Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 1st Jul 2007 15:21 UTC
Sometimes, Apple's (or any other software maker's) complete lack of respect for usability never ceases to amaze me. Take today for example. Apart from the close, minimise, and "maximise" widgets Apple places on window decors, there is also a fourth widget programmers on the Apple platform can use. This widget resembles a sort of dash, and is placed on the top right corner of the window decor. This widget is used in many applications, both from Apple as well as from various third parties. It has one function: toggle the visibility of the window's toolbar.
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Member since:
2006-02-07
It is interesting that a few days ago Thom argued that there's no standard of usability, habit trumps intuition, users get used, etc.
Anyway, I agree this is a weird behavior. But I think it's part of a bigger problem which hopefully will be addressed in Leopard: that OSX has one consistent look (aqua) and one anything-is-valid look (metal brushed). Metal-brushed is not standard. Each metal-brushed window has had its own ways, different from the standard aqua windows. We came to expect that from iTunes, Safari, and the Finder. Each has different borders, different ways of drawing sidebars; even as far as I know by that time the Finder was the only Apple metal-brushed window with a standard (customizable) toolbar. The problem is not how the pill thing changes the theme of the window (since users should not expect consistency in metal brush) but the fact that apple relied on two different visual types of window representations with no apparent reason.
And of course, as THom points out, the lack of consistency of the visual representation when you go back to the same folder is also troubling.