> I wish Microsoft would define a robust, standardised set of UI conventions again, based on usability rather than flashy stuff, and then at least stick to it themselves instead of inventing a whole new bunch of tricks for every new version of Office, IE, Visual Studio and so on.
This, to me, is one the biggest pluses for Macs at this point. Microsoft keeps trying to reinvent the GUI, but they don't get rid of the old stuff, even in their own systems.
I also wish Microsoft would adopt actual application bundles. 99% of applications should not actually need installers and uninstallers. Despite what Raymond Chen says, a simple folder is not the same thing.
Unfortunately the Delicious Generation (including some of its adherents inside Apple) threw out the HIG. And now we have the weird iOS-OS X hybrid that is Lion.
This is undoubtedly true (with the flagrant exception of iCal and Address Book), but some of us old-timey Mac users remember a glorious past full of matte gray and a spatial Finder…
Possibly the UI of iCal and Address Book might have the inconsistant UI, but they still have the exact same UX as every other OS X app, thanks to all (with the exception of iTunes?) being built in Cocoa so they all use the same text controls and menu items etc.
You can create a Cocoa app in XCode and just add a text field, and you will automatically get spell check, dictionary look-up and font controls. All your shortcuts will work exactly how you would expect them to (ctrl+a, I'm looking at you). You get a help menu with built in search of the menu bar (http://cl.ly/8yKI). All with no effort from the dev at all.
The only exception to this would be Adobe apps, but at least they have their own UI/UX that they seems to follow most of the time (but they actually hate Apple/OS X, so they probably just do it out of spite)
That's true about iCal and Address Book. I don't use either of those, so I'd forgotten what they'd done to them.
I'm not an "old-timey" Mac user by any stretch of the imagination, but I can't help wondering when Macs were "full of matte gray". Are you referring to pre-OSX days, because it seems that OSX is more gray now than ever before?
I am in fact. If I remember correctly (I may very well not!) Mac OS 8 or so (maybe 8.5) was the height of the let's-never-ever-deviate-from-the-HIG days.
This also included a glorious commitment to the desktop metaphor, when that phrase meant anything: you really could map your mental representation of virtual objects onto their real-life analogs and expect things to work remarkably like you expected.
Now, I don't know that a desktop metaphor is the right way to interact with a computer (I certainly avoid it like the plague), but it seems preferable, in my experience, to the hodge-podge of mixed metaphors that the modern desktop UI has become, in both Mac and Windows.
I'm reminded of the scene in The Big Lebowski when the protagonists encounter a group of nihilists: say what you will about the desktop metaphor, but at least it's an ethos.
You remember correctly; in the 8/8.5 days, Apple's HIG was considered a must-read for any application programmer, and deviating from it was guaranteed to get you lots of criticism. IIRC, about the only 'non-standard' common widget in applications was the floating windoid, which started out as a hackish WDEF.
As an (at the time) longtime Mac programmer and enthusiast, my disappointment in the OS X UI was one of the reasons that I walked away from Mac programming and never went back. In fact, OS X drove me to more seriously try out Linux and learn to appreciate Windows. Now, I tolerate OS X, but still find myself pining for good ol' 8.5.
This, to me, is one the biggest pluses for Macs at this point. Microsoft keeps trying to reinvent the GUI, but they don't get rid of the old stuff, even in their own systems.
I also wish Microsoft would adopt actual application bundles. 99% of applications should not actually need installers and uninstallers. Despite what Raymond Chen says, a simple folder is not the same thing.