For a start, you have to click something on the extememe left and then move all the way across to the extreme right, just to toggle a check box, which breaks just about every UI rule in the book!
Oh, come on! I can think of all sorts of examples of this in many apps. For instance in Mail the mailbox-search field is at the right edge of the toolbar, while the controls to select which mailbox to search in are on the left. It’s a common design to have a source list/outline on the left of the window and an inspector view on the right.
Yes, mail suffers from the same thing - guess who both apps were written by! lol
It would be lovely if every control in an app could be put right next to every other control that it ever interacted with, but basic 2D geometry makes that impossible. :)
The whole design is PANELA-WorkSpace-PANELB, if it were PANELA-PANEL-B-wortkspace, they would be nearer automatically.
You’re right it is impossible to put every control next to every other control if everything is in the same window!!!
In the XCode case, you have a File list Panel on the left, then the source file or whatever in the middle and a Utilities/Properties Panel on the right. If the properties panel opened in a separate window and it remembered it’s position, then you could move it where ever you wanted it, so you could have every control you need right now next to every other control you need right now or at least a lot closer! Which is what we had originally!
If you could just move the two panels on the left and right to where you wanted them horizontally within the window, you could at least position things so they are a lot nearer to each other when you needed to for the task in hand!
The (lack) of UI design in XCode 5 is shocking, why they don’t employ a really good UI designer rather than leaving it up to the whim of developers is beyond me.
No, the UI of Apple apps is NEVER left up to the developers. There are always UI designers involved.
Obviosuly not very good ones in this case! lol
I worked on OS X apps at Apple for years (2000–2007), though not on Xcode. Sometimes I disagreed with the designers’ decisions because they were prioritizing aesthetics over functionality, and sometimes they didn’t understand the usage of the app as well as I did, but they were very much involved. Often with veto power.
Agreed! QuickTime Player was a good example of this!
I have a sinking feeling we’re about to see yet another flame war about Xcode’s UI. Please don’t go there, folks, not again. Or before you play back-seat driver, show us the amazing and perfect application UI’s _you’ve_ designed.
Don’t want a flame war and don’t take part in them, but really it doesn’t take a degree in applied metaphysics to point out a bad UI.