RE: Apple and Cocoa (why don't they eat their own dog food?)
RE: Apple and Cocoa (why don't they eat their own dog food?)
- Subject: RE: Apple and Cocoa (why don't they eat their own dog food?)
- From: Gregory Weston <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2003 21:20:44 -0500
On 1/13/03 at 12:47 PM, Chris Hanson <email@hidden> wrote:
>
There is a standard on the Macintosh and there has been a standard
>
for somewhere between one and two decades. (I'm not sure if the
>
standard was originally developed for the Lisa in 1983 - which did
>
have arrow keys - or for the Mac Plus in 1986. Or if it evolved in
>
the late 1980s.)
I have no background with the Lisa, but the arrow semantics were introduced to
the Mac with IM4. Could've been earlier; there were arrows on the optional
keypad for pre-Plus machines.
>
So it's not really Apple's problem; the guidelines have existed for a
>
*long* time and been relatively easy to implement for that entire
>
time. And they're trivial to implement in Cocoa applications. The
>
blame lies with developers who don't adhere to Apple's human
>
interface guidelines.
Including, it must be admitted, Apple.
So do we do what Apple says, or do what Apple does. And if the goal is to
achieve an intuitable interface, is there sense in acknowledging that 99.44% of
Mac users are also familiar with Windows so maybe some of the Windows
conventions should be adopted - after careful consideration - from simple
pragmatism.
(Personally, I'd prefer "no" but pretty much monthly I hear someone complaining
about how they have to remember two sets of arrow semantics that are, at this
point, different only due to momentum.)
G
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