On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 3:06 PM, Bill Royds <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Forms layout is not part of the "standard user experience" in general, > although forms look and feel is.
Wrong. Otherwise the Apple HIG, the Windows interface guidelines, the Gnome HIG, etc. all would lack sections on the positioning and spacing of controls. The Apple HIG in particular is the odd one out because it advocates center-aligning controls inside of windows. > Are you saying that all Carbon applications > are not Mac compatible since there is no conversion of Carbon nibs to Cocoa? You're being a bit deceptive with "Mac compatible." I think you meant that in the sense of "compatible with the expectations of a typical Mac user." Applications written for OS 9 and ported straight to OS X were horrible violators of the Aqua look and feel, so in one sense, yes, they were incompatible with the environment. > Software is also worse when the developer has to re-invent the wheel for > each version. Not necessarily worse. More expensive, yes. Perhaps to the point of requiring additional team members, some of whom might not even be programmers. But what's worth doing is worth doing right; those people whose jobs have strange titles like "analyst" and "vice president" have to make decisions about whether it's worth the extra expense to invest in a new platform. To wit Gregory makes a very good point; the cost of recreating the user interface elements according to the expectations of the platform's user is negligible compared to the loss in perceived value of an application that looks, feels, and smells like it was machine-translated. The most valuable part of almost any application from the author's perspective is its business logic; the guts of the app that fulfill the requirements. However, the user doesn't see any of that; the user quite literally only sees the interface. I believe that investing the additional money upfront in proper development for the Mac, rather than treating it as a second-class citizen, will pay for itself in perceived value and user satisfaction. Before you consider me to be some dogmatic evangelist, I'm well aware that there exist circumstances in which my argument is foolish. Internal apps, for example, don't benefit nearly as much from polish as shrinkwrap apps. This is especially true for scientific apps -- I've seen some horribe offenses against usability on Windows, Mac, and Linux in math and engineering labs, but the software's utility lies in such a niche, and interaction with the software is so minimal, that investing in the user interface at the expense of the software's core functionality would be unthinkable. But that argument is not universal; the Adobe, Macromedia, and MS Office suites were for years decried as examples of products whose designers cared not about the users. The spin controls on the Adobe dialogs were awful, Office (and Excel 2004 especially) looked like it was still designed for typefaces half the size of the very readable 13pt Lucida Grande default, and Macromedia changed its interface so many times that nobody knew if a control still behaved the same way from version to version. And let's all remember the fun of Java AWT UIs, and the abomination that is its replacement Swing! I suppose the question I should be asking you is, who is your audience? What does your product do? Why do you want to auto-generate your user interface in a serialized object graph form from a textual template? That certainly wouldn't be my first choice. If I were the president of an American auto manufacturer and decided that I wanted to start selling cars in the UK, my first instinct wouldn't be to design a mirror-image of one of my cars and fix what broke. It would be to design a car from the ground up for my target market that had the same soul as my original model, taking into consideration the tastes of my audience in the process. --Kyle Sluder _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
