Re: metallized interface (offtopic rant)
Re: metallized interface (offtopic rant)
- Subject: Re: metallized interface (offtopic rant)
- From: Angela Brett <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 2 Nov 2002 12:09:21 +1300
- Minimise button. What purpose does that serve that wasn't served
by window shading?
It gets the window completely out of the way. I remember on OS 9
windowshading a whole lot of windows and then still having to move
their title bars around to get them out of the way.
- Toolbars too damn big.
Which is probably why we need a convenient way to hide them ;) Or you
could show them just as text, which would confuse any poor Windows
user who happened across your computer because they'd think they were
menus and probably not expect them to do anything when clicked on
(though some things in Windows menubars do, so perhaps it wouldn't be
such a shock.) Hey, I'll have to try that trick some time.
Actually, I'd go as far as to say that all the UI elements are now
too big. I didn't buy a 19" monitor so my toolbars could take up
more space, dammit.
I'll agree with you there. Well, sort of. I think the big UI elements
would be great on a 19" monitor or larger... the pixels are getting
smaller so using more of them means we can still easily see what
things are, and in more detail than before. I've tried turning the
resolution way up on other computers (not on OS X) and it's pretty
damn difficult to see anything so I'm glad if OS X makes higher
resolutions usable. However, I have a clamshell iBook with an 800x600
screen, which is only just big enough to fit all the menus of some
apps since the menu font is bigger than it used to be. I wish I could
make some things smaller for this screen, but I think I'd be quite
happy with them the way they are if I had anything bigger.
Sadly, I think we are going to see more and more divergence from
good UI design, and more and more metal interfaced crap, more and
more skinnable apps, until we are as bad as windows (or, god forbid,
X-Windows windowmanagers like enlightenment/sawfish/etc - have you
_seen_ some of those horrible skins?).
I don't think so. Apple gives us two kinds of window, and one kind of
every other widget, so it's easy to use those and difficult to use
anything else. With Windows it seems as though you get a different
widget set depending on how you compile the project or something, and
on X-Windows... well, there's no single window manager so there's no
hope of making your app look like every other unless the user has a
near-identical skin for each one. On Mac OS X, we use Aqua, and if
Aqua changes then our apps change with it without us having to do
anything, so everything's forced to be consistent unless we either
put a lot of effort into making it inconsistent or use textured
windows. I've only seen one skinnable app for OS X (Netscape 6) and I
don't use it. It's no good having an app which can look like anything
I want except the rest of my OS.
Well, that defense doesn't have much to do with metal windows. At
least the different style was put there deliberately, with some
guidelines for use, instead of just being there as a result of
disorganisation and/or much mind-changing. It would be better if
there were more rigid guidelines of when to use metal though, and if
Apple stuck rigidly to those guidelines. When I used to have
real-world calendars and address books, they were made of paper. TVs,
stereos, cellphones etc are plastic. Having said that, the Address
Book in 10.2 is far, far nicer than the one in 10.1, and I don't mind
it being metal at all. I like the metal look in practice but not so
much in theory. I don't like inconsistency, but this is only one
element which there are only two forms of... that's barely noticeable
compared with other OSs where every element has at least three forms.
Mac OS has the most consistent GUI I've seen.
At 3:54 PM +0100 1/11/2002, Andreas Mayer wrote:
What's the real world counterpart of iChat? (Uses multiple windows too.)
I wondered that at first, but then I realised we do have instant
messaging in the real world... cell phones and pagers.
--
Angela Brett email@hidden
http://acronyms.co.nz/angela
A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems -- Paul Erdos
_______________________________________________
cocoa-dev mailing list | email@hidden
Help/Unsubscribe/Archives:
http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/cocoa-dev
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.