Nicholas Riley’s Weblog
Thoughts from a computer science graduate student,
medical student and Cocoa programmer (this week).

Skip over navigation
June 2002
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
            1
2 3 4 5 6 7 8
9 10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20 21 22
23 24 25 26 27 28 29
30            
May   Jul

made with
Click here to visit the Radio UserLand website.

Click on the coffee mug to add Nicholas Riley's Instant Outline to your Radio UserLand buddy list.

 

>
Thursday, June 27, 2002
 
Apple no longer even pretends to follow its own interface guidelines. Take the Window menu. According to the Aqua HIG:

Window menu items appear in this order: Minimize, Zoom, <separator>, <application-specific window commands>, <separator>, Bring All to Front (optional), <separator>, <list of open documents>. The Close command should appear in the File menu, below the Open command.

Let's take a sample of some apps which ship with Mac OS X. Here are the items which appear before the first separator.

  • Finder, DVD Player: "Zoom Window", "Minimize Window"
  • Preview, Stickies: "Close Window", "Miniaturize Window"
  • Installer: "Close Window", "Zoom Window"
  • QuickTime Player: "Zoom Window", "Minimize Window", "Bring All to Front", "Show Movie Info"
  • Calculator, Sherlock: No Window menu
  • Script Editor: <window list>
  • TextEdit, iPhoto, Chess, Disk Copy, Console: "Close Window", "Zoom Window", "Minimize Window"
  • System Preferences: "Close", "Minimize"
  • Address Book, Image Capture, AirPort Admin Utility: "Minimize"
  • iTunes: "Minimize", "Zoom"

That makes one app out of 18, and three more which come close. How am I supposed to decide what to do here?

Another example is the project templates in Project Builder: the example strings included in Info.plist bear no relation with how they're supposed to be formatted. 3:17:07 AM | reply []


Looking for older (or newer) material? Click another date on the calendar at the top of this page.