Numbers, the spreadsheet application in Apple’s new iLife ‘08 suite, introduces a new form of secondary highlighting to convey relationships between selected items. Selected items are shown in the Sheets list in dark blue against the current sheet’s mid-range blue, but select a chart and you’ll see the source table for that chart highlighted with a lighter blue. It’s elegant and effective, but a little hard to describe.

So let’s see it in action.

Create an empty Numbers document and the Sheets list appears on the left, the current sheet indicated with a mid-range blue background. Add a stacked column chart, and a new table and chart appear, both displaying sample data. Select the table, and you see it highlighted on the left in a dark blue.

Now select the chart to see it highlighted in dark blue in the list , while its source table is selected in a lighter blue.

That’s why the selected item’s blue is unusually dark: it had to be a little darker than usual to contrast against that lighter blue. Compare the lists in Numbers and iTunes, and it is clear how much darker the list selection highlighting is:

Highlighting connected list items together—selected items darker, source items lighter—seems new. Has this been used before?

The designers could have easy skipped the secondary highlighting, since the source table is already clearly highlighted on the right. But also conveying this relationship in the Sheets list becomes increasingly handy as the document grows, with many tables scrolled out of sight. Whereas you’d have to scroll in two dimensions to locate the source table on the right, you only have to scroll in one dimension on the left. Nice.

(Hey, while we’re there, see that little pivot control in the table above Region 1? Click that and you pivot the axes of the associated chart. Cool!)

Object selection highlighting could be improved. Highlighting table cells obscures the text in the cells. Designers obviously wanted to keep table cell heights small to permit large tables, but it makes for an uncomfortably cramped-looking selection. Reducing the opacity of the selection highlighting might help here.

And selection handles in charts need an extra pixel or two of breathing room. The little grab handles you see when you select an item lie exactly on the item’s border. Normally this feels natural, because it enhances the illusion of direct manipulation. But this doesn’t work as well on charts, whose borders are mostly open white space and text: the selection handles “touch” the chart’s title and axes labels. Again, it makes the selection look uncomfortably cramped. An extra pixel or two of added space between chart border and selection handle would improve things.

Saturday, August 18th, 2007, 7:27 pm    Trackback.