On Saturday, Aug 30, 2003, at 13:10 Asia/Jerusalem, Stanislav Malyshev wrote:
Actually I'm not sure that MACs "nobody needs more than one button on mouse"
Actually, they said that "no beginner needs a two button mouse". And if you ever gave tech support to beginners (or not-so-beginners) you will appreciate that. The OS supports "out of the box" any 2 button mouse that you connect to it, including the wheel.
, "nobody wants two user menus on the screen or user menu attached to the actual application it belongs to",
When the application is in the background, what would you need it's menu for anyway? You still need to click on it to get it into focus before you can do anything. Therefore, the menu in the background window just add clutter. Also, it is much faster to reach the edges of the screen then the middle, therefor it makes very much sense to put the menu smug on top. Here is one good example of Fitt's law, which sadly Apple abandoned in other places (the location of the trash, for example)
"let's invent a number of modifier keys and call them with confusing icons instead of names"
"alt" "command"- really confusing, yeah. At least the user is hidden from the tilde and pipe, unless they really want to know abut them.
The point is, that although OSX interface is not perfect, it is very clear that Apple puts thought and research into it. I have been following OSX since 10.0. We will soon be at 10.3- And although at first sight they look nearly identical, when you sit down and use both, you discover that Apple have been busy refining the UI- fixing all those tiny annoyances that you find in almost all UI.
This is something to learn from, even while disagreeing about this or that detail. That way Linux's UI will improve as well. It is a shame that so many Linux apps just copy the MS stuff, without trying to improve or change (one big offender here is OpenOffice, which it's UI can drive me crazy at times).
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