Mac OS X peccadillos

There’s usually little sport in pointing out UI flaws in an OS, but Mac OS X is well-enough designed that it’s actually fun, like catching an erudite friend confusing a tense or saying “kinda.”

Here are several examples. Good times!

Terminology  

cannot_sync.png

Huh? Remapping record identifiers? What the heck?

movie.png

So, saving a movie is an operation. Good to know.

Controls  

pdf_menu.png

Menu buttons look like a button, but act like a menu. Fine in concept, but the execution—slapping a normal menu against a normal button—is startlingly crude. The menu should really emerge more organically from the button.

 
The sign in dialog contains a useful little flag button that lets you choose a language, but it shouldn’t be in the window title bar.

And lastly, there are some good aspects to the new Help menu, but the way the menu grabs focus and causes selection highlighting to flash in the front window is not among them.

Thursday, July 31st, 2008, 10:49 am    You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

4 Responses to “Mac OS X peccadillos”

  1. Partners in Grime July 31st, 2008 at 2:11 pm

    A sometimes fun thing is to look for humor in Apple messages. For example, go to Apple’s homepage and type virus into the search field then wait for the popup result. :)

  2. Agli August 10th, 2008 at 10:00 am

    But you do know you can get TinkerTools (http://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html) that allows you to let the Help Window not be in the front!

    @Partners in Grime:
    Hahaha!

  3. instig8r August 21st, 2008 at 11:09 am

    Quote> [...]like catching an erudite friend confusing a tense or saying “kinda”.

    …or putting punctuation outside quotation marks?

  4. John Blackburn August 21st, 2008 at 11:57 am

    Thanks, instig8r. Period moved inside quotation marks. :-)

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