I'd agree that Services are more buried than Spelling. I'm running a third party app that puts services in a contextual menu, but without it I almost never use services, since it's buried in a menu at the same level as spell checking is buried.
C'mon, JD... one submenu in is 'buried'? Are you advocating for all menu items to be at the top level, with no organization?
FWIW, that's the same 'depth' as Find in Safari, Arrange options in the Finder, and *most* menu items in Mail.
I can't really see how you could call it 'buried'... it's placement is logical (hmm, Spelling is an editing function, maybe I'll look under Edit for kicks), it is listed in the menu directly (ah, there's a submenu named Spelling), and the submenu items are pretty self-explanatory (cool, found it). Heck, even if the user just scans across the menus randomly and reads the first level items, they'll find Spelling.
Remember that discussion we were having about discoverability of a UI? That's it in a nutshell. If a user isn't willing to even click on a menu to look for an item, they really should try something simpler like an Etch-a-Sketch.
Of course, the real problem there is that users from other systems don't expect to be able to *find* what they want in the menus, since they're used to things being truly buried and hidden in contextual menus only, so they don't even bother looking in the menu bar. Ah, the joys of not being able to enforce good UI principles in developers.
I'm torn about having the "Check Spelling as [I] Type" feature on by default. Surely it will wow our windows brethren, getting the wavy red underline in your browser and whatnot, but since its a non-standard behavior, I think it is something that a user should have to turn on.
Its annoying though because then you get users like me who have to toggle it on all over the place. There should be a universal button so that with one click I can turn on spell check for all applications.
Windows has buttons in the toolbar for *everything*. It's kinda cluttered like that. Print Preview??? I mean, do you always always need that so close to hand that the File menu is just too much to go to?
One of the things that strikes me about OS X is that toolbar buttons are usually to do with manipulating stuff within a document, with all the superfluous buttons stripped away. ...
Absolutely.
[off topic start]
PS: The day i put the "Schubert" PDFviewer plug-in into my
library i knew why i love the Mac OS so much.
Clean interface design, that's all about. Apple rules.
Comments
Originally posted by Imergingenious
yea.... so, hmmmmm
how is the windows way better, again?
Oh yea, thats right, IT ISN'T.
Nobody said it was. I only suggested that a single feature in Windows would be nice to have in OS X. Chill out.
Originally posted by Junkyard Dawg
I'd agree that Services are more buried than Spelling. I'm running a third party app that puts services in a contextual menu, but without it I almost never use services, since it's buried in a menu at the same level as spell checking is buried.
C'mon, JD... one submenu in is 'buried'? Are you advocating for all menu items to be at the top level, with no organization?
FWIW, that's the same 'depth' as Find in Safari, Arrange options in the Finder, and *most* menu items in Mail.
I can't really see how you could call it 'buried'... it's placement is logical (hmm, Spelling is an editing function, maybe I'll look under Edit for kicks), it is listed in the menu directly (ah, there's a submenu named Spelling), and the submenu items are pretty self-explanatory (cool, found it). Heck, even if the user just scans across the menus randomly and reads the first level items, they'll find Spelling.
Remember that discussion we were having about discoverability of a UI? That's it in a nutshell. If a user isn't willing to even click on a menu to look for an item, they really should try something simpler like an Etch-a-Sketch.
Of course, the real problem there is that users from other systems don't expect to be able to *find* what they want in the menus, since they're used to things being truly buried and hidden in contextual menus only, so they don't even bother looking in the menu bar. Ah, the joys of not being able to enforce good UI principles in developers.
Its annoying though because then you get users like me who have to toggle it on all over the place. There should be a universal button so that with one click I can turn on spell check for all applications.
Originally posted by Arnel
Windows has buttons in the toolbar for *everything*. It's kinda cluttered like that. Print Preview??? I mean, do you always always need that so close to hand that the File menu is just too much to go to?
One of the things that strikes me about OS X is that toolbar buttons are usually to do with manipulating stuff within a document, with all the superfluous buttons stripped away. ...
Absolutely.
[off topic start]
PS: The day i put the "Schubert" PDFviewer plug-in into my
library i knew why i love the Mac OS so much.
Clean interface design, that's all about. Apple rules.
The Adobe PDF plug-in sucks big time. It gives
you the taste of "Windows" right on your mac.
[off topic end]