On 24 Jun 2008, at 09:29, Michael Van Canneyt wrote:
But for a company that has 'Think different' as a motto the insistence on adherence to the rules is ironic :-)
Actually, it makes perfect sense since it's apparently so different from what you are used to that you consider it a completely outlandish concept.
Secondly, all things you mention apply to advanced users only,
Compared to your customers, most Mac users probably are "advanced". Most certainly not because they are smarter or better, but because the consistency makes it easier to become advanced (learned skills carry over much more easily from one application to another). Even my mother is probably "advanced" in this way, even though she also started out with simply memorising which icons to click in which order (she really is everything but a computer person).
and I dare say to developers only: I invite you to visit ALL our customers.
I invite you to ask on any number of "regular joe" Mac sites, forums or mailing lists how important the people there think that it is for a program to adhere to the standard user interface conventions (except for games, where total immersion into the game world is often more important, and simple widgets where you only have a text field and a button or so).
That said: if people are in front of your application five days out of seven from 9 to 5, it is indeed probably less important to be consistent with anything else. The learning curve may be fairly steep, but that doesn't matter since companies always provide training. Users may notice the different interface in the beginning but since they're so often in front of it, it will soon enough blend into the background. They'll also learn the layout and the automatisms required to operate the application after a while (no matter how contrived the interface may be: we even have administrative people at our university who have learned to be somewhat efficient with our SAP implementation, which is universally recognised by everyone here as a the most horrible user interface they have ever used).
This is however quite different from an application which isn't purchased by some PHB, but by a home user or independent professional (and traditionally that market has been much bigger than the corporate one in the Mac world). In that market, blending in and making your interface as little distinctive as possible is vital to be able to close the sale in most cases (at least in the Mac market).
Even in the corporate world actually paying attention to user interface consistencies could probably help the users a lot, but there it's seldom the users who can decide on what to use. And once they do get used to your particular interface, it's probably even a competitive advantage to have a lot of proprietary concepts since switching to a different application would require significant retraining.
Jonas _______________________________________________ fpc-pascal maillist - fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal
