GIGO: words unreadable aloud

UI Blunders: Apple and Firefox

Channeling Hani today, but with fewer swearwords.

IMHO, Apple has a well-deserved reputation as one of the best UI design organizations on the planet. But even the best err sometimes. So here's a list of what I consider to be User Interface Blunders that Apple has made, despite that reputation.

Page Setup vs the print dialog

EVERY application should provide the option, IN THE PRINT DIALOG, to switch between landscape and portrait mode. NO EXCEPTIONS. THIS IS BASIC.

To force me to close the print dialog, and go to Page Setup, just to get a page printed in the desired orientation, is to admit that your APIs are ossified, and cannot adapt to providing the smooth and simple interaction that Apple was once justly praised for.

the one-button mouse

Though it might have been the right choice even as late as 1987, it was definitely a mistake by 1997, and is a huge blunder in 2007.

Not giving Text files special status

Apple innovation: giving files types, and assigning a specific preferred ("creator") application to most kinds of files. This was actually a nice innovation.

Cool flexibility variation: the "open with" menu item. Nice for giving the user more choices.

Blunder: Not giving text files special status. Face it, dammit. Text files matter more.

Ok, I read about a new programming language NML. Its sources are in files named with a ".nml" extension.
Even firefox suffers from Apple's precedent here -- instead of giving me the choice of treating NML as if it *might* be a text file, it just asks whether to save it, or open with ... no choices.
DAMMIT, just let me see what's in tha damn thing!! I can tell better than you can, whether it might just simply be plain text.
No, actually, YOU could do it. It is all or mostly ascii or valid unicode? Does it have line-ender characters every so often, like, say, within every few hundred characters? than DAMMIT offer a decent text editor as one of the preferred options, no matter what the filename extension says. These things are supposed to be for OUR benefit, Shit!

Now, maybe I'm biased from thirty-plus years of Unix use, but dammit, text files, as streams of characters, ARE more relevant to what I care about on the computer than just about ANYTHING else. JUST LET ME SEE THE DAMN THING. If I don't like that, or it turns out to be gibberish, I am perfectly capable of closing that window!!!

Printer margins in 2-up mode.

This might just be a minor printer driver issue, but it has persisted for a long time. PLEASE allow me to choose margin sizes, percentage magnification, etc., when doing 2-up printing. Your drivers (or your printer-partners' drivers) ALL SUCK. (Well, maybe it's just the cheap and sucky drivers for the cheap printers that I've been able to afford.)

Speaking of firefox ... but I suppose that's a different entry.

It sure would be nice to make it a better Mac OS X client. Here are my two trivial improvements:

Fix the text selection behavior. If I select a string of text, and then hit the left-arrow button, then the cursor should be *at the left edge of where that selection was*. Otherwise, it is not a Mac Application.
I'm not sure what lame rules it does use, but ... well, they're wrong.
the dock-context menu currently has
- show in finder
- hide
- quit
It needs to have "New Window"
Why? Say I have a couple of Ffox windows full of tabs full of stuff I'm sorta reading. Then I cmd-M minimize them and do some work. Now, when I have a work-related question that I need to use FFox to solve, I just want a new ffox window to come up. Instead, if I click on the Ffox in the dock, then one of my old surfing windows-full-of-tabs slithers out of its crate, and whatever cow orker is peering over my shoulder has to ask about all the interesting stuff in there, instead of getting a clean-slate starter spot.
To get the effect I most often want, I have to cmd-Tab as many times as necessary to get to Ffox, then hit cmd-N. Feels like n different operations (with n unpredictable) when it should be one (right click on Ffox dock icon, and glide the cursor up to select the nonexistent (but should-exist) "New Firefox Window" menu item).
(feature request): when the user changes the text size, if some text on the page is selected, then do your darnedest to keep (at least the start of) that selected text visible.
my workaround for this is :
- select some text
- cmd-+ (often as many as three times) to repair some resolution-challenged bozo's teeny tiny text
- shift-down-arrow (extends the selection, which has the side effect of bringing that end of the selection into view)
It shouldn't have to be that cumbersome.

10:56:47 PM comment/