[prev] [thread] [next] [lurker] [Date index for 2004/01/03]
> >This is one of the two things I think they really screwed up on OS X. They > >should have just Carbonised the existing Finder and LEFT IT ALONE, and then > >started over with the OpenStep file browser as the, and let you pick which > >one gets used when a program opens a file dialog. > John Siracusa has been saying something like this for a long time, as > well as (sagely) pointing out that the 10.3 Finder isn't 'all new', > it's just the 10.2 one with some extra crap shat all over it. Well, he wants to redesign it from scratch. I'm a lot less enthusiastic about that. > What's wrong with click and hold? I have two answers to this. First: I don't care for timing-dependent interfaces. Click-and-hold, double-click, tap-and-hold on the Pocket PC, mouse acceleration, they bother me. I don't think we'll ever get rid of doubleclick (on the original Xerox UI, the middle mouse button was the action button and did what doubleclick does, but Apple torpedoed any chance of going back to that), but the rest can be avoided. Second: OK, make it tap-and-hold. The point is not the mechanism used to bring up the context menu, but that the context menu be the *primary* meta-click mechanism, with all the rest as optional accelerators (the way combos like Cmd-Q or Cmd-A are for Quit and Select All). The point, again, is that the UI should have a couple of simple mechanisms that always work reliably and consistently, rather than a lot of special cases that are different for every application. That is, after all, why I'm using a Mac instead of my FreeBSD box for my main desktop... because it's consistent. Windows, and this is scary but true, Windows actually does this part of the user interface much better than the Mac.There's stuff above here
Generated at 14:02 on 01 Jul 2004 by mariachi 0.52