Re: "untitled" vs "Untitled"
Re: "untitled" vs "Untitled"
- Subject: Re: "untitled" vs "Untitled"
- From: Gregory Weston <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2005 11:05:47 -0400
I don't really have an opinion one way or the other on whether
"untitled" should be capitalized or not on a new document window, but
a couple of things have been said in pursuit of that topic on which I
do have opinions.
On Jul 10, 2005, at 6:56 AM, Brian K. wrote:
in addition, these days we have the proxy icon, which more clearly
states whether the document has been saved on disk,
Yes, but it's not all that obvious in comparison to the name itself
indicating such.
I've been a Mac user for twenty years. I never noticed that new
windows had lowercased "untitled" for the name. It certainly never
occurred to me that I could or should look at the case of the window
name as an indicator of whether it had ever been saved or not.
in addition to the dot in the close box, which indicates whether it
is currently saved or not.
Which is a good supplemental feature, but it is no excuse for
removing an excellent guideline (which has really good psychological
roots in its reasoning).
Neither of these techniques was around when this guideline was
written up.
True, but that doesn't mean it's still not a good guideline. Change
for change's sake is not a reason.
Consider carefully these last two bits. I agree that change for the
sake of change is not a virtue, but persistence for the sake of
persistence isn't either. You go on to say...
The people who wrote up the core guidelines long ago really did know
what they were doing.
... and I can't help but notice the use of past tense. "Wrote" ...
"long ago" ... "did know." Granted that gratuitous change is a bad
thing, where's the evidence that what those people wrote "long ago"
remains correct? The fundamental rule of interface design, as far as
I know, is to (try to) do what the user expects. User expectations
change slowly (usually) but continuously. If in the tim since the
guideline (and note that the word is guideline, not rule) was written
user expectations have changed then changing the guideline may not,
in fact, be gratuitous.
G
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