Sunday, August 24, 2014

Cthulu in my room?!

Just the shadow of my camera, but when I glanced at it, that was the first thing i thought :P.
The tentacles coming down from it and ... whatever caused those beady eyes.

(And no the poster is not crocked, it's just the angle i took the photo that is at fault here.)

Monday, August 11, 2014

Design consistency

Something to take note when designing anything, is consistency. That's because your users or clients will be conditioned/taught and they'll expect something to "be there" or be in a certain way. It's why the close button on Windows hasn't moved from where it is. It may be changing slowly, but it's still there, looking all Xed and red now.

And my issue is with OS X, or rather the way it has implemented a feature in the Finder; to be able to go back to the folder you came from by using the keyboard. You press Command and the UP arrow on the keyboard. From an engineer's point of view it's fine, because the data on a computer are thought as trees. The more folders nested in other folders you open, the deeper down the roots you travel, and so Command + UP to go up, closer to the surface makes sense. But not with the way the GUI is designed.

Look at the buttons right there on the left. They are pointing left and right as if further back the timeline or forward.
Yet with the keyboard you go up and down. You might say that i'm nitpicking and most probably I am, but it actually took some time to get used to it, it's two different ways of thinking and it's nice that it's not the whole OS like that. Command + left arrow or right arrow does the same thing as Shift + <- / -> as far as I know.







In Windows the Windows key with the arrows does something expected, it throws the window in the directions of the arrows. Stacked to the left, to the right, maximised, minimised, similar to what Control+arrows does on OS X.

By keeping things consistent you make for a smoother UI experience, and keep nitpickers happy :).