Yesterday I opened several documents within Adobe Photoshop CS4 and was confronted with this dialog:

What the…what was this telling me? I hadn’t even known that Photoshop uses OpenGL backing for its document window (although that’s nice) and certainly hadn’t told it to do so. Why tell me about this horribly technical implementation detail?

The dialog didn’t tell me, but should have, that OpenGL makes things fast, and that any additional windows I opened would be slower. Instead, my workflow was brought to a complete halt while I parsed the terms “OpenGL”, “document windows” (if I open a second window for the same document, does that count?), “screen resolution”, “RAM”, and “graphics card”.

Imagine instead if the dialog had displayed a primary and secondary message:

You’ve already opened the maximum number of accelerated windows. Additional windows will be unaccelerated.

Photoshop accelerates windows when permitted by your graphics card. (and so on)

Even better, don’t bother me at all with a modal dialog, which is rude and unhelpful. So what if additional windows won’t be OpenGL-backed? Do you really think I won’t open another window? Worse, the one-time-only alert is incomplete because, once I’ve opened additional windows, how am I to know which are OpenGL-backed and which aren’t?

A more graceful solution would be to mark the slower windows with a badge or equivalent affordance which when clicked would explain the situation.

And that OK button just looks sad.

Thursday, October 8th, 2009, 10:32 am    Both comments and pings are currently closed.