The Cafes » User Interface

For the last couple of months I’ve been working on Windows as my main desktop during the workday (not my personal choice, but I can live with it.), and that’s caused me to notice a few things I haven’t noticed before, especially in contrast to the Mac style of managing windows. I’ve task switched between Mac and Windows before–for several years in the late 90s I did all my development and book writing on Windows and all my e-mail and Internet on the Mac–but this is the first time I’ve had the chance to compare the two environments with multiple monitors, and that’s made some difference in my take on matters. Practices that work well on a single monitor system don’t work as well on multimonitor system and vice versa. After playing with this for a while, I’m starting to think that the Windows approach works better for multiple, small monitors and the Mac approach works better for a single, widescreen monitor.

To summarize, here are the critical differences between the two platforms. These are worth keeping in mind when you’re designing a cross-platform application such as Firefox or Limewire, or any web site.
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There’s a common but mistaken belief that proper user interface design requires lots of pictures and icons. In fact, it doesn’t. Many concepts and actions can be fully and best conveyed by text. While standard icons for directories and disks and the like can be helpful, custom icons for an application’s unique actions rarely are. The fact is, most icons are not self-explanatory; and if they’re not common enough to be standardized, they’re not common enough to be learned easily.

Nonetheless, many applications persist in creating pointless, incomprehensible toolbars. Icon design is hard. It is not something that just any art school graduate with mad Photoshop skills can accomplish. Icon design is about conveying an idea with pictures. not merely making a 32×32 bitmap look pretty. It’s hard enough coming up with a good icon for basic actions like cut and paste. Now try imagining one for “Analyze Module Dependencies” or “View Breakpoints”. There’s a reason Susan Kare gets the big bucks.

Lately, this trend seems to have seeped into menus, where text used to rule supreme. For instance, look at this File menu from IntelliJ IDEA 6.0:

Not only do the icons add nothing to the menu items. They actually make the menu harder to scan and read because the items are no longer left aligned.
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IBM’s Bill Higgins takes a very unusual way of explaining why Mac apps should look like Mac apps and Windows apps should look like Windows apps. It also explains why desktop Java failed.

I’m not sure his analogy really holds, but I’m not sure it doesn’t. His conclusions are correct, even if his reasoning and/or evidence turns out to be faulty.

He makes a good argument that SWT is the right way to design a cross-platform GUI, and Swing is the wrong way. The problem here is that empirically Swing delivers more native cross-platform apps than SWT does. When theory clashes with experience, either the theory is wrong or there are factors not accounted for in the theory. I suspect the latter here.

While Mac programs usually have very consistent user interfaces, and most programmers religiously adhere to Apple’s human interface guidelines, there is one persistent glitch that continues to annoy us: the behavior of the Home and End keys. On a Mac, these keys should always, always, always move the cursor to the beginning and end of the document respectively.
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Why was VRML an also-ran in the flood of new technologies introduced in the 1990s? It wasn’t fundamentally broken or a bad idea. It wasn’t worse than other technologies of the day like Java 1.0 and Shockwave. It certainly didn’t suffer from a lack of hype, investment, or development resources compared to the winners. VRML fail for one reason and one reason only: it didn’t run on the Mac; and OpenOffice is failing now for the same reason.
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