OSNews

As a product designer and as one who has extensively used Mac, Windows and Linux, I think that the Mac menu-bar being detached from the application window is a huge usability mistake.

Agreed. And what is most paradoxical about it, as an error, is that exactly the point at which you need to have the menu-bar on the application window, is when you are running many apps at the same time. But this ability was always one of the strengths of the old Apple OS, and there were lots of studies showing how Mac users did use more different apps. How weird it should be that your HIG rules end up being exactly what makes the original unique selling point of the system harder rather than easier to use!

Its a classic instance of how Apple's HIGs, which started out in a different era as being rules fostering innovation and usability, as the world moved on, became a sort of dead hand of conservatism. The continued insistence on the single button mouse was exactly the same sort of thing.

The other classic instance of it is the way in which the guidelines are all designed around one non-tabbing desktop as the way to do things. Whereas in fact the right way in many cases is virtual desktops. If you wrote your HIG with multiple desktops in mind, half of it would have to be thrown out.

Well, they did finally get to multi-button mice, and they have now at last admitted virtual desktops with Spaces, so there is progress, however glacial.