That metaphorical consistency is very important for building a good UI, but products these days have gotten so complex that most of them lose it.Ģ. On early Mac versions, the Finder "was" your files, it wasn't just "a browser for" your files. It preserves the metaphor of your desktop being a place where you can directly manipulate your files and folders. (To be fair, the one company that's tried the "great, let's make a great product, kill off the competition, and then hold it there and reassign all the people" was Microsoft with IE6, and that worked fine up until Firefox and Chrome came around and then completely screwed them over.)ġ. It's like up till then you have room to improve, and then suddenly you've hit the pinnacle of product design in your category, but rather than hold it there, you have to make random changes so your employees have something to do and don't quit. There seems to be this phenomenom where good products seems to get better right up until they get mainstream adoption, and then they steadily get worse. It seemed to hit the sweet spot where you could do just about everything you needed to easily (it had collapsible tree views, folders, computed folder sizes, drag & drop, copy & paste, labels, etc.), but it didn't try to hide things from you or restrict what you could do, it didn't get too fancy and guess at your common tasks, it actually showed your filesystem instead of Apple's prescribed guess at what your filesystem should do, and it was still simple enough that you could wrap your head around exactly how it worked. When it comes to look and feel, "It's better to look good than to feel good!" The frustration is that unlike them, Apple could do so much better, but ever since the candy-colored iMacs, they've decided that Fernando (Billy Crystal's old SNL character) was right. And yet the rest of the industry is so fragmented that they don't do any better in terms of usability. Now, it's all about the style, about how the edges look in fashion magazines. Can't you work on this, Apple? "Thinner!"Īpple used to emphasize software quality and usability. Or, the apps get worse, not better, over time, and you always have to ask yourself whether each free OS upgrade is worth the risk of unreliable WiFi. Don't you realize how critically important that is?" Or a yearning for more battery life, or even just a swappable battery? "The bottom of our laptop looks better than the top of theirs!" Or, why is the text on my iPhone suddenly so low contrast and hard to read? "Surely you agree that having a fresh look matters more than readability! Look, the icons are flat. Surely you agree that the appearance of a thin edge is more important than usability of Finder or connectors." I mean this more metaphorically than literally, but I'm so tired of complaints about the ridiculously primitive Finder being met with, "the edge of the iMac now appears even thinner, now that we've repositioned formerly convenient connectors and such into a bulge behind the screen. Because you can't really tell how well software is working when looking at the device edge-on, and that's apparently the way Apple looks at them most of the time.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |