you chose another key shortcut, they're going to assume your app is broken. They're going to write you and try to be helpful in reporting a "bug" and then you're going to write back all haughty with a developers-know-all attitude that vi uses something else for Find and so that's what your app uses and you're just plain going to alienate users. If vi users are also important to you, make a Preference such as "use vi shortcuts" so that a user can enable. There are a couple of apps that already handle key shortcuts this way on Mac OS X.
Pixelated graphics and icons are another strike because Mac OS has had system-wide high-quality anti-aliasing and full-color icons since 8.5 (almost 5 years). Users expect from experience that graphics will be smooth and colorful and text will have "no jaggies". If you graphics are not anti-aliased on Mac OS X, it sticks out like old stock war footage in a movie about WWII. There's no excuse these days. The average coder can find a half-decent artist on the Web in NO TIME AT ALL and get some better graphics. Some coders have simply shipped a beta with bad graphics and icons along with the message that they are open to user contributions, and within a week they will get icons and toolbars and logos in email. In other words, there's just NO EXCUSE for bad graphics. Half-decent graphics are FREE, and good graphics are CHEAP.
Another reason to respect the Aqua GUI is that if you let Apple manage this stuff, you don't have to. You start Interface Builder and you get a menubar with File, Edit, View already on it and lots of stuff already filled in where it is expected to be. Hook that up to your code and data and functionality, and if you need to modify something there, find out how somebody else has already solved that so you can stay consistent.
It's such a drag when you find a good app with good functionality that you end up putting in the Trash because you simply don't have the time or patience to adapt to it every time you use it. I don't want to think about what app I'm in, just what document I'm working on, so having one app not work as expected gets in the way of my whole workflow.
The stuff in this document is the real reason people use Macs. It's not because they're prettier, it's because compared to other systems, with the Mac, it's like you only have to learn one application ("Macintosh"), and then there are thousands of plug-ins for that app that add other functionality. From the user's perspective, it's very, very empowering. You're not afraid of a new app, because you "already learned most of it", and the interface fades into the background along with the computer and you only see your WORK (song, story, poem, artwork, movie, code, memo, whatever). These days the stability and proper security and also standards support are other big reasons, but the Mac is still around basically because other systems all still have shitty interfaces.
It's funny to see UNIX geeks bashing this document
On a Mac, the dialog would have shrunk down if there are options that aren't needed on that system. That kind of stuff is accounted for. The
What the user uses is where the buck stops, though. If I'm sitting at that system, I'm going to see that dialog box. This is not a mock-up of a Windows dialog box, it's a real Windows dialog box. You think that kind of shoddy interface is fine because you're 1) used to it, 2) you know the technical excuse for it. Mac users 1) are not used to it, and 2) don't care about the technical excuse for it, or don't believe the excuse since they've already seen it done better by other apps. GET OVER IT.
Ha ha ha. All the inconsistencies in Windows (95, 98, NT, Me, 2000, XP) on all the different hardwares, with all the different shitty drivers, and you guys think that an inconsistency in a screenshot in a tech paper is more likely to be "Photoshopped in" by Apple?
MICROSOFT DOES NOT NEED APPLE'S HELP TO MAKE SHITTY DIALOGS. Apple does not need to use Photoshop to display examples of strange dialog boxes in Windows applications. In fact, this comparison is rather tame. They are taking care not to insult the reader, who is likely to be a Windows developer who has made his or her share of shitty, shitty dialogs. They also use Microsoft's own apps here. They are not even using other developer examples to display the inconsistencies. Why don't they show a Borland app written for Windows 95 running on Windows XP? Users are running into that kind of shit all the time.
This article is about porting software from other platforms to Mac OS X. That is the reason they took an arbitrary Windows dialog box and recreated it as a Mac dialog that doesn't actually exist on the Mac. PORTING.
... the dividing lines are not clear on Windows. You might not think of Windows' Control Panels as apps, but they are and their interfaces SUCK ASS.
It would have been better if the dialog they showed was from CorelDRAW or something, then you would get the picture that we're talking about porting an app between systems. I guess they wanted to use Microsoft's own stuff, though.
Also, on the Mac, System Preferences is just an application that modifies XML preference files. Showing a Windows Control Panel to a Windows user is like showing them a "system" thing, though
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 think he's responding to the guy who pointed out that his kitchen appliances all had different controls ... stove and toaster, etc. This post makes the point that certain conventions are still being followed, such as turning a knob clockwise to increase a setting. A knob that goes the "wrong" way is not another kind of control altogether, just a faulty knob.
Do the expectations of the users matter, or do you just sit there and design in a vacuum? If you think of the users, it will be a cinch to use the standard Mac conventions that they already know and let the user get IMMEDIATELY on to utilizing the distinctive features and functionality of your software.
On the PC, there are like 10 ways to do everything (IBM vs. MS vs. Apple key shortcuts, for example), while on the Mac there is often only one way that's been agreed upon long ago. What Apple is saying is that before you introduce a second way, make sure that you have examined the value proposition from the perspective of a user who has been hitting Command+P to Print from their GUI apps for almost 20 straight years. These conventions are just as valuable as "/" and "|" are to command-line UNIX. Just as MS turned "/" to "\" they also turned Apple GUI stuff into Windows. It's the same method for cutting out actual design or innovation: take someone else's work and modify it just enough to call it your own and then sell it cheaper, or give it away, and make more of a profit because you didn't have to actually pay to invent it or build it or design it or test it.
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.
>> 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.
> I really can't understand why so many Mac users object to multi-button mice
... come on.
... the mouse is not a part of your hand anymore like with a one-button mouse.
... the fact that it is standard means that the computer itself and all Mac apps can be navigated with just one button. If you are on a desktop PC you say "so what?", but if you are using a stylus on a graphics tablet then you are happy to only have to press one button, if you are controlling the computer by voice or gesture (both built-into Mac OS X) then you are also going to gain from only NEEDING point and click. Touch screens, etc. So multiple buttons on a mouse is like a hack that won't scale, and MS Windows requires that second button for some stuff (amazing). On any other pointing device, the other buttons are even less useful and even more in the way. Most trackballs are nightmares of ergonomics just so they can fit a lot of buttons on there and convince somebody who spend $50 last year on a two-button trackball to spend $60 this year on a three-button trackball.
> and the mousewheel, outside of dogmatism.
Remember that most Mac users have used Windows for real work, while most Windows users have not used a Mac at all. When you talk about dogma, we Mac users have seen more than our share of Windows users going through life the hard way
Apple's Pro Mouse doesn't have any buttons. It sits in your hand and you point and press either your whole hand or one finger, two fingers, whatever, and get a click. It becomes second nature.
I don't have any research to support this, just my own experience, but it seems like the hand has enough brains to take on the simple function of pointing and clicking and that means your brain doesn't have to do that. If you overload the hand, though, with multiple controls, then the brain has to get more involved in mousing. So on a Mac you just think "point, click" and your hand does it very naturally, develops a habit of flicking the cursor up to the menus and such. With a two-button mouse, now you are working individual fingers, e.g. pointer finger on left button, index on right
Another point about the one-button mouse
One additional point: I can teach almost anyone to play a hand drum musically in almost no time at all because we are used to moving our hands around to hit things. The hands already have the skill and you just have to teach the music. To learn to play the piano musically, though, the person will probably have to build up their finger dexterity quite a bit ... in other words, their hands need to be taught new skills as well as learning the music. The one-button mouse doesn't ask more from the user's dexterity than what most people have from their regular life skills.
Think about other things you do with your hands and compare to a one-button slam and point mouse with no finger aiming or dexterity required at all, and to a three-button scroller mouse. Pick up a rock and throw it, write with a pencil, point and press with an Apple mouse. EVERYONE can do these things. What are the analogies for the three-button scroller mouse?
Another point is that point-click-response is easy to see on a Mac. Go up to any Windows system and press the "wrong" mouse button for a task and see how confusing that could be to someone who doesn't have experience with it.
Finally, Mac OS X has support for up to 32 mouse buttons, so go nuts at Fry's and use whatever you want. Context menus are pluggable, so if the one you want isn't there, make it yourself or get it from somebody else.
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
The reason for that is to keep your password secure. Let's say someone is running a "fake" login dialog box that will capture your username/password. Well, they can't because ctrl-alt-del is written into the keyboard driver, WinNT always intercepts it, so NT's dialog box will be the only program that can be activated by ctrl-alt-del. Make sense?
That's the excuse, not the reason. The reason is that the PC's firmware is decades old in some places and can't prevent a false login box. Open Firmware (IEEE 1275) on Apple, Sun, and other machines doesn't suffer from this problem.
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.