Striped Background in OS X Revisited

[Kay C Lan]

On 6/26/07, Richard Gaskin <ambassador at fourthworld.com> wrote:
>
> and Apple
> moves the menu bar to the top of the window,


It's all a bad dream, make it go away...It's all a bad dream, make it go
away... it's all a bad dream...;-)

Richard, this is the 2nd time you've mentioned this in about as many many
weeks. If anyone from Apple HIG is reading this PLEASE ignore.

IMO I loathe the way WIN has a menu bar in every window. I first thought I
was going to loathe the OSX Dock until I learnt I could make it disappear. I
wont go into all the reasons but will mention just one - I hate wasted
screen. In fact I'd prefer Apple to do with the Menubar what it does with
the Dock, allow it to disappear - although for new computer users I
appreciate that the default setting would be to have it permanently visible
and in the one place, at the top of the screen.

Richard, you allude to the next great HI revolution, and to me, it would be
if an Application opens and presented you with a window (workspace) with
nothing more than a blank sheet and a fine boarder. No menu bar, no tool
bar, no scroll bars, nothing. All these extra's would appear either via
contextual menus or placing the mouse over hot spots.

I actually come pretty close to this by attaching a second monitor. On the
second monitor an OSX app has no menu bar and there's no Dock. I've learnt
which apps have good contextual menus and move these across to the 2nd
monitor and turn off all the tool bars and extra clutter. I just have
workspace, workspace and workspace. One of my favourite set ups is to have
Preview on the second monitor - and since it's been mentioned recently, with
the excellent MySQL user manual open for reference. Set to 'Continuous'
rather than Page View, just wide enough to make the horizontal scroll bar
disappear, the draw wide enough to type in searches and yes I'd prefer that
the vertical scroll bar not to be there and just let me scroll with a scroll
wheel. Generally I find this better than a real book, the only downside, not
being able to hilight or write comments in the margin ;-)

Interestingly one of the only apps that behaves badly on a second monitor is
Rev. For some reason it thinks a menu bar exists at the top of the screen so
wont allow you to move your Rev window to the very top of the screen:-(

I just felt I couldn't leave it appear as there was no opposition to a move
for OSX to be more Win like :-)