Slashdot Mirror
Apple Explains Interface Differences
WCityMike writes "This switch document for developers details the interface differences between Microsoft Windows and the Aqua interface used in Mac OS X. Written on a layman's level, it actually makes for pretty interesting reading!"
Look at the screenshot of the power settings in Windows. The reason it looks like that is because the computer that Apple happened to use for the screen shot did not have the "turn off disk", "standby", and "hibernate" features and as such those things were missing from the screenshot. Had those things been there, then the screenshot would have looked full. Just a little misleading
Well, why didn't the size of the dialog shrink if those features weren't there? That's Apple's point.
Most application interfaces are just a little more complex than a toaster.
Consistency is the most important part of a UI - a user will get used to the behaviour of certain controls/widgets, if your app comes along and uses it's own that behave differently, you just broke consistency and the user will have to waste time deducing the behaviour rules of your control.
Windows has become a hive of confusing and inconsistent interfaces, not only because people like Adobe write their own tab controls, but people like Creative and whoever wrote BlackIce discard the standard interface entirely and use their own hideous bitmap based monstrosities.
Not to mention the fact that using standard controls saves a hell of a lot of time developing custom ones. Obviously some controls simply won't exist and you'll have to make them yourself, but with a reasonable set of standard ones and a good canvas control you have most things covered.
Chris "Ng" Jones
cmsj@tenshu.net
www.tenshu.net
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.
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.
>By switching to OS X, Apple threw out 15 years of hard work, just to release an OS with an inferior UI on an inferior kernel.
Yes, a kernel that rarely crashes is indeed inferior. Likewise, a kernel that allows developers to build applications based on standards is a poor choice.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
Apple is just trying to ensure that their OS's reputation of being user-friendly isn't damaged by overzealous developers. New users don't know enough to distinguish between the OS and the applications that run on it, so an app that's hard to use reflects negatively on their OS.
This space intentionally left blank.
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
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.
No, actually he does not say that. What I read there is that he doesn't necessarily agree with Apple's "new direction", and has decided that the difference between PC and Mac interfaces is now negligible. Obviously, a lot of people disagree.
Cocoa could not, no-way-no-how, have been ported to OS 9. While I miss my old spacial Finder too, I realize that it does not scale at all for the large numbers of files UNIX - and indeed, things like digital photography/music collections - requires.
By switching to OS X, Apple threw out 15 years of hard work, just to release an OS with an inferior UI on an inferior kernel. And their interface in many ways no longer follows the principles that Apple themselves set out so brilliantly back in 1984, and others tried to emulate with varying degrees of success (don't even get me started on the Dock).
Inferior kernal? Smoke another one, buddy.
I've heard these arguments over and over about the Dock. No one has a problem with the dock unless they are already thoroughly entrenched in some other mechanism. I'm convinced that it is the pain of un-learning something else that makes people hate the Dock. Try this - put some newbies in front of Mac OS 9 and tell them to launch the browser. They won't be able to do it. Where is the browser? 4 levels down, inside the Apps folder, with no visible way to get there. OS X solves this. The dock may have some significant limitations, but it's hardly the disaster some make it out to be.
As for throwing out 15 years of work, if you'll check the aforementioned Aqua UI guidelines, you'll see that it's not true. They have built upon that foundation. It's practically identical. I still have the original 10-book set of UI guidelines, and it really hasn't budged. If anything they've added to it - such as the new mode for dialogs (status, reason, action). Things like 'verb' button-labels remain.
But there's absolutely no point in buying a closed platform when the software, specially designed for that platform, sucks. At least with PCs, I can run BeOS on a laptop; with Macs, such is no longer an option.
You know, that is an opinion.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
I can't agree with some of them. For example :"Don't use non-standard controls".
I agree with you, however... I suspect the reason Apple makes this suggestion is that most developers over estimate their expertise in designing user interfaces. They think, "it makes sense to me" and they write a control that makes no sense at all. Their intimate familiarity with the product and it's intended use makes it difficult for them to imagine the thought process of a new user.
Designing user interfaces is pretty complicated, and requires a lot of thought. Even with this time investment, you still need to do user testing etc on your new control to see if it gets used the way you had hoped. This is true of any new interface, but especially true if that interface is full of non-standard controls. Most software products don't have the resources to devote to this aspect of development.
So yes, an intelligent design with non-standard control *can* work. But you won't go far wrong with the ones that have been carefully thought out and provided for you. As soon as the article say something like "most developers will do better with the standard controls", every developers suddenly feels like he is part of the group that doesn't fall into that category. (Everyone overestimates their own ability.)
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.
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.
Actually there were two very valid reasons for doing this back when the original Mac UI was being developed.
... not neccisarily bad but still very confusing to those of us (myself inculded) coming from a[n] [X]windows background.
The cheesy reason: It saves screen space, on a 3 or 4 inch low res monitor screen space is very valuable.
The good reason: 'targetability' With the menu always at the top of the screen it has an effectivly infinite height making it easier for the user to get to the menu (ie a quick flick upwards of the wrist always gets the mouse over the menu).
Clearly the first reason is no longer valid on todays systems, but the second still has some merit. But on the other hand if I wish to 'target' a menu item in a different document window things get much more cumbersome... I guess they just optimized for the common case at the expense of the uncommon one
Thoughts on tech, Software Engineering, and stuff
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."
"The best argument against democracy is a five minute chat with the average voter."
--Winston Churchill
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.
Apple's Developer site has more info. In fact, they say that xnu is not strictly a microkernel.
--
The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
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!
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.
XP is easier for you just because you are used to it. The OS X environment is easier for me because that is what I am used to.
Precisely. I'm not saying that everyone's the same, but since it's in Apples interest to attract Windows users, it makes sense to make the transition as painless as possible.
Is adding a menubar to a window really that radical a change? It's just an object - I'm betting the alteration to attach it to a movable window rather than fixed to the desktop is not a huge undertaking, and the apps wouldn't behave any differently aside from a thin strip across the top of the windows.
Again, this could easily be a choice; a simple checkbox ("Dock menu to window"), and not the default, but maybe mentioned in a getting started guide for Windows migrants. People can then choose whatever works best for them. Be interesting to see the percentages in any case...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
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.
I know that you meant it as a joke, but I think Apple's statement makes sense.
The days of the skilled programmer (but unskilled UI designer) putting together the icons and user interface are over. Well designed applications are the key to making an application useful. I think SoundJam and iTunes are a great example.
Cassidy and Green built the original SoundJam MP3 application, and while it was full-featured, it was a bit of a pain to use, particularly the custom playlist feature. In fact, I never really used the feature since it was such a pain to create the playlist with customized criteria and keep it in synch with the songs I had in my collection.
When Apple bought SoundJam from Cassidy and Green, they renamed it as iTunes, and stripped the functionality down. The most important thing they added was the live searching feature, and the ability to support integrated playlists. Suddenly, the overwhelming SoundJam application became the much more friendly iTunes, accessible to any user. iTunes 1.0 had fewer features than SoundJam, but since its user interface was better, the application was better.
Icons are the same way. When you look at just the icons of 10 years ago, you can see how far we've come. Look at the winners of Icon Factory's Pixelpalooza competition, you can see how even the winners' icons from just five years ago, you can see although they were cute and clever for 1997, they look unprofessional compared to the look of the icons delivered with Mac OS X 10.2.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
No, they don't complain. They just don't use websites that are too different and/or confusing.
Tim
...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
Ah yes! Damn thee the to hell, Xnu[0]! I can no longer press the mouse button to pause the operating system...
[0]- Xnu is the name of the new kernel.
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
if your new custom [widget] is well designed for its specific use, rather than merely cobbled together from generic components then any initial time-wasting will be saved
I disagree. I generally find that custom widgets charm developers, and annoy users.
Lets take a look at existing custom widgets. The big annoying ones are bitmap ones (on Windows, often using the standard button as an underly widget). These look different, add nothing to the application, amake the program bigger (esp. to download), slower, look less professional, and seem to frequently be written by interns or something, judging by the quality of them.
There are custom tab widgets. They usually aren't any better than normal tab widgets, especially the annoying reshuffling multi-row tab widgets.
There are animated widgets. Animated widgets are just plain annoying to a lot of people.
There are dials. Every custom widget library seems like it has to come with a dial widget. Dial widgets are about the most difficult interface to work with on a computer, given your input devices (keyboard, mouse).
A lot of examples of what custom widgets do and how bad they are can be found at the excellent Interface Hall of Shame.
There are a *very* few custom widgets that I've seen over the past few years that I think are honestly good and deserve being adopted. I haven't seen a single Windows widget that I like, and in all my years of poking around at human-computer-interaction, I've seen exactly three widgets on the Mac that were a good idea (all of which were pretty much uniformly adopted by the Mac developer community).
A) The slider. The MacOS never had a slider control. When MS copied the Mac's interface elements, this is one of the things they did right -- added a slider. Traditionally, MacOS developers have used scroll bars to fill in the gap, but a fair number of people have introduced a Windows-style slider.
B) The Mercutio MDEF -- this is a menu widget that supports more complex keybindings. The original Mac menu widget only supported Command-A, not Command-A separate from Command-Shift-A. This has been a fairly useful invention (and the UI was done right -- there was a shift symbol added, not just a capital "A" shown in the menu).
C) Windoids. These are the little palettes that vanish when you switch to other apps. They don't look like standard windows, they disappear on their own, but they're so useful that everyone uses them now.
There are also a few, high-level and very custom widgets that don't really appear to the user as widgets, and make reasonable sense. A calendar widget, or something along the lines of GnomeCanvas.
May we never see th
> The most obvious example of this, IMHO, is
> kicker. The K menu has, at least in 2.2.x, no
> keyboard accelerators at all. Bring it up with
> alt-F1 and scroll around with the arrow keys,
> fine. But why can't I hit "g" and jump to
> games, like Windows has allowed me to do in
> the start menu since 1995?
I just checked, and at least KDE 3.1 CVS lets you press a key to jump to the first kicker item beginning with that letter. The letters get underlined when you press a key. The developers are listening.
- Brent
Not on my system it isn't. I'm viewing it in Mozilla, and the text is inside the boxes.
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.
Assuming you are using Windows, I find text is far more legible on Macs.
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).
That's not the problem. Mac monitors are no longer 72 dpi if you run them at high resolutions. I'm using a 19" Sylvania monitor set at 1280 X 1024. Mozilla's display resolution is 96 dpi, same as on PCs. IE also defaults to 96 dpi.
The real issue is not screen resolution, but the size of fonts on Windows.
A 10 pt font is expected to be 10 points. There are 72 points to an inch (or 2.54 cm). Windows fonts are too large, with 10 points closer to 12 points. I know this because I work in pre-press. This is why the text on websites made on PCs often looks too small on Macs, and vice versa.
-- 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
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.
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."
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.
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
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
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.
With those options turned on you can do everything you want without needing a mouse.
-braxton
It's not a question of being "unfriendly at first glance"--most new interfaces are (that's what makes them "new"). It's a question of being unfriendly throughout the lifetime of your interactions with it, due to bad design decisions made at a deep level. Your statement gives developers permission to punish end-users for needing to use the app. This is good news if you're a monopoly, but bad news if you have competitors.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Actually as a Windows user who loathes the Mac look and feel it was one of the few pieces of advice I agreed with as a general matter.
When Mosaic first came out the most noticable thing about it was that it was the first browser for X-Windows that did not have an amateur DIY look and feel, it was plain Motif with the standard SGI fonts.
I don't much like using Adobe products because they insist on inventing their own UI techniques rather than providing the user with something consistent. At one point I used photoshop on a daily basis, then I stopped using it for a couple of months and found that I had forgotten how to use most of the commands. These days I just can't be bothered with it.
My pet peeve is MP3 players. For some reason these programs seem to be insist on morphing into the most unusable shape possible. Skins are cute as an option but just why does nobody - including Microsoft make an MP3 player with standard Windows look and feel?
The other point that is quite noticable in the document is that the Apple designers appear to be making most of their comparisons to the Windows 95 look and feel rather than XP.
It is also quite noticable that the example they give of an application with 'only one' menubar on Aqua actually has at least four visible command bars. The IE window has its own menu and shows a page with yet another menu.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
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
HTML was originally designed to work this way. Unfortunately, it's hard to convince peopel that this is a better system -- legions of hard-copy print era designers swarmed the Web design scene and pretty much decimated any hope of client-side UI control.
Now, HTML is pretty much an inefficient, hard to parse Postscript variant.
May we never see th
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
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