TinkerTool BETTER not be necessary in Jaguar. OS X's "power" is a CROCK when it comes UI, especially in the Finder, since many good features in OS 9 were forgotten
Menu Blinking for example. The Appearance Manager
Unsanity's Haxies shouldn't be necessary either. Windowshade X, Xounds(coming in Jaguar I think), Silk, and FruitMenu (more flexibility at least) And the Command-Tab switching is a kludge. Of course the Dock is a whole other can of worms.
<strong>TinkerTool BETTER not be necessary in Jaguar. OS X's "power" is a CROCK when it comes UI, especially in the Finder, since many good features in OS 9 were forgotten
Menu Blinking for example. The Appearance Manager
Unsanity's Haxies shouldn't be necessary either. Windowshade X, Xounds(coming in Jaguar I think), Silk, and FruitMenu (more flexibility at least) And the Command-Tab switching is a kludge. Of course the Dock is a whole other can of worms.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Menu blinking is in OS X, as is the Appearance Manager.
Windowshade would be nice.
Silk is something that Apple cannot do, because it is up to an application's developer to adopt Quartz for text rendering.
How can you turn Menu Blinking off? Starfleet X agrees, you can't. And the gee-whiz pre-emptively multitasking OS X apparently doesn't start work on a selected menu item until blinking is done. Menus, with their current fonts, shadows, transparency, and blinking, SUCK in terms of readability/usability. Of course I hate Aqua, but still... OS X lacks many of the customizations OS 9 offered, especially in terms of the Finder and general GUI. They've been listed, but for me: Windowshades. Spring Loaded Folders. Labels. Appearance Manager things (Themes, soundsets, etc. ONLY in OS 9 remember)
TinkerTool and Unsanity shouldn't be necessary.
Also why can't we cascade into infinite directories? 5 is a small number. I'd love to be able to stick an alias to my hard drive in FruitMenu or the Dock and peruse through as many subfolders as I like.
Jaguar only goes halfway toward catching up to OS 9. Speed and some customizability.
<strong>Then how come Silk works?</strong><hr></blockquote>Silk works because it interrupts each window as it is created and tells the window manager to use the different text renderer and/or metrics on it. Apple will likely not force all windows to do this globally because of the font metrics issue. Also, remember all the problems AOL and AIM users were having with Silk? They would have the same problems if Apple forcibly enabled Quartz text everywhere. [quote]<strong>Menus, with their current fonts, shadows, transparency, and blinking, SUCK in terms of readability/usability.</strong><hr></blockquote>I think the menus are fine and actually prefer the slight transparency. The only shadow I see is the one surrounding the entire menu, unless you are referring to the slight shadow under bold titles. [quote]<strong>Spring Loaded Folders</strong><hr></blockquote>Back in Jaguar. [quote]<strong>Themes</strong><hr></blockquote>Themes have NEVER been available by sanctioned means. The OS8 "Appearance Manager" themes were practically the same as the themes already currently available for OSX. [quote]<strong>soundsets</strong><hr></blockquote>Back in Jaguar... sort of. [quote]<strong>Also why can't we cascade into infinite directories? 5 is a small number.</strong><hr></blockquote>Yes, you absolutely CAN have as many levels deep as you want. The only place the 5-level limit exists is in Dock menus.
edit: Correction to last note...
Actually you can only go 255 levels deep. I think this is a limitation of the filesystem, though, not the OS. I just ran a little test and this is the deepest directory I can create:
Personally i like the big font size's, but i think it would be a good idea for apple to make it changable. There are other programs that will do it easyly enough though.
why is there a 5 level cap on menu browsing? what if i have a file nestled 10 folders deep(with the way that i do html, it happens alot) and i just want to be able to browse through to it on the dock? why cant we have this capability? it has been a limit since os 8 at least, probally before that even
<strong>StarfleetX, would you please edit and break up the path? It is completely messing up the formatting.</strong><hr></blockquote>Odd. Formatting looks just fine in OmniWeb:
Oh, I see... you must be using one of those inferior browsers. No problem. I'll have it fixed in a jiffy.
Interestingly enough, I'd also be interested in changing the menu font size, but I want to make it bigger. My wife is legally blind and can't see the menus at our default screen size of 1600x1024. While I can pop our monitor to 800x512, that doesn't work so well for a bunch of programs, including iPhoto.
Jaguar's screen enlarging is fine, but it's not necessarily the most intuitive way to enlarge the screen. As far as I can tell, all Apple has done is to reimplement CloseView from OS 6 or 7 (or was it earlier?). Windows screen enlarging software (e.g., Dolphin) is still leaps and bounds ahead of anything Apple is offering or will be offering in the next 6 months.
The problem with Apple's solution is that when the screen is enlarged, every time you move the cursor a little, the whole screen moves in response. It would be better if the screen only moved when the mouse pointer came near to the edge.
We'd be 100% fine spending 100% of our time in OS X, except for this annoying menu size. It really bugs me that Apple has decided that the integrity of the Aqua user experience needs to take priority over users' ability to use that interface.
If anybody has any clue where I'd start to change the menu size, let me know. I have the developer tools, etc. and would be happy to throw something together, but having looked through Apple's documentation I'm baffled as to where to start.
Apple is paying much better attention to the needs of people with disabilities now, so I wouldn't be surprised if they'll offer some way to increase font sizes, but your choices will probably be limited.
There are "Large" and "Extra Large" font settings in Windows, but they only affect a couple of areas in the GUI - titlebars and the taskbar, and icon labels. That's about the best you can hope for from any similar functionality in OS X.
The areas you mentioned that are configurable in Windows (menus, title bars, task bar, and icon labels) are exactly the areas that need customization in OS X. The content of windows in most applications can be enlarged. E-mail software, web browsers, word processors -- they all allow you to specify the font and size that will be used to display on-screen text. However, for now, the operating system won't allow you to enlarge the controls needed to manipulate that content.
The importance of this change is hard to explain if you haven't experienced it. It's very much like curb cuts when designing wheelchair accessibility. You can say that putting in curb cuts is a minor change (it only affects the edges of curbs), but it totally changes the world that is available to people in wheelchairs.
If you've ever lived in a country where you didn't speak the language (I lived in Japan for a year), you probably also have a sense of what I'm getting at.
When we're talking about customization... Can I finally turn of the selected menu-item blinking?? This has been bugging me from the start. <img src="graemlins/oyvey.gif" border="0" alt="[No]" />
<strong>Apple is paying much better attention to the needs of people with disabilities now, so I wouldn't be surprised if they'll offer some way to increase font sizes, but your choices will probably be limited.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Well... there is ZoomView. That might help, sort of.
Comments
StarfleetX maybe ?
Menu Blinking for example. The Appearance Manager
Unsanity's Haxies shouldn't be necessary either. Windowshade X, Xounds(coming in Jaguar I think), Silk, and FruitMenu (more flexibility at least) And the Command-Tab switching is a kludge. Of course the Dock is a whole other can of worms.
<strong>TinkerTool BETTER not be necessary in Jaguar. OS X's "power" is a CROCK when it comes UI, especially in the Finder, since many good features in OS 9 were forgotten
Menu Blinking for example. The Appearance Manager
Unsanity's Haxies shouldn't be necessary either. Windowshade X, Xounds(coming in Jaguar I think), Silk, and FruitMenu (more flexibility at least) And the Command-Tab switching is a kludge. Of course the Dock is a whole other can of worms.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Menu blinking is in OS X, as is the Appearance Manager.
Windowshade would be nice.
Silk is something that Apple cannot do, because it is up to an application's developer to adopt Quartz for text rendering.
How can you turn Menu Blinking off? Starfleet X agrees, you can't. And the gee-whiz pre-emptively multitasking OS X apparently doesn't start work on a selected menu item until blinking is done. Menus, with their current fonts, shadows, transparency, and blinking, SUCK in terms of readability/usability. Of course I hate Aqua, but still... OS X lacks many of the customizations OS 9 offered, especially in terms of the Finder and general GUI. They've been listed, but for me: Windowshades. Spring Loaded Folders. Labels. Appearance Manager things (Themes, soundsets, etc. ONLY in OS 9 remember)
TinkerTool and Unsanity shouldn't be necessary.
Also why can't we cascade into infinite directories? 5 is a small number. I'd love to be able to stick an alias to my hard drive in FruitMenu or the Dock and peruse through as many subfolders as I like.
Jaguar only goes halfway toward catching up to OS 9. Speed and some customizability.
<strong>Then how come Silk works?</strong><hr></blockquote>Silk works because it interrupts each window as it is created and tells the window manager to use the different text renderer and/or metrics on it. Apple will likely not force all windows to do this globally because of the font metrics issue. Also, remember all the problems AOL and AIM users were having with Silk? They would have the same problems if Apple forcibly enabled Quartz text everywhere. [quote]<strong>Menus, with their current fonts, shadows, transparency, and blinking, SUCK in terms of readability/usability.</strong><hr></blockquote>I think the menus are fine and actually prefer the slight transparency. The only shadow I see is the one surrounding the entire menu, unless you are referring to the slight shadow under bold titles. [quote]<strong>Spring Loaded Folders</strong><hr></blockquote>Back in Jaguar. [quote]<strong>Themes</strong><hr></blockquote>Themes have NEVER been available by sanctioned means. The OS8 "Appearance Manager" themes were practically the same as the themes already currently available for OSX. [quote]<strong>soundsets</strong><hr></blockquote>Back in Jaguar... sort of. [quote]<strong>Also why can't we cascade into infinite directories? 5 is a small number.</strong><hr></blockquote>Yes, you absolutely CAN have as many levels deep as you want. The only place the 5-level limit exists is in Dock menus.
edit: Correction to last note...
Actually you can only go 255 levels deep. I think this is a limitation of the filesystem, though, not the OS. I just ran a little test and this is the deepest directory I can create:
/Users/bwsmith/Desktop/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a
/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a
/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a
/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a
/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a
/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a
/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a
/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a
/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a
/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a
/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a/a
[ 07-08-2002: Message edited by: starfleetX ]</p>
[ 07-08-2002: Message edited by: graphiteman ]</p>
<strong>StarfleetX, would you please edit and break up the path? It is completely messing up the formatting.</strong><hr></blockquote>Odd. Formatting looks just fine in OmniWeb:
Oh, I see... you must be using one of those inferior browsers.
<strong>Odd. Formatting looks just fine in OmniWeb:
<image>
Oh, I see... you must be using one of those inferior browsers.
Yeah, Internet Exploder I suspect. Totally ignores table cell widths you specify and chooses it's own based on the content of the cell.
Remedy: User education. Recomend user get a decent standards compliant browser.
<strong>
Yeah, Internet Exploder I suspect. Totally ignores table cell widths you specify and chooses it's own based on the content of the cell.
Remedy: User education. Recomend user get a decent standards compliant browser.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Internet Explorer!? INTERNET EXPLORER?! I hate Internet Explorer!!!
I'm using iCab, one of the best browsers on the planet (AND HTML 4.0 compliant!). I suspect the problem is BAD HTML CODE.
Jaguar's screen enlarging is fine, but it's not necessarily the most intuitive way to enlarge the screen. As far as I can tell, all Apple has done is to reimplement CloseView from OS 6 or 7 (or was it earlier?). Windows screen enlarging software (e.g., Dolphin) is still leaps and bounds ahead of anything Apple is offering or will be offering in the next 6 months.
The problem with Apple's solution is that when the screen is enlarged, every time you move the cursor a little, the whole screen moves in response. It would be better if the screen only moved when the mouse pointer came near to the edge.
We'd be 100% fine spending 100% of our time in OS X, except for this annoying menu size. It really bugs me that Apple has decided that the integrity of the Aqua user experience needs to take priority over users' ability to use that interface.
If anybody has any clue where I'd start to change the menu size, let me know. I have the developer tools, etc. and would be happy to throw something together, but having looked through Apple's documentation I'm baffled as to where to start.
There are "Large" and "Extra Large" font settings in Windows, but they only affect a couple of areas in the GUI - titlebars and the taskbar, and icon labels. That's about the best you can hope for from any similar functionality in OS X.
[ 07-10-2002: Message edited by: Amorph ]</p>
The importance of this change is hard to explain if you haven't experienced it. It's very much like curb cuts when designing wheelchair accessibility. You can say that putting in curb cuts is a minor change (it only affects the edges of curbs), but it totally changes the world that is available to people in wheelchairs.
If you've ever lived in a country where you didn't speak the language (I lived in Japan for a year), you probably also have a sense of what I'm getting at.
<strong>Can I finally turn of the selected menu-item blinking??</strong><hr></blockquote>Nope. Not yet, at least.
<strong>Apple is paying much better attention to the needs of people with disabilities now, so I wouldn't be surprised if they'll offer some way to increase font sizes, but your choices will probably be limited.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Well... there is ZoomView. That might help, sort of.