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clebin · Feb 27, 2003, 09:38 AM

I've seen some bad interfaces in my time, but Apple have really excelled themselves with this one...

Open a Disk Image in Disk Copy and go to Resize Image..

There's a slider, but one pixel movement can take you from 400mb to 7gb. No good. There's no text-box to enter an exact size. No good. There's up and down buttons which let you add 1kb at a time, but it's impossibly slow. Still no good.

You can select to display in Megabytes, but then the up and down buttons actually stop working! So once more, no use whatsoever!

If you can find a worse user-interface in OS X, let's see it...

Chris

nsxpower · Feb 27, 2003, 09:54 AM

Hmm, never noticed that! It does sound like a pretty *bad* design failure on Apple's part ... You would contact Apple and give them a good b*tching

Sometimes that helps.

Personally, I only see DiskCopy when mounting DMGs so it does not bother me that much at all... I would much rather have them add 'Default Folder' functionality to the save dialog and a few other interface twirks in OS X that I see a lot more often.

Terri · Feb 27, 2003, 10:24 AM

And here I thought that this thread would be about the Finder�

_

nsxpower · Feb 27, 2003, 10:34 AM

Ah, the great art of sarcasm

besson3c · Feb 27, 2003, 11:08 AM

This behavior is similar to trying to resize a movie with QT Pro... You have to manually drag the movie, cannot type in the exact size.

Incidentally, iMovie 3 inherits the QT export dialogs, but there are no options to specify movie dimensions that I have seen. You could do this in iMovie 2.

I understand the logic in consolidating export dialogs, but they need some improvement!

DoctorW · Feb 27, 2003, 11:17 AM

Originally posted by nsxpower:
Ah, the great art of sarcasm

Yeah. Great.

RAILhead · Feb 27, 2003, 01:08 PM

The arrows work fine for me when I switch to MB -- but the REALLY fun thing is to keep holding the up (or down) arrow and watch the slider cycle from one end to the other without stopping at the max or min.

Silly Apple.

OptimusG4 · Feb 27, 2003, 01:37 PM

Originally posted by Terri:
And here I thought that this thread would be about the Finder�

Same here!!

voodoo · Feb 27, 2003, 02:58 PM

The Finder is good. Nothing major wrong woth it, just many little things. I want ti see them improved, but it doesn't fall under the "worst user-interface design in OS X" IMO.

ambush · Feb 27, 2003, 03:03 PM

It's kinda HARD to beat this UI tho.

http://fly.to/infosoft

http://users.skynet.be/cefs/alex/ven...creenshots.htm

ouch

the fact that they use IconFactory's icons for commerical software is also fun. (cause it's ****ing illegal)

iRebound · Feb 27, 2003, 03:49 PM

Originally posted by ambush:
It's kinda HARD to beat this UI tho.

http://fly.to/infosoft

http://users.skynet.be/cefs/alex/ven...creenshots.htm

ouch

the fact that they use IconFactory's icons for commerical software is also fun. (cause it's ****ing illegal)

LOL

ckohler · Feb 27, 2003, 04:34 PM

The original version of PocketMAC (PocketPC sync software for the Mac) is probably the ugliest and most confusing attempt at an OSX interface I've seen.

I thought it was so bad I spent 10 minutes whipping up a more OSX compliant design but they never used it. Thankfully, the interface for their pro version looks like they learned their lesson.

ambush · Feb 27, 2003, 06:24 PM

Originally posted by ckohler:
The original version of PocketMAC (PocketPC sync software for the Mac) is probably the ugliest and most confusing attempt at an OSX interface I've seen.

I thought it was so bad I spent 10 minutes whipping up a more OSX compliant design but they never used it. Thankfully, the interface for their pro version looks like they learned their lesson.

Well using that kind of interface (with the toolbar) with Carbon is kinda hard, but I agree that the interface really sucks ...

sushiism · Feb 27, 2003, 07:59 PM

ARGH they all look like the jumbled garbage you find on windows ARGh

arekkusu · Feb 27, 2003, 08:05 PM

The OS X Cisco Aironet client. Absolutely horrible.

ambush · Feb 27, 2003, 08:25 PM

Originally posted by arekkusu:
The OS X Cisco Aironet client. Absolutely horrible.

screenshot plz ^_^

Gul Banana · Feb 27, 2003, 09:19 PM

I'm tempted to mention Haxial.. the problem is that their interfaces are quite functional and usable, just godawful UGLY and deliberately completely inconsistent with every single part of the standard OS X look.

eddiecatflap · Feb 28, 2003, 02:10 PM

..selecting a window and it zooming down to teh dock all the flappin' time..

nforcer · Mar 1, 2003, 03:24 AM

Originally posted by Gul Banana:
I'm tempted to mention Haxial.. the problem is that their interfaces are quite functional and usable, just godawful UGLY and deliberately completely inconsistent with every single part of the standard OS X look.

Haxial has a non-standard GUI for all their apps that doesn't look OS X-like at all, that's for sure. But I believe they do it with their own GUI/controls because they want to maintain multiplatform consistency, much like the Mozilla project (speaking of which, Mozilla is another app that also looks like crap under OS X). However, in the case of Haxial, I applaud them for not stuping to the ultimate low and relying on Java or some other slow/bloated/ugly/bugged/god awful "solution" for their cross platformness.

On the other hand, the good part of KDX is that the GUI can be customized much more than other apps (even though there really isn't a need, especially if they just dedicated themselves to making separate GUIs that were designed for their own platforms... one for Mac, one for Winblows). However, the interface of KDX... despite how customizable they claim it to be, is not customizable enough, because I can't make it look exactly like a well designed OS X app

Oh, and don't forget Opera and iCab. iCab has that whole "relic of OS 9" interface thing going on, and Opera is just ugly as crap (how insightful I am today)

Mithras · Mar 1, 2003, 09:44 AM

A slashdot story brought me to the wonderful PerversionTracker, featuring reviews of the most pathetic Mac software known.

Sample interface to a very useful program called "Rendezvous Opener", in which you type the Rendezvous address of a computer to open it. No browsing of available servers is possible.

The second screencap shows what happens when you pull on the resize widget:

barbarian · Mar 1, 2003, 11:23 AM

gosh there are so many....

while not as bad some of the programs mentioned above I would like to all add the major OS X font managing programs. FontAgentPro and Suitcase in particular seem designed to make the user throw his ibook out the window.

crazyjohnson · Mar 1, 2003, 04:04 PM

iChat. I really dont like it.

chris v · Mar 1, 2003, 05:39 PM

Originally posted by Mithras:
A slashdot story brought me to the wonderful PerversionTracker, featuring reviews of the most pathetic Mac software known.

A random quote from perversiontracker:

"...Frankly, nothing can excuse this fetid little pile of frass. Nothing perhaps, other than pathological misanthropy on the part of the authors. They really must hate all humanity, since this game really has nothing going for it, nor is there any tenable reason to subject others to this flavor of torture, which is reminiscent of nothing so much as a warm loogie drifting through the inner reaches of the ear canal."

These guys know how to write prose! Site of the week.

Cv

rcr · Mar 2, 2003, 11:43 AM

I think the Keywords mechanism in iPhoto 2 is extremely poor UI. Unless, I'm missing something, the feature is much less usable and requires several more mouseclicks compared to the same feature in iMovie 1.

rcr