U S E R I N T E R F A C E
S I D E B A R The Start Menu: a bad idea I had a client that called me one day and said that he was having problems starting a Windows program. He had a PC that hed recently bought, and Id helped him pick it out. So I asked him to go through the steps he was using to run the program. He said hed click the programs icon, and then press the Start button, and the program wouldnt start! Instead, he said, hed just get this silly menu! |
This is the most obvious place to start, because its the "lowest common denominator" as operating systems are concerned. Both Windows and Mac users have the most intimate contact with the user interface (as opposed to the swap file or the power supply or something).
The Mac user interface is more refined. Thats for sure. It has design metaphor that its been using since the Lisa Desktop Manager way back before 1984. As I recall, Windows was but a gleam in Bill Gatess eye back then. I'm not going to get into a conversation about who stole what from whom. I will tell you that Microsoft did steal the ideas for the graphical operating system from Apple, but Apple stole them from Xerox. So there. Let's all just go out and buy a Xerox Alto.
Anyway, menu bars, title bars, close boxes and the like have all been roughly the same for Mac OS since Finder version 5, the Finder that came with the original Macintosh. Of course, some visual refinements have taken place over the years, like adding shading to menu bars and buttons, but the placement of the controls has barely changed.
Windows on the other hand, has gone through several iterations of its user interface. Windows 1, which had a DOS-like look to it, came first. Windows 2 (or Windows/386) had a slight bump up in graphics quality, and didnt change much. Windows 3 added shading and colors. Then came Windows 95, which completely blew up the interface metaphor that theyd had. Suddenly there was a NeXTStep-like dock/application bar and all the window control widgets had shifted over to one side. There was a "Start" menu. And of course, Windows NT, 98, 98 (second edition), and 2000 all followed suit.
Thats not to say, however, that the Mac OS will never change. If youve seen the recent interface changes to Mac OS X, then you know what Im talking about. They, too, are moving all of their window control widgets to one side, and adding an application dock. Of course, this is not to say that I like what Apple is doing. I mean, I think its pretty, but I think theyre making the same mistake Microsoft did and blowing their existing design metaphor to smithereens.
And you have to admit that the Aqua interface metaphor is pretty. I mean, its like candy!