Month: November 2004

So let’s move on to my next UI pet peeve^H^H^H^H^H^H serious issue.

I open one window, say a column view window, and navigate the filesystem hierarchy to a particular location. I see that location’s contents in the window.

Let’s say at that point I want to see, side by side with the original window, the contents of a location next to the original location. Two locations, same parent folder.

In Mac OS 9, this was trivial:

1. Double-click the folder icon representing the sibling location, and it pops up in a new window.

In Mac OS X, to my knowledge, it is not trivial.

OS X thinks of Finder windows as separate working sessions, not as locations. Each session is distinct, and sessions don’t need to talk to each other.

Here’s the way I’ve figured out to do it:

1. Drag the folder icon representing the sibling location into Terminal.
2. Remove, by hand, escape characters preceding spaces anywhere in the location’s full path.
3. Select the path and copy it.
4. Open a new window.
5. Press Cmd-Shift-G to invoke the “Go to the folder:” sheet for that window.
6. Paste in the full path and hit the Return key.

Now, for locations that are easy to navigate to, this is overkill. Instead, just open a window to the same base location and navigate the same way as you did to get to the original place. But that’s a pain, and inelegant to boot.

Better solution? An “Open in New Window” folder contextual menu item would do the trick.

When you see a foremost window, and a window behind it, you’d think that Cmd-W would always close the foremost window, right?

Wrong.

Switch to the Finder, open a new window, then choose the menu “View” and submenu “Show View Options”. Then, press Cmd-W.

Instead of the foremost window, which is a utility window, closing, the regular window behind it closes.

Utility windows are distinguishable by their smaller window controls, and by their behavior: they float over other windows. They always have a close button, but the keystroke shortcut is never hooked up. You have to click that tiny tiny close button yourself.

Because of the control size, it isn’t hard to distinguish utility windows from regular windows. But during the kind of rapid-fire UI interactions that power users love, it’s easy to accidently treat the Find window of Acrobat Reader 5 (utility) like the Find window for Text Edit (regular). To treat the Palettes window of Interface Builder (utility) like the Catalog window of CodeWarrior’s Constructor (regular). After enough “D’oh” moments, I start to get frustrated, and I slow down.

My advice? Avoid using utility windows whenever they might be mistaken for normal windows, like when they overlap normal windows. Don’t use them when you might want to close them often.

But they can be done right. Have a look at Photoshop, where the utility windows are “docked” to the side.

Uli Kusterer has a response to my Heterogeneous Trees post.

His approach on modifying TADS Workbench for Macintosh – which is his app, after all, so he has some authority in the matter – is a compromise, and I can see his point.

There are some usability benefits to using trees. Trees nodes are easier for the user to minimize, and might be less cumbersome than, say, three separate list widgets stacked vertically in a window. If you make it so the list widgets get bigger as the window gets bigger, then even the spatial arguments I made before hold less water, since the coordinates of the beginning of the lower lists are not fixed, but depend on window size. If you don’t make the lists grow in that fashion, then you’re condemning the user to endless scrolling to navigate lengthy lists, no matter how big you make the window.

Split views are one solution, but I find them a bit cumbersome. You have to click just so on a split control to resize it, unlike the larger disclosure triangles of an outline view.

Well, so how about the Finder’s Info window? It uses disclosure triangles, but I’m dissatisfied here as well. Letting the user have so much control over minimizing pieces of a window’s UI feels sloppy: window-as-accordian.

My ideal solution to this is not to have multiple lists in a single window at the same time at all. Separate the lists onto different panels of a tab view, and make those single lists grow as the window grows. Will that cover all cases comfortably? Probably not, and I wouldn’t be rigid about it, but it’s where I’d start.