Thursday, 27 June 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 AM
