What I’d Like to See in Tiger: Part 3, A Consistent User Interface
Maybe it’s because I’m a graphic designer by training but I like things to be visually consistent.
One of the beautiful things about the original Mac operating system was its visual simplicity and consistency. A window in Macpaint had a similar look and feel (such a funny expression, look and feel!) to a window in the finder.
This consistency was, well, consistent throughout the entire classic operating system. OS X appears to have thrown all that out the window. Now we have some Apple applications with a metallic look and some without. Why does iPhoto get the metallic look and Mail doesn’t? Or, even more egregious, within the finder itself some windows are metallic and some aren’t. I’d like to see the dartboard at Apple where they figure this stuff out. Actually, I wouldn’t.
Consistency in a user interface is a good thing. At a certain point the UI should fade into the background. The early innovators on the Macintosh knew this, Windows copied it, and to see a somewhat scattered interface in OS X is disappointing to say the least. Yes, some of this visual vertigo has to do with the superfluous (albeit beautiful) over-the-top eye-candy in OS X. But a lot of it has to so with interface differences where they are not needed.
Let’s hope Tiger cleans up its act and bring the Mac back to the refined interface it was famous for.
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It sounds - from Jeff’s description of what we can expect from Apple - that the ‘Golden Age’ of Mac human interface design is over. It seems like an irony to me that the ‘Mac’ name which set the ground rules for an intuitive, flexible, and metaphorical GUI - and originally promoted this (with great success) by focusing on the overly complicated and dictatorial routines of its predecessors, are now themselves in danger of moving towards a position of “you do things OUR way or not at all”... all blurred over with lashings and lashings of eye-candy.
I could see this coming with the advent of the Dock… for the first time Apple had bullied its way into encroaching on my sacrosanct Desktop.
Yes, I work FAST (or used to), perhaps users here like to cruise along at their own speed, but - even working within applications - OSX is far far slower than OS 9. Something interesting caught my eye when watching the Steve Jobs Keynote speech in January where our great leader sat at his onstage Mac to demo various new Apps (GarageBand etc). At first it didn’t quite sink in… then I realised… as he navigated his way around OS X, Steve movements too revealed those subtle but familiar tell-tale signs of hesitancy, awkwardness, struggling to accurately pinpoint the cursor and - ultimately - trying to ‘beat the unresponsive OS’.
I’m not saying Apple shouldn’t implement new technology. I’m saying there is a BETTER way of doing so. It’s sometimes a pity that Mac enthusiasts don’t feel confident enough in the Company to feel able to criticise it.
Yes, with Tiger, thankfully the golden age of OS 9 will be over, an age when the user had to manually and tediously craft step by step a hierarchical folder structure on his own. Under Tiger the user can still OPT to do this, but it will then be precisely that—an option (as it should be) and not the ONLY way to organize files. Under Tiger we users who recognize the power and flexibility of a file system based on relational database concepts will be able to make full use of this—and in the process not only save a lot of time but also gain great searching and organizing abilities over their documents.
There are some—and apparently the user “winterbear” is one—who feel that OS 9 is God when it comes to interfaces, and no number of inconsistencies I point out (such as the ejection of disk volumes by dragging them to the trash) will make any difference. When I cite the egregious Chooser as an example of an anti-intuitive interface for Printer management, this falls on deaf ears. Instead, to people like this, OS 9 walks on water.
But OS 9 is actually a very inflexible interface which reduces options for the user rather than increases them. Oh sure, if you want the option of playing around with “inits” at boot time, and to worry about their loading sequence and conflicts and such, OS 9 is the operating system for you. Or if you want the flexibility to delete crucial system extensions, again, OS 9 is the one for you. But if you want command over your desktop windows, OS X actually offers more.
Apple does have a way to go yet. The user should be able to grab a window and move it by ANY border or side. The user should be able to expand or contract the window by grabbing any border or side—at least by pressing a modifier key. In this respect, X11 and Windows XP is superior. The user should have the option for the sidebar to be recursive and hierarchical—via a preference setting. And the user should have more “click through” options in which windows not in the foreground will come into focus instantly upon a mouse-click (instead of requiring two clicks as is now often the case).
You guys are simply too hard on OS X. It is a very young operating system. And with each major revision it shows improvement and refinements. To me the best UI is one which does not impose a “decree from Moscow” vision upon users but which instead gives the users tools and options so he can work in the way that best suits him. This means offering menus, taskbars, toolbars, floating palettes, and so on. It means offering a robust command line interface as well as a GUI.
There are times I navigate by means of the Dock. Other times I use menus. Other times I use Finder windows and click my way to bliss. Other times I use the comand line. Each of these things has its strengths and weaknesses depending on the end in view. To argue over which is better is absurd; they EACH have a place—and I find that Apple has done a superb job of providing all these things without creating the impression of screen clutter and “busy-ness.”
One of Apple’s strength is a minimalist or elegant aesthetic even as it also provides functionality. Windows XP provides functionality but it gets in your way in the process. OS X, in contrast, gets OUT of your way.
By contrast with OS X, I find that OS 9’s interface is clunky and confusing. I would not want people having to snoop around in a system folder just to know what fonts are installed. I would want to protect the user from that. The system’s integrity should be protected. If the user wants to muck around with it, then he is at liberty to do so by means of the OS X root account. But Apple does not make this easy nor should it do so.
My parents are in their 70s and I don’t want them to inadvertently delete or corrupt essential system files. I can guarantee you they would not regard it as a UI feature if the OS permitted them to do that. They don’t even know where the system files are located because all they see and inhabit are their own home folders where they have access to all the files they will ever need.
And there is my definition of a good GUI.
Jeff - I�m speaking here simply as a Mac user. All I know is that I was very fast navigating my way around OS 9 and am considerably slower doing the same in OS X. I may be wrong, but I feel sure I noticed the same symptoms that I experience when watching Steve Jobs also struggling with the OS X interface. To me, that is a problem and I�m trying to work out what it is about OS X which causes this. There�s little point in you submitting reams on X11, relational database concepts, �recursive and hierarchical sidebars� etc etc if a system once worked smoothly, quickly and well and its replacement no longer does.
The simple truth is that I - along with millions of other Mac users over the space of two decades - NEVER had any problems finding files, always knew exactly where to place fonts, never tampered in the system folder, and took the grown-up responsibility - you now feel we should be denied - of taking care of organising our desktop environments in ways which were familiar, through classical real-world subject/object associations, and worked best for us.
Your manifesto is trying to sell sleek �play-it-all-for-you� Bontempi Organs to expert pianists. People who knew their instrument, valued its limitations, fully understood and loved the rational behind it�s neutral �clunky� appearance, took the trouble to practice their routines, and ended up as masters of their own instruments.
By all means, let�s bring on the new tech and integrate it into that which already works. But PLEASE don�t try to teach your granny how to such eggs.
Hahaha sopes! You are too funny! Albeit completely FOS! Millions of Mac users NEVER had a problem? Hahaha! It’s impossible for them to have NOT tampered with the System Folder and also managed their fonts, especially pre-OS8-something, when fonts used to be stored not only in the System Folder, but in the System suitcase as well! What a joke! Are you actually saying that Jeff is suggesting that OSX users be denied something? That somehow OSX isn’t for grown-ups? Grow Up! What specifically is it that you want to do with your OSX Desktop that you can’t? Perhaps some of the children reading this thread can help you out.
Slopes, when you say, “Your manifesto is trying to sell sleek �play-it-all-for-you� Bontempi Organs to expert pianists,” I cannot but shake my head. It’s not that I don’t understand your point—I do. It’s just that true “expert pianists” would have been using UNIX all along, for as I have said, it gives MUCH more power to the INFORMED user than OS 9 could ever dream about.
Now does this extreme control come at a price? Yes—absolutely. If you want to control the internals of your system, there is a steep learning curve. But such is the nature of computers—if you want to be a USER only, then you can easily do so under OS X My 77-year-old father has no trouble finding his files either, and he first cut his teeth on OS 8 and then 9—and later chose to make the adjustment to OS X when I assured him it was much more stable and powerful (which it is). To him, he has just as much control as he ever had. He can create folders, name them (much longer names than he ever could under OS 9), he can place them wherever he wants in his home folder or on his desktop, and he can create any number of sub-folders and use whatever folder hierarchy he likes.
I think my dad would be very unimpressed and downright bewildered by your “lack of control” argument about OS X. Now can you place a document in the System folder of OS X? Well, yes, you COULD if you knew what you were doing—but an ordinary user with an ordinary user account cannot do this. So you’ve “got me” on that one. But WHY would anyone WANT to do that in the first place?
Please tell me what you can do under OS 9 that you cannot do under OS X that pertains to the following:
1. Creating folders.
2. Naming folders.
3. Locating document folders in the non-system place of your choice.
4. Creating files.
5. Naming files.
6. Locating files in any folder you have created.
7. Navigating from folder to folder with the mouse.
8. Opening as many windows as you like.
My parents do all of these things just fine under OS X and have not once told me they found it more constraining than under OS 9.
So this isn’t about my preaching the gospel. I have empirical (if anecdotal) evidence that OS X does not cause users any difficulty to speak of and in fact that it makes life easier for them on balance because of its increased stability, pre-emptive multitasking, file searching capability, etc.
In fact, my parents MUCH prefer the fact that in OS X when you move a window around the contents move right along with it, (rather than a bare rectangle as in OS 9. They like the fact that a window’s contents dynamically scrolls as they move the scroll tab up and down the scroll bar. They like the fact that there is a search text box embedded in every window for handy searching.
I could just go on and on with this.
Again, I don’t contend OS X has no room for improvement. But you remind me of my first experience with database software. I was concerned about the order in which I entered the records. I thought this mattered because I was used to manually locating folders under OS 6. It took me a while to let go of this idea that it mattered. It took me a while to learn to let the database do the work for me of locating records.
And so it will be with Tiger. Do you want a list of PDF files you have on disk which contain song lyrics. Done! Instantly in a single “Smart folder” which comes together immediately upon your request. Now do you truly prefer to put all these PDF’s together in a static folder manually? Really? Do you consider this an advantage?
Would you like to call up all your photos of your dog taken after last September? Done—instantly in a virtual smart folder under Tiger. Folders can appear and disappear as you need them. No longer do you have to have all these static pre-defined things lying around—unless you WANT to do so. OS X doesn’t DENY you the option of creating folders and stashing files in them. It just gives you so much more power and flexibility than that, even as you see it as LESS flexibility. Oh well…
slopes: While your own efficiency/productivity with OS 9 is apparently superior to your OS X experience some of us might consider pre-X a “Bontempi organ” version of Mac OS.
. . .
Something I think would make the various “smart” groups (playlists, albums, folders, mailboxes, et.al.) more powerful is a convenient way to exclude specific, irrelevant items from them. For example, if it were possible to toggle the visibility of certain items it would be easier to rely less on traditional methods of grouping (e.g. folder hierarchies) to keep them organized.
Instead of tediously shuffling data between different groups I’d rather create temporary “virtual” collections relevant to the particular task I’m focusing on. More generally I can imagine my home directory as a large iTunes/iPhoto-like library containing arbitrary playlist/album-like [smart] groups, easily added and removed, with minimal concern for the underlying physical location and organization of the data. A wide variety of metadata can be used to categorize items and link them with each other. Etc.
Conventional hierarchical file/folder organization doesn’t scale well in an increasingly non-hierarchical computing world. Nowadays it’s more important to have tools and skills to effectively search for information irregardless of how and where it’s located. And I’m convinced the desktop metaphor is dying (or at least becoming more irrelevant); that my wife didn’t know what the Mac “desktop” was is recent further evidence.
To sjk: Very well said. Succinct and to the point.
To Winterbear,
You don�t say if you were involved in the Human Interface Team at Apple - it sounds, from your knowledge, that you might have been. But I�d like any one of those experts to know that their many hours of hard work did not go unappreciated. OS 9 had a superb, refined, highly tuned and intuitive GUI which �drove� like a Ferrari. I�ve been on its replacement for nine months now (by far enough time to internalise its routines) and I can say, in comparison, it handles like the local bread-delivery-truck (albeit a heavily decorated one).
I have to return to my old G3 every once in a while to use certain software/hardware configurations. Each time I do I am reminded - with a mixture of pleasure and pain - of what a beautifully responsive and well-crafted tool the OS 9 GUI was. �Pleasure� at its ease of use and the dawning realisation that �it�s not ME after all - its the bloody OS X GUI� and �Pain� at knowing I will have to return to the daily frustrations of coping with something inferior.
As a graphic designer I am dedicated to reaching down to the core values of any process and building upon these values (through appropriate and concise symbolism and metaphor) as an essential, solid, foundation. So I find it ironic, after the years Apple dedicated to revolutionising the PC industry around its classic Human Interface metaphor, that the company is now complicit in encouraging a �user� evaluation and comparison of its two GUI�s as: Colourful baubles and dancing party tricks = GOOD, Neutral Grey = BAD.
Still, the HUT (or HIT?) team will surely take heart from recent research which revealed that a staggering 50% of the millions of Mac-owners are STILL happily using OX 9 as their chosen GUI - FIVE YEARS after OS X has been available to them! This is clearly such a worry to Apple that its stated primary reason for introducing the cheap MacMini is to encourage its own user-base to �switch�.
Thanks, Jeff. It’s surprising to get acknowledgment for being succinct. More often I’m known for rambling thought streams that lose the reader’s attention (I suspect) long before I’ve finished them, especially for topics I’m passionate about (like this one). Brevity often isn’t my ally and based on some of your postings I suspect not one of yours either.
Indeed—I’m not one to be brief, and this is what struck me about your post; you made your point in a concise way with an economy of words, thereby illustrating the concept that less is more (at times).
Of course, some ideas require a lot of verbiage to flesh out. And in that event one cannot be brief even as one could still use an economy of words and not be wasteful in one’s prose.
Alas, I tend to be both long AND wasteful, but what the hell, right? This is a technical forum and not the place for literary masterpieces.
I think much of the debate about “consistency” started with a genuine issue about the “application/document/window” distinction. The dock has been criticized for storing representations of these conceptually disparate items. I find it convenient, but confused—purely an answer to the Windows taskbar. But it one respect it is even more confused: why don’t all windows, other than the topmost one, appear on the Dock? I understand minimization and its very clever implementation—it’s for documents and tools (i.e. applications) that you are not finished with but not using right now—documents/tools “shoved to the side of your desk”. I understand having tools (i.e. applications) that will be used on multiple documents always available (i.e. in the dock). But why shouldn’t I have a persistent “map” of everything on my desk—i.e. an icon for every open window always in the dock. I know there is Expose, which is brilliant, but using it interrupts what you are doing and underlines this defect. I think the Windows taskbar is far from perfect, and both the XP and 2000 implementations have defects, but they’re onto the right idea (as much as I hate to say it).
The other inconsistency that totally baffles me is the location of the various “Recent Items”. Recent Applications and Recent Documents are stored in the Apple Menu. As far as I can tell, this is for two reasons. One, they are supposed to be accessible system-wide, as the Apple Menu is. Two, they didn’t seem to fit neatly into the dock. But why pick a perpetually visible iconic representation of applications and minimized windows (and folders!) in the dock, then bury their recently used counterparts in text menu on the other side of the screen? When looking at other applications, the situation becomes even more confused. Many applications now list their recently used documents in the “File” menu because that is where you would otherwise find the “Open” command. Web browsers list their recently used documents in a separate “History” menu, which happens to be next to the menu of permanent oft-used items (like the dock applications/documents/folders), “Bookmarks”. The Finder, for some inane reason, lists “Recent Folders” in a submenu under “Go To…”. If the Dock is so intuitive, should it not also be able to represent, in the same format, past items? (perhaps with transparency, or upon pressing a modifier key, etc.)
On an issue totally unrelated to the visual aspects of the design, I agree with the posters that OSX is better at doing 99% of things better than OS9, including networking and multi-user activities. But to suggest that these multi-user activities and the folder organization is more intuitive is crazy. I want to put my folders where I like them, not where an installer expects to find them. I want to share folders from where I want to store them. I don’t want to have to organize my files into particular folders to ensure that particular people get access. The program Sharepoints underlines this deficiency in the OS, but still isn’t simple enough for my parents. The need for programs like Launchbar and the new Tiger searching illustrate how silly folder navigability has become. This is the most egregious example of administrator/programmer-centric rather than user-centric design, and I know it’s inherited from BSD. It may conform to some metaphor of a person having a key to the office and key to particular filing cabinets, in which you must file particular things, but that is not a metaphor we should be bound by. How about a metaphor where I can put on my “John Doe” goggles to see which of my things John Doe can see and use, or my “World” goggles to see which of my things everyone can see, but when I take them off, everything is just where I wanted to keep it. I know if I have administrative privileges I can access their account, but that is not what I am talking about. Along the same lines, why is there no place where I can see *everything* I am sharing? The “Sharing” control panel displays whether you *allow* a particular type of sharing (printer, files, etc.), but not what is being shared (i.e. specific printers, etc.), and is incomplete (i.e. excluding iTunes songs, etc.). Certain applications like Rendezvous browser give you a more comprehensive list, but only for a certain technical protocol. I want to “see” what others can “see” without examining the settings in a dozen applications. I thought OS9’s modification of file icons to represent that they were shared was clever, but is clearly not enough in the networking age.
Thoughtful observations, miles1. I agree with much of what you say, although maybe less “frustrated” by it.
Re: Paragraph #1. I achieve much of that persistent view of open windows with the Pager in CodeTek Virtual Desktop, if that’s the sort of thing you mean.
Re: Paragraph #2. I’m not sure how to improve the recent “whatever” history. I’ve thought about a kind of global “activity history” that could track certain “events” for future reference. A crude example would be something like an extended A9.com history, with info similar Hallon‘s Organiser window (e.g. Created field). That history could be filtered/sorted and presented in different ways: a plain linear view, by app type, doc type, url, folder, etc. Apps could be relaunched, docs reopened, etc. There needs to be a way to keep it task-relevant without becoming cluttered, e.g. I don’t need to see every Safari History item most of the time. There’s much more to this than I can write here but that’s the general idea.
Re: Paragraph #3. Hmm, how to organize/navigate/view/share data… grand topic, and you move pretty quickly from organizing (“I want to put folders where I like them”) to sharing (“why is there no place where I can see *everything* I am sharing?”).
Briefly, maybe imagine creating “super-smart folders” which could behave in ways that would satisfy a wider diversity of Mac users, with a “Finder” that we might more generally agree doesn’t suck? 
Still ... it seems to me the traditional desktop/file/folder UI is at a transformational impasse that’s reflected in the mediocre state of the current OS X Finder which, for some users is a disaster, while for others it’s relatively insignificant. “Reverting” to the pre-X Finder isn’t the solution, yet throwing the baby out with the bathwater has it in a big fuss. I dunno, maybe what was once the centerpiece of desktop/file/folder computing on the Mac is preparing for an eventual new UI metaphor.