Article:		Creating Easy-to-Deploy Unix Applications for OS X
Subject:		From deployment engineering to GUI design...
Date:		2003-10-26 04:39:24
From:		roseman
Response to: From deployment engineering to GUI design...
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

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• From deployment engineering to GUI design...
  2003-10-26 15:00:49  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  Mark,
  
  I have a theory why you never get complaints; your customers are all Unix users too ;-) But seriously, if this panel is the only interface of your program (i.e. no menu bar) you could leave the icon out, and the title would even be o.k (but not great...). But the font size is really too small, and the alignment of the buttons is a clear give-away.
  
  What if you would combine the start and stop buttons into one button with alternating title, like in the 'sharing' panel of system preferences? It may seem like nitpicking, but in my view this is really what Macintosh is all about: usability and paying attention to details.
  
  Patrick