The Apple Desktop
There are many things to like about the MacOS X task bar at the top if
the screen. It doesn't take up much space, and can hold all sorts of
useful icons and information: current time, Spotlight searching, volume
control, and I have many other things there, like CPU and network activity
meters, the Little Snitch filter, the Skype indicator, and others.
But, if you ask me, it's also the biggest design flaw in the MacOS X desktop. The problem is that the left side shows the program, File, Edit, View, Window, Help, and other pulldown buttons that belong to the current application. The menu bar always reflects the current application. Select another application and the left side of the menu bar changes too.
Apple has done usability studies that show that it's good to have the application menu at an unchanging, consistent location for all applications. Other operating systems put the menu bar at the top of each application main window, where they are more difficult to find. But I see two problems with this:
Problem #1
The study was made at a time when displays had, at most, 1280x1024 pixels. Any significant application was likely to fill most of the screen. A 19" screen was considered large. The distance from the top of the app window to the top of the screen was therefore small, and you get predictable and easy-to-hit menu locations for the price of a small additional mouse movement.That was the 20th century. I write this on a 27" iMac with a display resolution of 2560x1440, more than twice the number of pixels. The screen is so large that the distance from the top of my application window to the menu bar can be more than 60cm or two feet. This kills the original advantage. Apple has managed to separate an application window from its menus by an ever-widening gulf, which has reached ridiculous proportions. The original usability study is worthless now, and MacOS X suffers from its legacy.
Problem #2
But the killer is that the menu bar design decision makes it impossible to implement focus-under-mouse. Since the mouse must cross large sections of the screen on its long way to the menu bar, it may pass over other windows. MacOS X must not activate these windows, or they would "steal" the menu bar and replace it with their own menu bar. Hence, if you want to work with a window on MacOS X, you must explicitly click it top activate it.Why is this bad? Imagine you see a button or some other control element on your screen. You click it. What happens?
The obvious answer is, you have activated the button, and it performs some action. On MacOS X, this is, surprisingly, the wrong answer. Instead, one of three things can happen:
- The window the button belongs to happened to be the active one.
The button activates as expected.
- The window was not active. Your click ignores the button and
activates the window. Even though you have just clicked on a
button, the button was not activated. You need to click it again.
- The window was not active, and the click activates it. But the button activates too. This is difficult to predict. All the icon buttons at the top of the Finder do this but no other element in the Finder. Most icon buttons at the top of in Apple Mail do this except the Delete and Junk buttons. None of the icon buttons at the top of Safari do this, but the bookmark bar below does. It's very easy to find more curious examples.
Besides, what's with those icon buttons at the top of the application window? Most applications have some. Why did the menu bar have to be split off and squirreled away to the top left corner of the screen, while the icon buttons below could stay where they were? Many of them are smaller than a menu bar button and therefore harder to hit. If you accept the original reasoning, they should have been moved too. Fortunately Apple didn't go that far.
To make this even worse, MacOS X makes it very difficult to see which window is active and will accept clicks immediately. Active windows have a slightly darker gray title bar, and have a subtly darker shadow. Except active quick-preview windows; they have no shadow and have a slightly brighter title bar.
Curiously, the Magic Mouse scroll gesture functions on all windows, active or not. (I appreciate that.) And multiple Terminal windows direct typed keys to the window under the mouse, whether it's active or not - except (nothing is ever easy here) cut-and-paste keys.
What now?
There are, of course, many oddities about the MacOS X desktop. But after three years of daily use of Macs, this is the one that still trips me up consistently. I have become very timid activating windows, choosing harmless blank spaces just in case the window does click-through actions.
And for simple things I don't use the menu bar at the top; keyboard accelerators for the handful of most commonly menu actions are pleasantly consistent - Apple-Q to quit, Apple-N for new, Apple-comma to bring up the preferences, and so on. (Less common actions are inconsistent though and degenerate to vulcan death grips involving several of the Apple/command, Alt/option, shift, and (rarely) the control modifier keys. A screenshot of a window, for example, is taken with Apple-Shift-4 followed by the space bar.
But isn't it time to abandon this bit of dogma of the Cult of Apple, and put the menu bar at the top of the window to which it belongs? And just activate the buttons I click without playing click-stealing windows focusing games? Maybe optionally, to avoid spooking old-time users? Come on, Apple, you ditched the one-button mouse (applause), this should be easy!