Re: Apple and 64 bit apps - the latest in this series

"Snit" <usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:C4EDA835.D5BCD%usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"Daniel Johnson" <danieljohnson2@xxxxxxxxxxx> stated in post
6L6dnUWKZeFv2VXVnZ2dnUVZ_qzinZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxx on 9/10/08 3:06 PM:

I am talking about things that hurt usability.

That makes your case the harder: you have to show that whatever you are
complaining about actually does hurt usability. Inconsistency is easier to
demonstrate.

One can look at the inconsistencies and get a pretty good idea about how the
effect usability (though to know for sure you may need to do usability
testing)

This is just going to be argument by "I said so".

[snip]
Was iTunes changed when it came to Windows? I thought it was like that well
before Apple did that.

Well, I am sure they were planning on the move to Windows from well before
it was made public. I do not recall how it was at the start.

I believe iTunes was pretty nonstandard from day one, back on OS 9. Though at that time, they may well have been thinking of porting, not to Windows, but not OS X!

[snip]
I'd be happier if Word 2007 had got with the program on the print dialog.
It's something of a flagship application for Vista's new UI style, and using
Ye Olde Print Dialog is not really, you know, the thing.

Just checked - yeah, Word 2007 still has non-standard Print and Save
dialogs. At least the title bars are consistent!

I checked that also. The *Save* dialog is, in fact, the standard Vista save dialog- the latest version. IE, WordPad, and Paint all use it as well.

The print dialog in Word 2007 is old.

And then look at the "Save" dialogs - works is completely different... and
the side bars are different for MS Office (though that is not completely
standard)

That's just a feature of the standard dialog. It's in the new Vista one too.

At least in XP, if you change the side panel icons they do not carry over to
MS Office. That is broken.

In XP, users cannot change the side panel in any supported way. I do not know how you were trying to do it.

In Vista, they can. And it does carry over. However, I believe that only the new Vista-style save/open dialogs have that feature.

[snip]
It will do just that, as long as you don't try to customize the dialog. If you
do so, it will stick to the old dialog so your customization does not
break.

Why not have the ability to add "extras" to the standard dialog.

This is indeed one of the things you can do. That area at the bottom of the Word 'Save' dialog where you can set the keywords, author, and create thumbnail? Those are extras.

Apparently that is what OS X does.

OS X does do that, and that's fine. It's one reason why Apple has not changed the save/open dialogs very much, though. Once you are sharing your UI with a guest, radical changes will break stuff.

What Apple has done, as I understand it, it change the controls that are in the save panel, but retain the same layout. The area for 'extras' winds up being in the same place, and the same size, and the surrounding dialog looks similar (but not identical) to application code running there.

This doesn't offer as much compatibility as MS's approach, but it's not that bad. It's a compromise- you get greater consistency at the cost of limited upgrades to the form and less compatibility.

[snip]
Well, when you created that page, the Works save dialog shown was not quite as
out of date. :D

Anyway, on Vista there is yet another new Save dialog- it's very different and
rather OS X-y. The print dialog has not changed. I note that Word, WordPad,
Paint and IE all use the Vista style save dialog.

Good... maybe MS is getting a clue.

Is it good that Vista has *yet another* save dialog (making 3 in total), or good that it's rather OS X-y, or good that they didn't do the same thing with the print dialog?

If you selected the right versions of the right apps, you could make a much more convincing looking web-page about the save dialogs: just make sure you include the Win95, WinXP, and Vista style dialogs, and throw in an old Win16 file dialog and some horrendous custom job while you are at it. You can get 5 completely different save dialogs, at least four of which are "Microsoft".

:D

[snip]
That's compatibility again. But Apple does not change their dialogs nearly as
much between releases, and cares less about compatibility anyway. So they
don't keep old versions of the save dialog around.

OS X is *more* consistent... if Apple does not really care then how did that
come about?

You need to read the rest of that sentence, where it says "... about compatibility".

What Apple things about consistency is hard to judge.

They spent years being as inconsistent as humanly possible, with a zillion different UI styles. But now in Leopard they've cut back on that, at least as far as the OS proper goes. Yet they haven't eliminated it across all their apps. And there is Time Machine, which is consistent with nothing; but then Time Machine ignores every tenet of good UI design *anyway*.

What will Apple do going forward? Will GarageBand lose the wood paneling? Will 'brushed metal' creep back in?

I have no idea, at this point.


.

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