Tab Buttons Mac vs. Win

Stephen Barncard stephen at barncard.com
Sat Jul 18 03:12:52 EDT 2020


I had become aware of and long appreciated Tog, even in 1983 when I had a
job at Datamost, and the first mac on my desktop. The single floppy and the
horrible printer got in the way and I didn't again consider the machine for
my hardware control development work over the Apple ][ until 1987 when I
got A&M Studios connected to the developer program (thanks to fellow
Datamost employee Craig Keithley).  It was in that first box that the Mac
SE (with a 20mb hard drive) that I went looking for the included "card".
What card? Where is it?
Oh, it's *Hypercard*!

 It changed my life of course and that of A&M Studios too.
After that I could fully understand and utilize Tog's vision and its Xerox
roots embedded in this wonderful tool as I built a dedicated control system
for A&M tape copy <http://amstudios.net/htdoc/Pages/welcome_PP.html>.

I think Tognazzini was written about in that first Mac User issue that
featured members of the original design team.  Keithley was a friend of
Steve Jobs and Woz in the Apple ][ garage days, could have been employee #4
but he was very young and he and his parents moved to LA.  He was
"slightly" unhappy about that. He eventually got a job at 1 Infinite Loop.
I'm sure Mike Markkula (Johnny Appleseed) knew of him too.

If in 1975 I hadn't gotten pissed off at the Grateful Dead and taken off to
LA, I very likely would have ended up at that Homebrew Computer Club
because I was seeking information about these microprocessor thingies.
In life, there are many forks in the road.
Brushes with greatness. I am truly fortunate.

sqb
--
Stephen Barncard - Sebastopol Ca. USA -
mixstream.org


On Fri, Jul 17, 2020 at 10:50 PM Richard Gaskin via use-livecode <
use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:

> Bob Sneidar wrote:
>
>  > I would LOVE to find out how Livecode for Mac draws those beautiful
>  > tab buttons so I can duplicate it on Windows, because DAYAM are the
>  > Windows ones ugly!
>
> Around the turn of the century I wrote to Bruce Tognazzini, back when he
> was still taking email questions.
>
> I asked him about the proper placement of confirmation and dismissal
> buttons (often "OK" and "Cancel") in cross-platform apps.  I was
> familiar with his early research on how the Mac layout (confirmation on
> the right) matched eye tracking studies on scanning order, and thus was
> a better solution.  On Windows reading order is used (confirmation on
> the left), which might seem better but not in UIs; dialog boxes just
> aren't read as much as skimmed, so rather than taking in each line
> individually as we do when we read, most folks more or less just scan
> from upper-left to lower-right, where on Mac the action button awaits.
>
> So I asked Tog:
>
> "Given that the Mac way is borne out by research, wouldn't it be better
> to use to Mac way in my Windows apps as well?"
>
> He was kind enough in his reply, acknowledging that at least my heart
> was in the right place with wanting to "do the right thing" by the user.
> But he was also blunt: I had missed something even more important than
> research.  I had overlooked the significance of user habits.
>
> When a user spends years with an OS design, they build up a cognitive
> and muscle memory, so strong that even when research shows an advantage
> to a different means, the consistency winds up outweighing it.
>
> In short, he suggested I do Windows things on Windows, and leave Mac
> things on Mac.
>
> Who am I to argue with Tog?
>
> --
>   Richard Gaskin
>   Fourth World Systems
>   Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
>   ____________________________________________________________________
>   Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com
>
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