From: Mark Fowler Date: 13:19 on 23 Apr 2004 Subject: Most stupid GUI design ever (On a Mac...what else) Since no-one else has posted it, here's one that bit us the other day. Find someone who's not used a Mac before. Give them Apple Mail, let them open preferences and then get them to accidentially click on the lozenge as it's where the close button would be on a Windows laptop (and it, like other mac window controls are, are not labeled.) This will close the toolbar. However in preferences dialogs the toolbar isn't extra helpful buttons - it's the *only* way to access the other preference panes. And the dialogs are stateful. Meaning if you quit Mail and re-open it again then you'll get the same dialog back without the toolbar. Unless the user was paying a lot of attention they'll probably never be able to get at the other preferences. You'll be lucky if the user even *knows* there's other panes there - you've certainly lost any visual indication that they even exist from the screen. It took me a good number of months to work out that the lozenge opens and closes toolbars or that opening and closing toolbars was even possible (essentially that's a notion that doesn't translate from X11 window managers at all.) Having the *only* way to access controls to be able to be optionally disabled and hidden is truely insane. And it's not just that preferences pane - it's all of them all over the whole OS. That's just nuts! Mark.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 14:29 on 23 Apr 2004 Subject: Re: Most stupid GUI design ever (On a Mac...what else) > Having the *only* way to access controls to be able to be optionally > disabled and hidden is truely insane. And it's not just that preferences > pane - it's all of them all over the whole OS. That's just nuts! And of course in the Finder that button switches you between stupid-metal-itunes-view and crippled-subset- of-os-1.1-finder view.
Generated at 10:27 on 16 Apr 2008 by mariachi