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Comment by pedalpete | Hacker News Reader

This article makes some good points about the balance of design & graphics, but with the first image being of the windows 'ribbon' interface, I wish the author would have used that as an example, and am curious if the author would use that as an example of bad design. Personally, i still can't adjust to the ribbon, too much going on, and lacks direction.

At the same time it is great to hear Donald Norman perspective 'prettier things are actually easier to use, or are at least are perceived to be.' This is my opinion of Mac's (which I am typing this on now). Pretty, but I think most people confuse that with easier to use.

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I would argue that the Mac is easier to use not because it is pretty, but because it feels considered from the ground up to be a pleasure to use, rather than an afterthought.

Things people mistake for "pretty", such as the genie minimising effect are actually cues that show clearly what your action has done.

Similarly, having a single menu bar at the top of the screen gives the menu items infinite height, so they're much easier to target than the menus on Windows (this is especially important on laptops with trackpads).

..of course, some of it is just pretty. damn pretty.

At the same time, the single top menu makes it harder to access menu items of two programs simultaneously. If you have two different programs side by side, in windows you can just click the menus on either one, but in mac you have to click the window you want to use, then move up to the top to click the menu, then back and so on.

I'm a bit biased, I have double display set up so I constantly switch between 4-5 windows at a time. If I had to click on the top menu all the time as on a mac I would go a little more insane.

Personally I think both the mac and windows setups are junk, which is why I'm making my own desktop shell.

Purely anecdotally, i have found that applications that are native to the mac are not as reliant on the menu bar for the most of their tasks than their windows counterparts. As a result i don't find having to switch applications to access a menu particularly onerous.

I think menu bars in general are a relic and should be done away with entirely. I can't count how many applications have the obligatory File/Edit/Tools/Help menus when the application has absolutely no need for them. Some of the newer microsoft apps have been moving away from them, which is a good sign, but they're obviously not the king of innovation.

I have an idea for how to shake things up, which is what I'm working on.

if I understand what you are saying about the top menu, you're stating that the ability to have unlimited menu items in a single menu is great???

You have to be kidding! When have you ever run out of space for a menu? If your menu has that many items in it, I suspect there is something very wrong.

I may have completely misunderstood what you meant (I hope I did).

On the other hand, having the single menu at the top means that the menu is not explicitly linked to the program window. In Mac it is possible (though I haven't done it yet) to save a file, from the wrong window, as it is easy to get confused as to which is the 'active' window.

I think the top menu bar is exactly the kind of thing I'm referring to when I say it keeps the mac pretty, but not necessarily functional. It keeps the menus in a highly ignored location so the features of a program don't mess with the clean look of the window.

You have misunderstood.

With regard to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fittss_law (a law that tells you how likely you are to successfully 'click' a control on screen based on its size and the distance to travel), the target are for the menu click is infinitely high because you can just ram your mouse vertically as it will not move past the 0th row of pxs thus always leaving you in the vertical bounds of the control, all that is left for the user to concern themselves with is x coordinate position.

Additionally the 4 corners of the screen are sweet spots for controls as they have infinity x * infinity y target size.

OK... then what do you say about having to aim for the bottom right corner in order to resize a window? Seems to me like whatever you gain from having an easy to aim menu system is negated by the difficulty of aiming the resize area. I'd argue that one resizes a window more often than access the menu (at least in my case).

Correct, it is finickity. I also probably resize my windows more than reach for the menu bar.

On the other hand, putting a direct manipulation control in the corner of the screen where it would get maximum fitt's law benefits would mean it was no longer a direct manipulation control which would make it significantly more finickity to perform the actual resize once you have 'acquired' the control_and_ would take that piece of valuable screen real-estate away from more useful controls.

Secondly, by attaching the menu bar to window you still have the same problem with a finickity resize control and you loose the advantage of the top anchored menu bar. Certainly window resizing in Windows is just as finickity (actually, possibly more so, windows in windows don't have to have the status bar resize thumb that is the norm in mac os x. I'm sure theres actual HCI research about windows vs mac os x resize interactions but I don't have any of it handy so wild speculation will have to do).

[Strange aside regarding Chrome: the window itself doesn't have a resize thumb (only border resizing) yet the text areas do. On the other hand there is no visual feedback to indicate that you have acquired the resize thumb]

One thing I wish OS X had natively is something like SizeUp [1]. It's incredibly useful, and I rarely use the corner to resize windows. Windows are often finicky to resize, and it's much easier for me to just hit a quick key combination to resize them. When I want something that isn't built in, SizeUp generally gets me close to where I want to be, and it's just a matter of moving a window straight along the x or y axis.

[1]: http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/

Several advantages of the ribbon:

Allows a more "organic" grouping of functions, e.g. All the design-related items are grouped together, then there is a subgrouping of font, paragraph, etc. Similar items are closer, either horizontally or vertically.

Multiple methods of communications: icons alongside text and color

Allows manipulation of attributes in-place (no popups)

Easy-to-find keyboard shortcuts (hold Alt for a whole second)

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