> What I don't like about these Chrome UI's is that they don't respect my OS settings
Hear, hear. On our new serious workstation, we mostly run a variety of developer tools and browsers, some basic office software, various graphics/DTP/modelling stuff from companies like Adobe and Autodesk, and a bunch of tools to automate things and join the dots.
On a quick look, exactly none of the major products there uses the standard Windows 7 UI conventions.
I, for one, am sick of:
- not knowing which keyboard shortcuts perform frequent tasks like undo/redo, or more generally, not being able to navigate a UI using systematic and intuitive keystrokes;
- every application's windows having different conventions for dealing with multiple documents, docking panels, and so on (and making the labels ever-smaller wherever they are, so your documents all look like "C:\users\Fred\..." and your web pages are all "Favourite Site | The S...");
- every application having different and increasingly obnoxious methods of giving you "important" notifications;
- every application having different and increasingly obnoxious auto-update policies that break stuff;
- every application having different ways to download and maintain plug-ins;
- more and more applications trying to squeeze every last square inch of screen space by hiding commands behind a small number of tabs or, worse, meaningless menu-icon-things (we bought large, hi-res monitors for a reason, and having access to browser bookmarks within two clicks is worth far more to us than reading a web site at 2560x1400 instead of 2560x1370);
- every application shoving its executables and config files in its own place (not helped by Windows 7's holier-than-thou "you can't put that in that directory" and "are you sure you want to do that" messages);
- and many other things that just make day-to-day work horribly inefficient.
I wish Microsoft would define a robust, standardised set of UI conventions again, based on usability rather than flashy stuff, and then at least stick to it themselves instead of inventing a whole new bunch of tricks for every new version of Office, IE, Visual Studio and so on.
And then I wish other software, including everything I mentioned above and most definitely including Firefox and Chrome, would just follow the conventions or make some effort to collaborate and standardise in connection with Microsoft (or whoever else writes the platform(s) they run on).
> I wish Microsoft would define a robust, standardised set of UI conventions again, based on usability rather than flashy stuff, and then at least stick to it themselves instead of inventing a whole new bunch of tricks for every new version of Office, IE, Visual Studio and so on.
This, to me, is one the biggest pluses for Macs at this point. Microsoft keeps trying to reinvent the GUI, but they don't get rid of the old stuff, even in their own systems.
I also wish Microsoft would adopt actual application bundles. 99% of applications should not actually need installers and uninstallers. Despite what Raymond Chen says, a simple folder is not the same thing.
Unfortunately the Delicious Generation (including some of its adherents inside Apple) threw out the HIG. And now we have the weird iOS-OS X hybrid that is Lion.
This is undoubtedly true (with the flagrant exception of iCal and Address Book), but some of us old-timey Mac users remember a glorious past full of matte gray and a spatial Finder…
Possibly the UI of iCal and Address Book might have the inconsistant UI, but they still have the exact same UX as every other OS X app, thanks to all (with the exception of iTunes?) being built in Cocoa so they all use the same text controls and menu items etc.
You can create a Cocoa app in XCode and just add a text field, and you will automatically get spell check, dictionary look-up and font controls. All your shortcuts will work exactly how you would expect them to (ctrl+a, I'm looking at you). You get a help menu with built in search of the menu bar (http://cl.ly/8yKI). All with no effort from the dev at all.
The only exception to this would be Adobe apps, but at least they have their own UI/UX that they seems to follow most of the time (but they actually hate Apple/OS X, so they probably just do it out of spite)
That's true about iCal and Address Book. I don't use either of those, so I'd forgotten what they'd done to them.
I'm not an "old-timey" Mac user by any stretch of the imagination, but I can't help wondering when Macs were "full of matte gray". Are you referring to pre-OSX days, because it seems that OSX is more gray now than ever before?
I am in fact. If I remember correctly (I may very well not!) Mac OS 8 or so (maybe 8.5) was the height of the let's-never-ever-deviate-from-the-HIG days.
This also included a glorious commitment to the desktop metaphor, when that phrase meant anything: you really could map your mental representation of virtual objects onto their real-life analogs and expect things to work remarkably like you expected.
Now, I don't know that a desktop metaphor is the right way to interact with a computer (I certainly avoid it like the plague), but it seems preferable, in my experience, to the hodge-podge of mixed metaphors that the modern desktop UI has become, in both Mac and Windows.
I'm reminded of the scene in The Big Lebowski when the protagonists encounter a group of nihilists: say what you will about the desktop metaphor, but at least it's an ethos.
You remember correctly; in the 8/8.5 days, Apple's HIG was considered a must-read for any application programmer, and deviating from it was guaranteed to get you lots of criticism. IIRC, about the only 'non-standard' common widget in applications was the floating windoid, which started out as a hackish WDEF.
As an (at the time) longtime Mac programmer and enthusiast, my disappointment in the OS X UI was one of the reasons that I walked away from Mac programming and never went back. In fact, OS X drove me to more seriously try out Linux and learn to appreciate Windows. Now, I tolerate OS X, but still find myself pining for good ol' 8.5.
They DO have UX guidelines, but hardly anyone reads and respects them. I have hard time arguing with my managers at work, who want to make our software's UI "prettier" by putting on the skin which 1) out of place on supported Windows versions, 2) ugly.
> every application having different and increasingly obnoxious methods of giving you "important" notifications;
This is one area in which the browsers seem to be getting better. Consider the humble Javascript alert, which used to grab and hold focus so that you could not interact with any other browser window or dialog until you had addressed the alert. Nearly all of the browsers have now switched to less intrusive alerts that display but do not dominate.
Most of the native Mac OS X applications are made using XCode which comes with the same basic default menu each time you start a new project. That is a guarantee that most apps are going to adhere as much as possible with the OS's conventions. There are exceptions, of course.
How many different IDEs/toolkits are available and used to develop Windows or "Linux" applications?
Hear, hear. On our new serious workstation, we mostly run a variety of developer tools and browsers, some basic office software, various graphics/DTP/modelling stuff from companies like Adobe and Autodesk, and a bunch of tools to automate things and join the dots.
On a quick look, exactly none of the major products there uses the standard Windows 7 UI conventions.
I, for one, am sick of:
- not knowing which keyboard shortcuts perform frequent tasks like undo/redo, or more generally, not being able to navigate a UI using systematic and intuitive keystrokes;
- every application's windows having different conventions for dealing with multiple documents, docking panels, and so on (and making the labels ever-smaller wherever they are, so your documents all look like "C:\users\Fred\..." and your web pages are all "Favourite Site | The S...");
- every application having different and increasingly obnoxious methods of giving you "important" notifications;
- every application having different and increasingly obnoxious auto-update policies that break stuff;
- every application having different ways to download and maintain plug-ins;
- more and more applications trying to squeeze every last square inch of screen space by hiding commands behind a small number of tabs or, worse, meaningless menu-icon-things (we bought large, hi-res monitors for a reason, and having access to browser bookmarks within two clicks is worth far more to us than reading a web site at 2560x1400 instead of 2560x1370);
- every application shoving its executables and config files in its own place (not helped by Windows 7's holier-than-thou "you can't put that in that directory" and "are you sure you want to do that" messages);
- and many other things that just make day-to-day work horribly inefficient.
I wish Microsoft would define a robust, standardised set of UI conventions again, based on usability rather than flashy stuff, and then at least stick to it themselves instead of inventing a whole new bunch of tricks for every new version of Office, IE, Visual Studio and so on.
And then I wish other software, including everything I mentioned above and most definitely including Firefox and Chrome, would just follow the conventions or make some effort to collaborate and standardise in connection with Microsoft (or whoever else writes the platform(s) they run on).