Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 22nd Dec 2006 11:16 UTC, submitted by bababooie
"The IndieHIG Wiki is a place where developers and UI designers can come together to create a new set of Human Interface Guidelines to supplement Apple's guidelines. Apple has neglected to update their HIG with modern UI designs and controls, so developers have been forced to replicate these UI elements on their own to keep their applications from looking dated. Since each developer has slightly different implementations of these elements, it has resulted in a fairly inconsistent look and feel for Mac OS users." Meanwhile, for the first time in over three months, Apple is asking its developer community to begin testing and providing feedback on a forthcoming update to Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
When you go back to Windows, one thing that really bugs you is that this behavioural consistency is lacking: Whilst you can use Alt+F4 (mostly) and Win+M, is preferences under Tools > Options, View > Preferences, or worse File > Preferences? Why is there no shortcut for it?
Neither OS is a panacea of consistency, both have some huge areas-of-omission. For Windows, it's the keyboard shortcuts and menu locations of common items. With MacOS X, it's the text manipulation commands - admittedly something that only power users care about, but the lack of consistency makes it quite frustrating to do extended text editing in OS X. In some text fields, holding down shift and pressing an arrow key extends the selection in that direction; in others, it doesn't. Sometimes the Home and End keys take you to the beginning or end of a line (or beginning/end of the document, if using a modifier); sometimes the up/down arrows perform that role. Some apps have additional modifiers that can be used with Shift to select an entire word to the right/left of the insertion point (or to select to the beginning/end of a line), but it's far from consistent. Whereas in Windows, those keyboard shortcuts tend to work the exact same way, in nearly all programs.