Universal GUI (was Re: HIG...)

[curry]

Richard Gaskin wrote:

>Agreed on all points.  But I guess here we get to the real question:  How do
>we get Apple back to being a research-based (as opposed to a
>Steve's-Whim-based) company?
>
>The pre-NeXT Apple understood the difference between usability engineering
>and graphic design.  And they had twice the marketshare.

Exactly!

One article you referred mentioned the round mouse, which I had. As 
much controversy as it caused, I noticed that many people never 
really blamed Apple about things like this.

Of course, OS changes were even more important, and when OSX came 
out, most Mac media went out of their way to find things to hype, and 
studiously avoided placing too much criticism on the obvious problems.

I don't settle into hypocritical behavior without a bit of struggle. 
I spent a while after I got OSX searching for a hack to change the 
locations of the Window title bar buttons, until one of the theme 
site people told me that it wouldn't work on Cocoa apps anyway 
because the position is hard-coded! (Double no-no: doing it wrong and 
making sure it can't be fixed.)

Open and Save dialogs are a mess. (At least on 10.1, has it been 
improved?) There are also a hundred little clashing things here and 
there throughout the system.

I still prefer Mac to Windows, but it's become relative in every 
aspect--consistency, productivity, appearance, enjoyment, ethics.

Curry