David Emery Online

All Good Developers...

30 May 2005

... care about interface design. Brent Simmons , is a very good developer – he and his wife are the force behind NetNewsWire – and he’s been posting up a series of articles on his blog about the current state of the Macintosh interface post Tiger. They are a must-read for anyone who is designing mac apps – in fact any kind of interface design; the point you should take home is that this is how much you should care about the interface of your program, so much so that whenever you add a new object to your interface, whether it’s a split-view or a save button, you need to think about it, look at what other apps do, look at whatever guidelines there may be, as opposed to using whatever is easiest.
My pet peeve introduced in tiger is with the System Preferences – a lot of people (or at least, people on the internet – do they count?) have been attacking Apple for only adding “bling” features to Tiger – i.e. things that look good on demos like dashboard and spotlight. Now, I think this accusation is pretty way off base, with Tiger having a whole load of good features (some with added “bling”, some not) but it’s completely true for the new System Preferences.
System Preferences used to have a useful toolbar at the top, where you could drag your favourite panels for easy access. The new System Preferences in Tiger has, however, got rid of this useful feature. Instead, we get a spotlight search field and a back-forward button. Now, I’m not really sure of the point of this (surely you should just use the global spotlight search in the top right of the screen to search for preference panels, it finds them just as well as the one in the System Preferences), but it becomes obvious as soon as you type in the search field – it’s there to look cool in demos.
When you type in the search box, instead of the normal list view of results, sorted by relevance like you get in every other app, the relevant panels get highlighted by a “spotlight” effect, with the more relevant panels in sharper focus. Also, to give some textual feedback, a menu drops down from the search box with the results, which causes it’s own problems, as this goes over the top of the preference panels:

So Apple, what was the point in that? Also, is that how we are supposed to implement are app preferences (a fair few apps use the previous System Preferences way of doing things)? Also, is this how we should do spotlight searching within our apps? Or should it be like the Finder does it? Or how Spotlight does it?

Hey Apple – you’re supposed to do this kind of thinking for us – not the other way round!