That's the whole point of the document. There may be 10 correct ways to do one thing, but if in the Mac community they decided on one way of doing a particular thing 20 years ago, then it's good to know that BEFORE you go in there telling them that GNOME is GUI done right. There are all kinds of parties, and although you CAN wear absolutely anything you want to any party, even nothing, or a crazy costume, if you know what you are expected to wear, then you at least will know what kind of reception you will get when you get there. What Apple is saying here is that the Mac is a formal party, and most apps wear black tie. If you want to show up dressed as Superman, then that's great, but expect to have more people ask you why you're dressed that way than if you were at a costume party. Now, if you ARE Superman, and then you can go to a formal party dressed as Superman then you are totally doing the right thing. Exceptions prove the rule.
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.
When you choose a Mac menu, you don't have to crawl up there like MS Windows users do, moving your hand slowly so you can stop on that teensy little MS Windows menu heading. We Mac users "slam" the cursor into the menubar, because you CAN'T OVERSHOOT IT... it's on the edge of the display. Once you get the hang of this (takes an hour, or a day), you don't even think about accessing the menus, you just think File > Save and your hand does it for you. You sort of flick the mouse cursor up there and all you have to aim is horizontally.
The busy cursor will disappear when applications stop causing it to appear. In a year or two all Mac apps will be multi-threaded (many are now) and there won't ever be a situation where an application stops responding to the system for seconds at a time.
The MS fix for this would be to remove the busy cursor. The Apple fix is to make it easy to multithread your app and then encourage developers to do that.
> You're right, it might be too painful on the eyes, but Apple doesn't provide a method > to modify the default luminance, so for now everything is white and bright; that IS > the HIG for the OS X UI.
Check out "ColorSync". You can change the gamma all you want. Traditional Mac and print default is 1.8, while PC's and TV's are 2.2. If you want all the white on your display to have the brilliance of old newsprint, then you can have that easily. This is THE publishing platform, remember?
There is also an app called "Black Light" that demonstrates the range of possibilities that are possible with Mac OS X's graphics engine. There are many more levels of processing than what Windows has, so even if you have only one "theme", you can change the colors with a filter applied when the display is composited. In Photoshop, you can spend all day painting new colors into photos with the little bucket, or you can use a filter or blending mode and get the result you want applied to every pixel in the image in one step. Windows is like the little bucket, working hard but not smart, having to have everything prepared before-hand. Mac OS X's UI is called Aqua partially because it is scaling and modifying and compositing and creating the best display it can for you in all kinds of ways. For example, if you put a Classic app in the Dock, the 32x32 icon is scaled up if necessary (there is no 128x128 icon in an old Classic app), and then it is also anti-aliased and smoothed so that it looks more like a regular 128x128 Mac OS X icon. Apple goes the distance to do things right.
It's unfortunate that the screen captures in this article are so bad. I don't think I've ever seen an all-white desktop on anyone's computer, anywhere, and the desktop is also missing completely from the Windows shot where the desktop icons are sort of floating out there. Mac OS X starts out with the blue swooshy graphic you see on most of the screen captures on Apple's site, and includes about 50 other high-quality desktops, as well as being able to use any picture that QuickTime can understand (which is pretty much all of them), or any photo from iPhoto.
Cursors have been animated for a long time in Mac OS, so the developer can show a spinning ball for a cursor if they want. There is also two little arrows chasing each other in a circle, which in 10.2 has changed a sort of clock face with no numbers where the lines take turns pulsing. You see it at boot time and at shutdown, too.
If a Mac OS X app takes more than 2 seconds to do something, the system automatically puts up the spinning beachball cursor.
There are four icon sizes in a Mac OS X icon: 16 (small), 32 (large), 48 (huge), and 128 (thumbnail). Many developers are still using basically the same 16 and 32 pixel icons that they've always used, but with some higher-quality rendering, anti-aliasing, and sometimes with some kind of Aqua touch like a "gel" color or something. Finder and other apps are smart enough to choose which icon to display based on the situation. They scale down the big image until they get to one of the others and then use that. Works pretty great. You can always find an example of bad icon design if you want to, though. Some developers leave out some icon sizes or make lousy images. Hence, the reason this article was published.
Also, Mac icons have been 32-bit (24-bit true color image with an 8-bit grayscale mask that defines translucent or transparent portions) for years and years. There's no excuse these days for a user seeing jagged edges... a modern NVIDIA or ATI card can do better than that. I'm using a PowerBook right now, and everything on the display is done with OpenGL in the graphics hardware. Apple planned ahead on the icons so the platform has icons that better match today's hardware. Guess what? MS didn't. Not surprising.
> But you're right, [iTunes and QuickTime Player] do kind of fly in the face of the Aqua guidelines.
No, they don't. The metal appearance is part of Aqua, and can be enabled for any window by the developer, and they quite specifically state that if you are making a single-window media player or an application that calls to mind a device of some sort, then you might want to do your own thing a little more. It's more important for iTunes to look good than for Photoshop to look good, because in iTunes you stare at iTunes, in Photoshop, you stare at your own documents, your own work. Most apps are like a paper and pen: a document and tools and the real magic is what you make with it... these apps should use standard conventions. Some apps are emulations of some real-world object, like a jukebox, and the real magic is that you can enjoy the same entertaining experience with a software app that you can with a real jukebox (at least this is true for iTunes) and also have digital benefits (like copy the whole library to your iPod and take it with you).
Also, no matter how "weird" an app might look, Apple always encourages the developer to enable proper drag and drop and such. For example, I can drag a photo from iPhoto to Photoshop's icon in the Dock or Finder and the image is opened in Photoshop. If I drop the photo in the Finder, a new file is created there. There are still conventions being followed, even if the app looks unconventional at first glance.
There are rules and there are exceptions. QuickTime Player is not an app that someone uses all day long for productivity. Even with a round volume slider it is not that bad to watch movies or listen to audio in QuickTime Player 4. It is meant to call to mind a stereo component or a device of some kind, and remind you that your focus is very much in the one window. It's meant to be "less computery" and help people to focus on the media, the content. Now, if you give the QuickTime Player 4 treatment to Photoshop, you will be able to feel shockwaves in the economy as far less graphics are turned out in various industries.
Also, when QuickTime Player 4 shipped, it was on Mac OS 9 and everything about it was atypical. Now, the metal look is a standard GUI thing you can get with one checkbox in Interface Builder on Mac OS X, and QuickTime Player uses a standard Aqua slider for volume.
Users prefer it to be consistent on their own computer. If I tell the Mac OS X speller that "Slashdot" is not a spelling mistake, and then I launch MS Word and have to tell MS Word that "Slashdot" is not a spelling mistake, then that's something that's broken on my computer. I don't care that MS wants me to use the Office speller, I care that I had to tell the computer how to spell "Slashdot" more than once. That sucks ass, and it's the kind of situation that happens much, much less on the Mac, because Apple has typically been willing and able to make decisions and take a leadership position that's good for the whole platform, which prevents us all from going down dead ends all the time.
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.
Rules are best when exceptions are allowed, even encouraged. You can check a single checkbox in Apple's developer tools and your app's Aqua windows change into brushed metal (like iTunes). Audion (MP3 player) has GREAT skins (all anti-aliased, all with drop shadows, even on Mac OS 9), but even though it can always look different, the controls still have play, pause, etc.
Pro audio plug-ins often have an interface that looks more like a hardware device than a computer UI, and these are also encouraged by Apple (they even own Emagic, who have some of the best examples of this kind of "non-standard" UI design). What they say about controls is either use ours or use your own, but don't use some of ours plus some of yours that look like ours but may not always act like ours.
There are very few things in life that are 100%, if there are any at all. To me, it seems much more like 90/10. Most apps should look and behave in perfect Aqua on Mac OS X, and some smaller percentage should work totally differently, and for good reason.
>> Office XP, although XP branded, supports none of XP's skinning abilities.
> I wonder if it is because Office XP, IIRC, will run on win98/win2k/winxp. The office team > has to code to the lowest common denominator there and attempt to get the same > functionality out of it as they will from xp. In contrast, OSX apps will run on only OSX > and not also have to run on other OS's that may or may not have the UI controls natively > installed.
Many (most?) Mac OS X apps also run on Mac OS 9. Geeks know how different Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X is from top-to-bottom, but they both have a Carbon API and you can code one app that runs in both places and looks good in both places. If you skin Mac OS 9, these apps even skin.
So, I think you came up with the excuse (what MS might tell you) rather than the actual reason. The reason that Office XP doesn't match Windows XP is simply "poor quality". Microsoft has not made this happen, and adding skins to the OS simply exposed another seam for the Windows user. Apple already tried a skinnable OS with Mac OS 8 and once it was up and running these kinds of slippery slope problems all appeared and they gave up. If Apple can't make a feature seamless enough for them, imagine how little chance MS has of making it seamless given the variety of other systemic problems Windows has.
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.
All of the "standard key commands" use the Command key, which does have a symbol on it. So to enter any of these commands on a Mac, first hold down Command, then press:
Open (O) Save (S) Print (P) Select All (A) Quit (Q) Cut (X) Copy (C) Paste (V) Undo (Z) Find (F) Find Again (G) Help (?) Close Window (W) Minimize Window (M) Hide Application (H)
That's a lot of productivity and utility for one modifier key, never mind learning the other modifier keys, which is something that's for the truly keyboard-committed.
Also, Option really works as an option. You can often figure out what Option will do when you press and hold it, because it will just be the opposite of not pressing it. For example, in iPhoto, there is a button that rotates selected images counter-clockwise. When you hold down Option, the button reverses to suggest that pressing it will rotate the image clockwise.
Nobody ever suggests that the current state of the Mac UI is the ultimate holy grail of interfaces, but it does represent the best thing out there for most people, by a large margin. Most Mac users have also used Windows at some point (at a job, school, library, previous computer, friend's house, whatever) and they still swear by their Macs. Most Windows users, however, typically don't really understand that there are alternatives. They are used to a one-party system and they can't imagine what anything else is like. Time and time again, though, you hear from people who used Windows for years and then switched to a Mac and you see that their eyes were opened. So many problems just drop away. So many housekeeping chores just disappear. So many daily annoyances and especially interruptions just disappear. Flaky hardware and instability just disappear. You can't tell me that Alt+F4 is a better key combination for "close this application" than Command+Q (Quit). You can't tell me that Windows is better because I used it for years and I know it's not.
Either do it the right way, or do it completely differently because you have a good reason to. The thing you really want to avoid is doing it "any old" way, or just not giving a shit about it.
I have two kinds of apps (UI-wise) in Mac OS X: ones that follow the standard conventions precisely, and ones that go totally against it in an obvious way and for good reason. The standard apps are legion, but here's an example of one that went against the grain: Emagic EXS24
Here's a screenshot of the EXS24's interface itself: EXS24 UI.
The key is that it's very hard to confuse the typical UI with a way-out one... when I open the EXS24 I get the picture right away that I'm not in Kansas. It's more of a musical instrument, or a self-contained "device". I can work with it by just moving sliders and discovering sounds. That's much, much, better "non-standard" behavior than when you press Command+F and you don't get the app's Find command, when that works in EVERY other app.
Don't use non-standard controls unless you REALLY, REALLY have a good reason. Don't interrupt the user and ask them to learn something new just so they can theoretically be a little faster next time.
What I see from non-Mac developers is that they develop as if their app is still the only one running on the PC. They think it is fine to "teach" the user any old thing, because the coder imagines that the user will learn it the first time they run into it, and then remember it forever after, as they go on using that app 24/7 all day long. What really happens is that you interrupt and/or annoy the user with what to them is trivial shit, and then that happens two days later again when they need your app again. It happens when they switch over to your app briefly from other apps they use more often. So time and time again you are interrupting the user. This has gotten so bad on Windows that it's killing the PC industry itself. People are using their old computers less and less and then not buying new ones, because the experience with pop-up windows, modal dialogs, and non-standard interfaces is not productive. It's fucking horrible, actually. The PC is cheaper than ever, but it's also shittier than ever. It's like a cable box... it's so bad it should just be free with the services, but you're also supposed to pay for it and troubleshoot it. Wow.
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.
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... 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.
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.
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.
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... 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.
There is the occasional exception to the iApps "just" being stand-alone and models for developers. For instance, iPhoto ignores the email client setting in OS X, only offering to use Apple's Mail. (There are hacks to change this, but that's not the point.) This perhaps is an example of Microsoft-like, or at least dumb, behavior.
I think this is most likely due to the fact that iPhoto is still in version 1. There are more glaring omissions in iPhoto than the fact that it has a button for "(Apple)Mail" not "e-mail". iMovie is in 2, iTunes in 3, iDVD in 2, and these apps all got a lot better after their first versions.
Still... the workaround is that you just drag a photo from iPhoto into an email message in Eudora or whatever and you get the same effect. Or drag to Finder and then drag the file into your email message (you get the picture).
With Microsoft, we're talking about things they do again and again and again and again, increasing as version numbers go up.
What you're saying is that circa 1990, the makers of a really crappy DOS text editor had every right to complain about the inclusion of Notepad in Windows 3. I would say that if there is no compelling reason to upgrade from an iApp to your product, then your product is NOT COMPELLING. There are plenty of text editors for Windows, and even some that simply advertise as "Notepad replacements", where the app is even named "notepad.exe" (to get around how hard it is to tell Windows to link documents to apps).
It's hard for non-Mac users to judge this stuff. On the Mac, iMovie is a great starter editor, or everything that the hobbyist needs if they add a few plug-ins (filters, transitions, etc). On Windows, though, iMovie kicks ass completely, so a Windows user can't imagine ditching iMovie for something better. There is nothing better on Windows at any price for working with DV. Even with Premiere, you will run into Windows again and again and again, even when just trying to reliably capture DV from a camcorder.
The funny thing with the Watson debate is that Watson is obviously named "Watson" because Sherlock is named "Sherlock". Get it? Watson is a "Sherlock add-on", or "Sherlock enhancement". "You've seen Sherlock... now go further with Watson."
Three years ago, Web services meant scraping Web pages, and that's what Sherlock did then. Now, it means the XML/Soap stuff, and that's what Sherlock does now. Duh. Is Apple supposed to just drop Sherlock entirely and recommend Watson to people? The name would be even weirder then.
I bought Watson. I like it. I look forward to it growing along with Sherlock. There are plenty of things that the Watson developers can do to grow it. Has the whole fucking future been invented yet? NO.
The only reason I can think of that I wouldn't buy a future version of Watson is all the whining that Karelia did about this. It's infantile. SHOW ME THE CODE! SHOW ME THE PRODUCT! ENTICE ME TO PART WITH MY HARD-EARNED CASH!
Just like all the included apps in Mac OS X, Sherlock does what it does "for everybody", and a certain subset of everybody are going to like that so much that they want Sherlock Plus, which, elementarily, is named "Watson".
It's also worth noting that Apple gave Watson lots of publicity, including a design award, featured the developer in a huge Webcast, promoted Watson in articles on Apple.com, and then offered the guy a job at Apple working on the future of Sherlock. He turned it down to keep making Watson and now he is complaining about the fact that ANYBODY CAN MAKE A WEB SERVICES CLIENT. That's the fucking idea with the Internet in the first place. Why use XML/Soap for Web services... why don't we just use Watson Markup Language and we'll all do Web services in Watson from here to eternity.
I remember that Karelia also said that the reason Watson was Mac OS X -only, not for Mac OS 9 or for Windows was that with Cocoa and other built-in features of Mac OS X, they just had to build the app, not make the plumbing, so they got it done in 1/3 the time with 1/10 the developers. Well, that's why you were there first. Don't expect to own the market forever.
It's sad to see this kind of thing being debated in public. The time spent on this should have been spent on Watson 2. How about 20 new channels, some only good for lawyers, some only good for doctors, some only good for coders? Then lawyers, doctors, and coders will be happy to pay $15 for Watson 2, even if they already have Sherlock 3. You know what I mean? Get it together.
> What features exactly are so integrated that a 3rd party developer could not mimmick? > The address book is accessable by any program. That is all I can think of.
Address Book uses vCards and communicates with other apps in all the same ways that any Mac app does. Developers who already make similarly functioning software can make their app a replacement for Address Book quite easily.
The core of the OS is open source. Some users get in there and replace UNIX components with different ones and they're fine. THIS IS NOT WINDOWS.
Slashdot Mirror
> "Mac users like it this way"
That's the whole point of the document. There may be 10 correct ways to do one thing, but if in the Mac community they decided on one way of doing a particular thing 20 years ago, then it's good to know that BEFORE you go in there telling them that GNOME is GUI done right. There are all kinds of parties, and although you CAN wear absolutely anything you want to any party, even nothing, or a crazy costume, if you know what you are expected to wear, then you at least will know what kind of reception you will get when you get there. What Apple is saying here is that the Mac is a formal party, and most apps wear black tie. If you want to show up dressed as Superman, then that's great, but expect to have more people ask you why you're dressed that way than if you were at a costume party. Now, if you ARE Superman, and then you can go to a formal party dressed as Superman then you are totally doing the right thing. Exceptions prove the rule.
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.
When you choose a Mac menu, you don't have to crawl up there like MS Windows users do, moving your hand slowly so you can stop on that teensy little MS Windows menu heading. We Mac users "slam" the cursor into the menubar, because you CAN'T OVERSHOOT IT ... it's on the edge of the display. Once you get the hang of this (takes an hour, or a day), you don't even think about accessing the menus, you just think File > Save and your hand does it for you. You sort of flick the mouse cursor up there and all you have to aim is horizontally.
The busy cursor will disappear when applications stop causing it to appear. In a year or two all Mac apps will be multi-threaded (many are now) and there won't ever be a situation where an application stops responding to the system for seconds at a time.
The MS fix for this would be to remove the busy cursor. The Apple fix is to make it easy to multithread your app and then encourage developers to do that.
> You're right, it might be too painful on the eyes, but Apple doesn't provide a method
> to modify the default luminance, so for now everything is white and bright; that IS
> the HIG for the OS X UI.
Check out "ColorSync". You can change the gamma all you want. Traditional Mac and print default is 1.8, while PC's and TV's are 2.2. If you want all the white on your display to have the brilliance of old newsprint, then you can have that easily. This is THE publishing platform, remember?
There is also an app called "Black Light" that demonstrates the range of possibilities that are possible with Mac OS X's graphics engine. There are many more levels of processing than what Windows has, so even if you have only one "theme", you can change the colors with a filter applied when the display is composited. In Photoshop, you can spend all day painting new colors into photos with the little bucket, or you can use a filter or blending mode and get the result you want applied to every pixel in the image in one step. Windows is like the little bucket, working hard but not smart, having to have everything prepared before-hand. Mac OS X's UI is called Aqua partially because it is scaling and modifying and compositing and creating the best display it can for you in all kinds of ways. For example, if you put a Classic app in the Dock, the 32x32 icon is scaled up if necessary (there is no 128x128 icon in an old Classic app), and then it is also anti-aliased and smoothed so that it looks more like a regular 128x128 Mac OS X icon. Apple goes the distance to do things right.
It's unfortunate that the screen captures in this article are so bad. I don't think I've ever seen an all-white desktop on anyone's computer, anywhere, and the desktop is also missing completely from the Windows shot where the desktop icons are sort of floating out there. Mac OS X starts out with the blue swooshy graphic you see on most of the screen captures on Apple's site, and includes about 50 other high-quality desktops, as well as being able to use any picture that QuickTime can understand (which is pretty much all of them), or any photo from iPhoto.
> 5) No happenings.
Cursors have been animated for a long time in Mac OS, so the developer can show a spinning ball for a cursor if they want. There is also two little arrows chasing each other in a circle, which in 10.2 has changed a sort of clock face with no numbers where the lines take turns pulsing. You see it at boot time and at shutdown, too.
If a Mac OS X app takes more than 2 seconds to do something, the system automatically puts up the spinning beachball cursor.
There are four icon sizes in a Mac OS X icon: 16 (small), 32 (large), 48 (huge), and 128 (thumbnail). Many developers are still using basically the same 16 and 32 pixel icons that they've always used, but with some higher-quality rendering, anti-aliasing, and sometimes with some kind of Aqua touch like a "gel" color or something. Finder and other apps are smart enough to choose which icon to display based on the situation. They scale down the big image until they get to one of the others and then use that. Works pretty great. You can always find an example of bad icon design if you want to, though. Some developers leave out some icon sizes or make lousy images. Hence, the reason this article was published.
... a modern NVIDIA or ATI card can do better than that. I'm using a PowerBook right now, and everything on the display is done with OpenGL in the graphics hardware. Apple planned ahead on the icons so the platform has icons that better match today's hardware. Guess what? MS didn't. Not surprising.
Also, Mac icons have been 32-bit (24-bit true color image with an 8-bit grayscale mask that defines translucent or transparent portions) for years and years. There's no excuse these days for a user seeing jagged edges
> But you're right, [iTunes and QuickTime Player] do kind of fly in the face of the Aqua guidelines.
... these apps should use standard conventions. Some apps are emulations of some real-world object, like a jukebox, and the real magic is that you can enjoy the same entertaining experience with a software app that you can with a real jukebox (at least this is true for iTunes) and also have digital benefits (like copy the whole library to your iPod and take it with you).
No, they don't. The metal appearance is part of Aqua, and can be enabled for any window by the developer, and they quite specifically state that if you are making a single-window media player or an application that calls to mind a device of some sort, then you might want to do your own thing a little more. It's more important for iTunes to look good than for Photoshop to look good, because in iTunes you stare at iTunes, in Photoshop, you stare at your own documents, your own work. Most apps are like a paper and pen: a document and tools and the real magic is what you make with it
Also, no matter how "weird" an app might look, Apple always encourages the developer to enable proper drag and drop and such. For example, I can drag a photo from iPhoto to Photoshop's icon in the Dock or Finder and the image is opened in Photoshop. If I drop the photo in the Finder, a new file is created there. There are still conventions being followed, even if the app looks unconventional at first glance.
There are rules and there are exceptions. QuickTime Player is not an app that someone uses all day long for productivity. Even with a round volume slider it is not that bad to watch movies or listen to audio in QuickTime Player 4. It is meant to call to mind a stereo component or a device of some kind, and remind you that your focus is very much in the one window. It's meant to be "less computery" and help people to focus on the media, the content. Now, if you give the QuickTime Player 4 treatment to Photoshop, you will be able to feel shockwaves in the economy as far less graphics are turned out in various industries.
Also, when QuickTime Player 4 shipped, it was on Mac OS 9 and everything about it was atypical. Now, the metal look is a standard GUI thing you can get with one checkbox in Interface Builder on Mac OS X, and QuickTime Player uses a standard Aqua slider for volume.
Users prefer it to be consistent on their own computer. If I tell the Mac OS X speller that "Slashdot" is not a spelling mistake, and then I launch MS Word and have to tell MS Word that "Slashdot" is not a spelling mistake, then that's something that's broken on my computer. I don't care that MS wants me to use the Office speller, I care that I had to tell the computer how to spell "Slashdot" more than once. That sucks ass, and it's the kind of situation that happens much, much less on the Mac, because Apple has typically been willing and able to make decisions and take a leadership position that's good for the whole platform, which prevents us all from going down dead ends all the time.
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.
Rules are best when exceptions are allowed, even encouraged. You can check a single checkbox in Apple's developer tools and your app's Aqua windows change into brushed metal (like iTunes). Audion (MP3 player) has GREAT skins (all anti-aliased, all with drop shadows, even on Mac OS 9), but even though it can always look different, the controls still have play, pause, etc.
Pro audio plug-ins often have an interface that looks more like a hardware device than a computer UI, and these are also encouraged by Apple (they even own Emagic, who have some of the best examples of this kind of "non-standard" UI design). What they say about controls is either use ours or use your own, but don't use some of ours plus some of yours that look like ours but may not always act like ours.
There are very few things in life that are 100%, if there are any at all. To me, it seems much more like 90/10. Most apps should look and behave in perfect Aqua on Mac OS X, and some smaller percentage should work totally differently, and for good reason.
>> Office XP, although XP branded, supports none of XP's skinning abilities.
> I wonder if it is because Office XP, IIRC, will run on win98/win2k/winxp. The office team
> has to code to the lowest common denominator there and attempt to get the same
> functionality out of it as they will from xp. In contrast, OSX apps will run on only OSX
> and not also have to run on other OS's that may or may not have the UI controls natively
> installed.
Many (most?) Mac OS X apps also run on Mac OS 9. Geeks know how different Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X is from top-to-bottom, but they both have a Carbon API and you can code one app that runs in both places and looks good in both places. If you skin Mac OS 9, these apps even skin.
So, I think you came up with the excuse (what MS might tell you) rather than the actual reason. The reason that Office XP doesn't match Windows XP is simply "poor quality". Microsoft has not made this happen, and adding skins to the OS simply exposed another seam for the Windows user. Apple already tried a skinnable OS with Mac OS 8 and once it was up and running these kinds of slippery slope problems all appeared and they gave up. If Apple can't make a feature seamless enough for them, imagine how little chance MS has of making it seamless given the variety of other systemic problems Windows has.
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.
All of the "standard key commands" use the Command key, which does have a symbol on it. So to enter any of these commands on a Mac, first hold down Command, then press:
Open (O)
Save (S)
Print (P)
Select All (A)
Quit (Q)
Cut (X)
Copy (C)
Paste (V)
Undo (Z)
Find (F)
Find Again (G)
Help (?)
Close Window (W)
Minimize Window (M)
Hide Application (H)
That's a lot of productivity and utility for one modifier key, never mind learning the other modifier keys, which is something that's for the truly keyboard-committed.
Also, Option really works as an option. You can often figure out what Option will do when you press and hold it, because it will just be the opposite of not pressing it. For example, in iPhoto, there is a button that rotates selected images counter-clockwise. When you hold down Option, the button reverses to suggest that pressing it will rotate the image clockwise.
Nobody ever suggests that the current state of the Mac UI is the ultimate holy grail of interfaces, but it does represent the best thing out there for most people, by a large margin. Most Mac users have also used Windows at some point (at a job, school, library, previous computer, friend's house, whatever) and they still swear by their Macs. Most Windows users, however, typically don't really understand that there are alternatives. They are used to a one-party system and they can't imagine what anything else is like. Time and time again, though, you hear from people who used Windows for years and then switched to a Mac and you see that their eyes were opened. So many problems just drop away. So many housekeeping chores just disappear. So many daily annoyances and especially interruptions just disappear. Flaky hardware and instability just disappear. You can't tell me that Alt+F4 is a better key combination for "close this application" than Command+Q (Quit). You can't tell me that Windows is better because I used it for years and I know it's not.
Either do it the right way, or do it completely differently because you have a good reason to. The thing you really want to avoid is doing it "any old" way, or just not giving a shit about it.
I have two kinds of apps (UI-wise) in Mac OS X: ones that follow the standard conventions precisely, and ones that go totally against it in an obvious way and for good reason. The standard apps are legion, but here's an example of one that went against the grain: Emagic EXS24
Here's a screenshot of the EXS24's interface itself: EXS24 UI.
The key is that it's very hard to confuse the typical UI with a way-out one ... when I open the EXS24 I get the picture right away that I'm not in Kansas. It's more of a musical instrument, or a self-contained "device". I can work with it by just moving sliders and discovering sounds. That's much, much, better "non-standard" behavior than when you press Command+F and you don't get the app's Find command, when that works in EVERY other app.
Don't use non-standard controls unless you REALLY, REALLY have a good reason. Don't interrupt the user and ask them to learn something new just so they can theoretically be a little faster next time.
... it's so bad it should just be free with the services, but you're also supposed to pay for it and troubleshoot it. Wow.
What I see from non-Mac developers is that they develop as if their app is still the only one running on the PC. They think it is fine to "teach" the user any old thing, because the coder imagines that the user will learn it the first time they run into it, and then remember it forever after, as they go on using that app 24/7 all day long. What really happens is that you interrupt and/or annoy the user with what to them is trivial shit, and then that happens two days later again when they need your app again. It happens when they switch over to your app briefly from other apps they use more often. So time and time again you are interrupting the user. This has gotten so bad on Windows that it's killing the PC industry itself. People are using their old computers less and less and then not buying new ones, because the experience with pop-up windows, modal dialogs, and non-standard interfaces is not productive. It's fucking horrible, actually. The PC is cheaper than ever, but it's also shittier than ever. It's like a cable box
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
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.
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.
> 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
There is the occasional exception to the iApps "just" being stand-alone and models for developers. For instance, iPhoto ignores the email client setting in OS X, only offering to use Apple's Mail. (There are hacks to change this, but that's not the point.) This perhaps is an example of Microsoft-like, or at least dumb, behavior.
I think this is most likely due to the fact that iPhoto is still in version 1. There are more glaring omissions in iPhoto than the fact that it has a button for "(Apple)Mail" not "e-mail". iMovie is in 2, iTunes in 3, iDVD in 2, and these apps all got a lot better after their first versions.
Still ... the workaround is that you just drag a photo from iPhoto into an email message in Eudora or whatever and you get the same effect. Or drag to Finder and then drag the file into your email message (you get the picture).
With Microsoft, we're talking about things they do again and again and again and again, increasing as version numbers go up.
What you're saying is that circa 1990, the makers of a really crappy DOS text editor had every right to complain about the inclusion of Notepad in Windows 3. I would say that if there is no compelling reason to upgrade from an iApp to your product, then your product is NOT COMPELLING. There are plenty of text editors for Windows, and even some that simply advertise as "Notepad replacements", where the app is even named "notepad.exe" (to get around how hard it is to tell Windows to link documents to apps).
It's hard for non-Mac users to judge this stuff. On the Mac, iMovie is a great starter editor, or everything that the hobbyist needs if they add a few plug-ins (filters, transitions, etc). On Windows, though, iMovie kicks ass completely, so a Windows user can't imagine ditching iMovie for something better. There is nothing better on Windows at any price for working with DV. Even with Premiere, you will run into Windows again and again and again, even when just trying to reliably capture DV from a camcorder.
The funny thing with the Watson debate is that Watson is obviously named "Watson" because Sherlock is named "Sherlock". Get it? Watson is a "Sherlock add-on", or "Sherlock enhancement". "You've seen Sherlock ... now go further with Watson."
... why don't we just use Watson Markup Language and we'll all do Web services in Watson from here to eternity.
Three years ago, Web services meant scraping Web pages, and that's what Sherlock did then. Now, it means the XML/Soap stuff, and that's what Sherlock does now. Duh. Is Apple supposed to just drop Sherlock entirely and recommend Watson to people? The name would be even weirder then.
I bought Watson. I like it. I look forward to it growing along with Sherlock. There are plenty of things that the Watson developers can do to grow it. Has the whole fucking future been invented yet? NO.
The only reason I can think of that I wouldn't buy a future version of Watson is all the whining that Karelia did about this. It's infantile. SHOW ME THE CODE! SHOW ME THE PRODUCT! ENTICE ME TO PART WITH MY HARD-EARNED CASH!
Just like all the included apps in Mac OS X, Sherlock does what it does "for everybody", and a certain subset of everybody are going to like that so much that they want Sherlock Plus, which, elementarily, is named "Watson".
It's also worth noting that Apple gave Watson lots of publicity, including a design award, featured the developer in a huge Webcast, promoted Watson in articles on Apple.com, and then offered the guy a job at Apple working on the future of Sherlock. He turned it down to keep making Watson and now he is complaining about the fact that ANYBODY CAN MAKE A WEB SERVICES CLIENT. That's the fucking idea with the Internet in the first place. Why use XML/Soap for Web services
I remember that Karelia also said that the reason Watson was Mac OS X -only, not for Mac OS 9 or for Windows was that with Cocoa and other built-in features of Mac OS X, they just had to build the app, not make the plumbing, so they got it done in 1/3 the time with 1/10 the developers. Well, that's why you were there first. Don't expect to own the market forever.
It's sad to see this kind of thing being debated in public. The time spent on this should have been spent on Watson 2. How about 20 new channels, some only good for lawyers, some only good for doctors, some only good for coders? Then lawyers, doctors, and coders will be happy to pay $15 for Watson 2, even if they already have Sherlock 3. You know what I mean? Get it together.
> What features exactly are so integrated that a 3rd party developer could not mimmick?
> The address book is accessable by any program. That is all I can think of.
Address Book uses vCards and communicates with other apps in all the same ways that any Mac app does. Developers who already make similarly functioning software can make their app a replacement for Address Book quite easily.
The core of the OS is open source. Some users get in there and replace UNIX components with different ones and they're fine. THIS IS NOT WINDOWS.