Apple vs. Microsoft: Which user interface do you prefer?

Some quotes from the article regarding that (2 separate quotes; there was text between them):

"To make changes to the photo, you have to use commands located in two places."

"In iPhoto the same option is not so easy to find. If you click the Edit button and look on the Quick Fixes tab, you’ll find a Rotate button. But clicking it rotates the selected photo (or photos) counterclockwise only. If you guess that Rotate options are on the Edit menu, you’d be wrong. Instead, you have to look on the Photos menu, which is where the Rotate Clockwise option appears.

In Windows Live Photo Gallery, just about every task and command is available from the ribbon. The design allows you to pick a tab and then scan its contents to see commands that apply to the task you’re trying to accomplish. In iPhoto, you have to learn where each command lives.

A good example is the option to use the current photo as your desktop background. In Windows Live Photo Gallery you’ll find a Set As Desktop button at the left of the Create tab, or you can right-click on a photo and choose Set Desktop Background. In iPhoto, that option isn’t available on a right-click menu. Confusingly, it’s not available from the menu that pops up when you click the Share button at the bottom of the window; you have to use the pull-down Share menu instead."

> And if you're on new-enough hardware to have real multitouch (the past what, 4 years?), they've already seen the gestural approach because it's been pushed at them from every angle multiple times - rotate 2 fingers = rotate picture. And that works from the editing perspective, the single-picture, and the bunch-o-pictures list. Zero clicks!, since they seem so focused on clicks as a measure of UI design.

Using the multitouch gestures is not quite that obvious. I've used mac for a little over a year and I've never used any other gestures than the two-finger scrolling. Besides, clicking on a single button is just simpler than rotating your fingers (assuming you want to rotate the image 90 degrees).

Hope this doesn't get picked up by a wider audience.

Try resizing the Ribbon all the way from super-wide (if you've got dual monitors, it's particularly interesting) to really narrow. It's quite fun to watch, especially in Office products with zillions of interface controls - the giant buttons and large scrollable boxes full of options become groups of smaller buttons with text, then even smaller buttons without text, then collapse into a single menu, before disappearing altogether into the 'more' button.

I stopped reading on the first page where he showed a 'default' screenshot from each program and stated they were strikingly similar. Only to spend the next 3 paragraphs explaining how he customised the Windows version to achieve that similarity.

At the bottom of the first page he compares the number of places to click and comes up with a figure of 14 for iPhoto and 5 for Windows. Apparently it made sense to include all the navigation for iPhoto in the count but only include the menu bar for Windows.

It was clear which he preferred so no further reading was necessary.

- Vi vs. Emacs. - Ruby vs. Python. - GNU vs. BSD. - Republican vs. Democrat.

There are some insightful differences that can be pointed out by comparing between the two, but that doesn't seem to be where this sort of 'story' is leading.

"Everyone has an opinion about user interfaces, but most people don’t have enough experience to back those opinions up."

In other words, if you like Apple computers, it's because you are a noob. Or maybe, if you like Apple computers, it's because you haven't used Windows enough.

I find that tone really obnoxious. Many of us in software development that happen to prefer Apple computers have to use Windows more than we like because of testing requirements. I love my Mac, but I have a small form-factor Dell tower here running Windows right next to my Mac. I don't hate Windows, but I unquestionably prefer OS X. Many of the points Ed makes in his column are valid, but it doesn't change the way I feel.

The multiclick menu selection is useful for long scrolling menus, such as font lists. Click, release, type first letters, then click again.

In general, I applaud the idea of unifying the menu bar and the tool bar into a 'ribbon'. That said, many programs do not need much menu interaction at all. In that case, the ribbon just looks noisy (explorer 8).

Ribbons are a big mess but now I don't have to look at them all the time, clearing my mind and my screen.