Mac OS X 10.4 Preview UI hell

Oh Mr. Helliferocious is so right on the button thing but it gets even worse. Have a look what the Preview.app application in Mac OS X 10.4 has in store for us:

One word: dis-gus-ting.

Background: on the Mac, the default button is on the right. The cancel button has to go to the left of it. This is probably the first Apple branded program doing this kind of thing since the invention of Macintosh. And now, the „greatest“ release of Mac OS X brings us this silly Windows-convention that never made sense (and as you can see even the GNOME people convverted to this model while KDE made it at least configurable).

Maybe Apple is hiring its programmers from Microsoft right now. Or the QA department. I don’t know. However, this has to go away.

7 Gedanken zu „Mac OS X 10.4 Preview UI hell

  1. You’re absolutely right. Luckily, we can easily fix that ourselves. Just open /Applications/Preview.app/Contens/Resources/English.lproj/PVPDFDocument.nib, swap the buttons and save. I just did it on my box, it works perfectly. The default button is now on the right side.

  2. If the default button had been on the right for all times it should reside there forever. No problem with that. But why is it basically silly having the default button on the left?

  3. Peter,

    The default/most used buttons should be closest, if not at, one of the edges of the UI (it should also be bigger/more prominent, but that’s another issue). Basically, you don’t have to really „look“ for it, you just move the cursor to the edge and click. This provides the „path to least resistance“ – like clicking on the close button – you just swing the mouse diagonally to the corner and click without even having to look at the button.

    Man, talk about a late post!

  4. Nicht nur das. Immer mal wieder stolpere ich über buttons auf denen einfach „OK“ steht, statt die entsprechende Aktion beim Namen zu nennen. Ich hoffe das legt sich wieder.

  5. I´d like to have a big Button, that simply says „FUCK YOU“.

    Like in „Your Application died suddenly!“ -> „Fuck You!“

    That would be great :-)

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