[Eug Wanker]

http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2004/02/16/os-x

[ntsc]

tbh and i'll freely admit that i've not read the entire list, i get the impression that this guy is a) looking for Mac OS 9 back in some instances, like the Application Menu moving File and Edit around and b) just complaining about what are basically cosmetic issues such as the list colour alternation.

just my two pence...

[voodoo]

In Windows and in Mac OS pre-X, an ellipsis following the label for a button or menu item means further information is required to carry out the command implied by the label. In Mac OS X, however, an ellipsis means nothing in particular, and so does the lack of an ellipsis. (For anything you think it might mean, at least one of these is a counterexample: Open Location… in Safari; About in any application, Address Panel in Mail, and Downloads in Safari; the main Help menu item in any application.)

Good point!

[Dudaev's Corpse]

Originally posted by voodoo:
In Windows and in Mac OS pre-X, an ellipsis following the label for a button or menu item means further information is required to carry out the command implied by the label. In Mac OS X, however, an ellipsis means nothing in particular, and so does the lack of an ellipsis. (For anything you think it might mean, at least one of these is a counterexample: Open Location… in Safari; About in any application, Address Panel in Mail, and Downloads in Safari; the main Help menu item in any application.)

Good point!

hmm. What it tells me is that clicking that command will not immediately execute it--only after additional input, be it selecting a folder or file, or making some choice among options. This is the ellipse at its basic level, and is the correct way to use it. OS X does not misuse it.

[voodoo]

Originally posted by Dudaev's Corpse:
hmm. What it tells me is that clicking that command will not immediately execute it--only after additional input, be it selecting a folder or file, or making some choice among options. This is the ellipse at its basic level, and is the correct way to use it. OS X does not misuse it.

Yes but in Safari the File > Open Location... executes the command with no additional input (at least it seems to)

[moonmonkey]

Originally posted by voodoo:
In Windows and in Mac OS pre-X, an ellipsis following the label for a button or menu item means further information is required to carry out the command implied by the label. In Mac OS X, however, an ellipsis means nothing in particular, and so does the lack of an ellipsis. (For anything you think it might mean, at least one of these is a counterexample: Open Location… in Safari; About in any application, Address Panel in Mail, and Downloads in Safari; the main Help menu item in any application.)

Good point!

Not really, the ellipses signify bringing up of a dialog, not a window or app.

So OSX's implementation is correct, (safari open location is the only wrong one).

[voodoo]

Originally posted by moonmonkey:
Not really, the ellipses signify bringing up of a dialog, not a window or app.

So OSX's implementation is correct, (safari open location is the only wrong one).

ya I was talking about the safari thing

[Developer]

Originally posted by voodoo:
In Windows and in Mac OS pre-X, an ellipsis following the label for a button or menu item means further information is required to carry out the command implied by the label. In Mac OS X, however, an ellipsis means nothing in particular, and so does the lack of an ellipsis. (For anything you think it might mean, at least one of these is a counterexample: Open Location… in Safari; About in any application, Address Panel in Mail, and Downloads in Safari; the main Help menu item in any application.)

Good point!

Huh? It means the same thing in Mac OS X. Open Location needs further information (you need to type in the URL), that's why it has the ellipsis. Showing the about box, address panel, download manager, or help viewer doesn't require further information by the user. They just pop up. That's why they don't have the ellipsis.

There are some instances where it is arguably wrong (like Preferences... probably shouldn't have them), but most of the time developers got it right.

[stew]

Originally posted by ntsc:
b) just complaining about what are basically cosmetic issues such as the list colour alternation.

That is more than just cosmetics. It does help reading long lists, that was the reason why back in the days paper for dot matrix printers had a similar pattern.

[msuper69]

Everyone is entitled to his/her opinion.

If he doesn't like it, he doesn't have to use it. If he doesn't want to contribute feedback to Apple, which they do in fact listen to (just not as fast as some would like), then he should just STFU.

I don't seem to have any particular problems figuring out how Mac OS X works or how to deal with the odd behaviour it sometimes exhibits. Maybe I'm just more forgiving or maybe I'm just more intelligent. Maybe I just don't sweat the small stuff in my OS's and in life. Don't know. Don't care. I just use it and have fun doing so.

[CharlesS]

I'm just going to address the bits I disagree with.

Pressing any key on the keyboard will wake the computer from sleep, but clicking the mouse button will not.

Not true; on my machine, clicking the mouse button wakes it right up. I do remember it behaving this way on our old clone that ran OS 9, though, so maybe it's something related to his hardware.

The Application menu (which appears to be a dumping ground for menu items that should not exist)

What menu items that should not exist? About? Preferences? Services? Show/hide application? Quit? Which of these should not exist? Did I miss something?

I rather like having them, myself.

Disclosure triangles always look unavailable. (Indeed, they are almost indistinguishable from the icon of an unavailable Forward button in Safari or the Finder.)

Huh?

Sheets move together with their parent window, which is good, but they cannot be moved independently of their parent window, which is bad. When asked if I wanted to save changes [sic] to a newly-created TextEdit document, I could not remember whether what I had started typing was important, and I could not move the sheet out of the way to look.

That's the reason for the translucency. And if they could be separated from the document window, that would sort of defeat the point, wouldn't it?

Any scrollbar, when scrolled as far as possible to the top or left, looks as if it could be scrolled three or four pixels further upward or leftward.

Not on my machine.

In many applications (including iChat, Help Viewer, Mail, Preview, and Safari, but not iTunes), scrollbars in a background window will scroll in response to the same click used to bring the window frontwards (in Apple parlance, they allow click-through). This makes focusing a window without scrolling it frustratingly difficult, since the scrollbar trough is often a large fraction of the only visible edge of the window.

Try explaining to a newbie why they have to click twice to click on a button in an inactive window, and you'll understand the reasoning behind click-through.

All folder windows zoom out from their icon when opened, and zoom back into their icon when closed. All, that is, except for the Trash.

Neither do folders if you put them in the Dock. The Trash is just behaving like a normal docked folder.

An item’s color label highlights its text but not its icon. This allows a blue-labelled icon to look selected when it is not. It also causes unnecessary difficulty in finding a labelled item quickly, particularly when it is selected or when it is in Icon view.

Yeah, but OS 9 had a way of making icons ugly with the tint it applied. Also, since the color would blend with the native color of the icon, it would be a different color than you expected, making it not all that useful for differentiating. The only thing I ever used OS 9 labels for was to keep track of what files had been recently added to the System Folder and its subfolders.

Clicking once in the address field does not do what people want 99 percent of the time, which is selecting the address so it can be replaced by typing a new one. (This can be done without interfering with those who want to select only part of the address, as demonstrated by Firefox and by Internet Explorer for Mac.)

You have a point, but what Firefox and IE do is non-standard behavior.

Safari’s View menu gives greatest prominence to those items that will be used least often.

Safari's "Show" section in its View menu shouldn't be there anyway. They should have used a standard Cocoa toolbar.

The default set of toolbar buttons in Mail’s Customize Toolbar dialog is not actually the default set. The true default set also includes the Junk button, at the opposite end of the toolbar from the Delete button. But in the junk filter’s Training mode these two commands are used in tandem (first mark a message as junk, then delete it), while in Automatic mode the commands are close substitutes (Delete to delete a message, or Junk to delete it and future messages like it). Therefore they should be immediately next to each other by default.

I dunno, it's annoying to try to delete a message and accidentally mark it as junk mail because you missed the icon, especially if you don't notice that you did so because it deleted after you marked it, thus bunging up the junk filter with incorrect data.

Other than these, it's a good list. He should send it to Apple, since he's spent the time to write it.

[Chuckit]

Originally posted by moonmonkey:
So OSX's implementation is correct, (safari open location is the only wrong one).

I'm not sure Safari is entirely wrong. If you have the location field hidden, it brings up a dialog with the location field in it. Otherwise it takes you up to the location field. And in either case, it doesn't actually do anything until you hit return in the location field.

[Truepop]

Edit: nevermind.

[Phrogman]

quote:
Clicking once in the address field does not do what people want 99 percent of the time, which is selecting the address so it can be replaced by typing a new one. (This can be done without interfering with those who want to select only part of the address, as demonstrated by Firefox and by Internet Explorer for Mac.)



FYI......If you click on the mini icon in the address field, the entire field is highlighted.

[poocat]

wow. thanks Phrogman, i never knew that.
he's got some points, some of which Charles has adressed adequately.

i think it's pretty much safe to say that everyone's got some os issues they'd like to see fixed. that's pretty standard. there are parts of my car i'd like to see work differently. same with my tv remote, my phone (nokia is actually pretty bad at interface design) etc.

i really do hope he sent it to apple.

poocat.

[Brass]

Originally posted by Phrogman:
Clicking once in the address field does not do what people want 99 percent of the time, which is selecting the address so it can be replaced by typing a new one. (This can be done without interfering with those who want to select only part of the address, as demonstrated by Firefox and by Internet Explorer for Mac.)

I HATE it when I click in the location field and the entire text is selected. Why should that text field behave differently to any other text field in any other application. 99% of the time, when I click in the text field, I do NOT want it all hightlighted.

If I want to highlight the entire text, I would do it the same as in any other Mac text field... click at the beginning and drag down, or click at the end and drag up. Windows users don't understand how well this works, because it isn't an option in Windows.

[[APi]TheMan]

I think you're all missing the point... who the heck is Matthew Thomas and what has he done for me recently? That's nice that he doesn't like OS X's GUI, I haven't read the article... but wow, Mr. Dixie Normous likes OS X's GUI. If I wasn't so lazy I'd whip up some quick HTML explaining what is so great about OS X's UI.

Meh, now to go look up this Matthew Thomas guy on google.

Originally posted by Brass:
I HATE it when I click in the location field and the entire text is selected. Why should that text field behave differently to any other text field in any other application. 99% of the time, when I click in the text field, I do NOT want it all hightlighted.

Ditto. Man I can't stand that. More often than not I want to delete all the mumbo jumbo after "http://forums.macnn.com/" to return to the forum index, for example, and Firefox, as lovely as it is, makes this kinda a pain in the butt.

edit: Ah, this Matthew Thomas guy prolly wouldn't know his elbow from a doorknob.

[Gee4orce]

Got to admit that he does make some very good observations.

But I've got to also admit that I personally hadn't noticed 99% of what he did, and exactly 0% of it bothers me enough to get in the way of what I want to do.

Some people are just far too anally retentive.

[Tsilou B.]

Originally posted by Brass:

I HATE it when I click in the location field and the entire text is selected. Why should that text field behave differently to any other text field in any other application. 99% of the time, when I click in the text field, I do NOT want it all hightlighted.

Mac OS X supports the triple click - Windows doesn't. You can select any paragraph in any application by triple-clicking. When I want to enter a new address in Safari, I triple-click the location bar and the whole address is highlighted. And, I have never really noticed (until now) that I do that all the time, because it's the standard in Mac OS X and I do it without thinking about it. If you are a Windows user or a Linux user and come to Mac OS X and expect everything to work like in Windows, you won't feel "at home" with the Mac OS X HI. Some things are missing and should be added, other things are just different and you have to get used to them.

[Spheric Harlot]

Originally posted by Tsilou B.:
Mac OS X supports the triple click - Windows doesn't. You can select any paragraph in any application by triple-clicking. When I want to enter a new address in Safari, I triple-click the location bar and the whole address is highlighted. And, I have never really noticed (until now) that I do that all the time, because it's the standard in Mac OS X and I do it without thinking about it. If you are a Windows user or a Linux user and come to Mac OS X and expect everything to work like in Windows, you won't feel "at home" with the Mac OS X HI. Some things are missing and should be added, other things are just different and you have to get used to them.

Heh.

In Safari, triple-click on your paragraph above.

It will only select a single line.

-s*

[voodoo]

Originally posted by Spheric Harlot:
Heh.

In Safari, triple-click on your paragraph above.

It will only select a single line.

-s*

While Windows triple clicking that paragraph selects it all (using teh crappo OS 2000 right now)

[HOMBRESINIESTRO]

I've just sent a bug report to apple via their feedback site. As he obviously doesn't want to do it, but I think he's got some good points.

[TheSpaz]

"It is easy for important controls — such as a window’s scrollbar buttons and resize handle — to become unclickable because they are stuck under the Dock. The Dock cannot be hidden temporarily, but even if it could, that would only be a workaround, not a solution."

Cmd-Option-D


"Clicking once in the address field does not do what people want 99 percent of the time, which is selecting the address so it can be replaced by typing a new one. (This can be done without interfering with those who want to select only part of the address, as demonstrated by Firefox and by Internet Explorer for Mac.)"

Click below or above the address box and the whole address will hilite

"If an instant message window is as tall as possible, every time you type a space the text field scrolls back to the first line, hiding what you just typed."

Then don't make it as tall as possible

[ibobunot]

Well-known usability hacker Mattew Thomas (mostly of Mozilla fame) gives his two cents on Mac OS X.

[Lew]

Originally posted by CharlesS:

The Application menu (which appears to be a dumping ground for menu items that should not exist)

What menu items that should not exist? About? Preferences? Services? Show/hide application? Quit? Which of these should not exist? Did I miss something?

Maybe he means that the Application menu shouldn't exist?

The Application menu (which appears to be a dumping ground … that should not exist)

[mitchell_pgh]

I find these items GREAT!!!

If these are the types of consistency issues we are having with OS X, I'm impressed. If I went over Windows or OS 9 with this level of detail, the list would be many times longer. Windows has numerous applications that don't follow any interface guidelines.

Going from application to application forces you in to relearning many shortcut keys. Like "un-group"

Quark: Command + U
Photoshop: Shift + Command + G

Very annoying...

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by Mimizuku no Lew:
Maybe he means that the Application menu shouldn't exist?

If that is the case, then he has used a misplaced modifier, and any high-school English teacher would have his hide.

Seriously, though, I don't think that's what he meant. He said it was a "dumping ground", therefore a place to put menu items that should be tossed. However, I find all the items in there to be quite useful...

[dole]

Clicking once in the address field does not do what people want 99 percent of the time, which is selecting the address so it can be replaced by typing a new one. (This can be done without interfering with those who want to select only part of the address, as demonstrated by Firefox and by Internet Explorer for Mac.)

If you want to select the whole address so you can type in a new one, just click the favicon in the left of the address bar and it selects the whole thing.

[Spheric Harlot]

Originally posted by CharlesS:
Seriously, though, I don't think that's what he meant. He said it was a "dumping ground", therefore a place to put menu items that should be tossed. However, I find all the items in there to be quite useful...

The arrangement FINALLY makes sense the way it is.

Apple menu: System-related and global/user-level items

Application menu: application-related/-wide items

File menu: individual file-/window-related items

Edit menu: window content-related items


Mac OS X is the only OS that has finally introduced a menu bar hierarchy that makes absolute sense.

-s*

[Chuckit]

Originally posted by mitchell_pgh:
Windows has numerous applications that don't follow any interface guidelines.

Going from application to application forces you in to relearning many shortcut keys. Like "un-group"

Quark: Command + U
Photoshop: Shift + Command + G

That's true of the Mac versions as well, isn't it?

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by Spheric Harlot:
The arrangement FINALLY makes sense the way it is.

Apple menu: System-related and global/user-level items

Application menu: application-related/-wide items

File menu: individual file-/window-related items

Edit menu: window content-related items


Mac OS X is the only OS that has finally introduced a menu bar hierarchy that makes absolute sense.

-s*

Yes, I agree 100%.

[lngtones]

Originally posted by stew:
That is more than just cosmetics. It does help reading long lists, that was the reason why back in the days paper for dot matrix printers had a similar pattern.

And you'll also notice that most of the time lists with more then one column have alternating colors and lists with only one column don't. Alternating colors in a one column list isn't going to help much.

[Link]

The whole home/end or control a+e or up/down or whatnot issue REALLY bugs the hell out of me.

Why can't *ALL* apps use either control a/e (unix style) *AND* home/end (every other GUI style) <-- MANY apps don't work with EITHER method and it kills me.

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by Link:
The whole home/end or control a+e or up/down or whatnot issue REALLY bugs the hell out of me.

Why can't *ALL* apps use either control a/e (unix style) *AND* home/end (every other GUI style) <-- MANY apps don't work with EITHER method and it kills me.

Not every other GUI. Just Windows uses home/end. The classic Mac way is command-left arrow and command-right arrow. Mac OS X uses that as well as the emacs shortcuts in Cocoa apps. Carbon apps which haven't been updated to use the emacs shortcuts will only support command-arrows. The only Mac app that has ever supported home/end to do the job of the aforementioned shortcuts is Word, which naturally doesn't support home/end or command-arrows. That is non-standard behavior. Home and end are supposed to take you to the top and bottom of a scroll bar, not the beginning and end of a line.

[DeathMan]

Originally posted by Link:
The whole home/end or control a+e or up/down or whatnot issue REALLY bugs the hell out of me.

Why can't *ALL* apps use either control a/e (unix style) *AND* home/end (every other GUI style) <-- MANY apps don't work with EITHER method and it kills me.

What it should be is command -> goes to the end of a line (or ctrl-e) and home and end go to the beginning and end of a documnet. The two culprits that I've found are of course MS Office, and Dreamweaver, since MM is MS's biatch.