Betalogue

Good analysis by Marc Zeedar at macopinion.com of the badly designed Print Center toolbars in Mac OS X:

“Designing Bad Software”

These “Start Jobs” and “Stop Jobs” buttons are utterly confusing. They badly need to be fixed. And the fix is amazingly easy.

The interesting aspect in all this is that you can’t help but wonder whether Apple developers are sometimes “blinded” by the new interface constraints that they themselves have created in Aqua, such as the ubiquitous customizable toolbar.

These toolbars are a good idea in theory, but that doesn’t mean that they are the best possible solution in all situations. And even if they can be used, there are several different ways of using them to convey various messages/states.

In this case, the solution proposed by Marc is extremely simple. It can be done within the context of a toolbar. And it’s much less confusing.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Wednesday, March 19th, 2003 at 10:24 pm and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.