Comment by Groxx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Groxx | Hacker News Reader

I don't know how much they've actually used iPhoto. Page [4] has a good example of this (or, specifically, this [picture]) - why are they going into the menu for rotating, when there's a big-ass "rotate" button right on the right-hand side? 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.

also, I'm not sure what their point is in these paragraphs on page 5, but it reads like a poorly-executed ad-hominem:

>One enormous difference between Microsoft and Apple is the amount of public communication each company puts out. In the last five years, Microsoft engineers and executives have written the equivalent of several big books about the process of designing and building the user interface for Windows and Office.

The Windows 8 blog, with its epic posts from Steven Sinofsky and the Windows team, is just the latest in a long line of similar efforts. Jensen Harris, who led the development of the original ribbon in Office 2007, wrote an eight-part series of blog posts titled “Why the UI?”

I am certain that Apple’s designers do just as much thinking, research, prototyping, and testing as their counterparts in Redmond. But they don’t talk about that work. Instead, the results are described in press releases and promotional web pages with terms like “easier than ever” and “incredibly easy.”

[4]: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/apple-vs-microsoft-which-user... [picture]: http://www.zdnet.com/photos/windows-live-photo-gallery-versu...

> why are they going into the menu for rotating

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).

What's wrong with just pressing the rotate button more than once? When I see a picture that has is rotated wrong, i just think "rotate". Thinking about left? right? needs more brainpower, and finding the small icon also. I'm faster just hitting the button until I'm satisfied with the rotation. It's EXIF rotate anyway, it doesn't change the picture quality.

Some people just prefer to use the button that says it does what they want to do rather than thinking about how to do it with multiple operations.

"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."

? That is learning where the command lives, you just happen to be comfortable with the places you should look first.

I think that mac's Help menu is also an example of great UX. If you don't know where 'copy' is, just click on the Help menu and start typing 'cop..' and you'll be presented with a beautiful animation (sort of) that shows you exactly where that command is. The great thing about it is that it's system-wide and works in every single application (and for those who don't know: the key shortcut is Command+Shift+/, you can use it as a menu-item launcher!)

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