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Article:
  Creating Easy-to-Deploy Unix Applications for OS X
Subject:   From deployment engineering to GUI design...
Date:   2003-10-25 16:17:26
From:   anonymous2
A nice article! If software (be it Unix or other) is easy to install (and easy to remove...) people will have less hesitation to try it out in the first place.


However, being a Mac Application takes more than easy installation. Take a look at your user interface for instance. In a single window you manage to do _everyting_ wrong ;-), making it clear to most Mac users that 'something is different' with your software.
I guess that's not what you want.


Some suggested improvements:


* the window title should be more discriptive.
* the fontsize of the message is too small.
* you probably should display a warning icon, or your apps icon.
* the buttons are in the wrong order, and should be aligned to the _right_ edge.


Apple provides Human Interface Guidelines that go into this kind of stuff.


Otherwise your article makes perfect sense and I wish every developer coming from (presumably) Linux would take your words to heart.


Patrick Machielse
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  • From deployment engineering to GUI design...
    2003-10-26 04:39:24  roseman [Reply | View]

    Hi Patrick, thanks for your comments and appreciate the suggestions!

    Having been developing Mac software since 1989 I'm somewhat familiar with the HIG. ;-) Were this coming up as a dialog in the middle of using the program, I'd certainly agree with all your improvements, but instead its the sole window launched at start, and meant to hang around fairly low-key. That it's different from dialog windows is therefore good (I know everytime I see a dialog my first instinct is to do what I can to deal with it and move on, which is exactly what we don't want to see happen here).

    Our users have been actually quite happy with that interface and the way it works for them... never gotten comments about it being 'different'. I think that's the difference when you use it in context versus just see a screenshot in the middle of an article!

    Mark