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New look at old, boring controversy
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Posted by quant
Mar 24, 2008 at 07:21 AM
>>ehm, people usually use RSS for
>>things like that (which is well
>executed in Safari btw.)
>
>So, the availability of features and services to
>compensate for speed make speed immaterial?
not at all, I just think you didn’t pick up the best reason to support your “speed” argument here.
As with all of the software, it’s a matter of preference. Even if I were to accept the statistics on Apple’s site, the html speed of Safari in seconds being 2.09, Firefox 3.6, IE 4, ... the speed would come relevant only if you we clicking/opening/loading websites hundreds or thousands of times per day ... not impossible, but certainly not my case ;-)
Posted by Chris Thompson
Mar 24, 2008 at 05:52 PM
I use Safari, but it’s not because of the speed… my main reason is because it’s the only browser (on any platform) at the moment that’s color-managed. If your monitor has a calibrated color profile, photos with embedded color profiles—basically anything out of a digital camera these days—look truer because they’re displayed properly. This may only matter to photography and design nerds, but it’s nice.
(I’m not sure if the Windows version supports color management. It’d be nice if it did too.)
As for the two button issue, the real motivation in my view is not simplicity or minimalism… it’s to encourage OS X interface conventions. On Windows, the dominant interface convention is “subject-verb”. That is, you click on an object (the subject) and then right click to select which “verb” to perform on that object. On OS X, property sheets are the dominant interface convention. You select the object you want to modify, then select items from its property sheet, generally floating to the right. Interfaces which depend too heavily on the subject-verb metaphor are generally not seen as respecting OS X conventions, since context menus on OS X are supposed to represent exceptional actions. These conventions do matter… consistency in feel and behavior is what makes Mac applications easy to pick up quickly.
That said, all Mac laptops now support two finger right click to make life easier for people switching who instinctively reach for context menus.
—Chris
Posted by Randall Shinn
Mar 26, 2008 at 11:30 AM
Having just completed the switch from Windows to Mac, I found this discussion of the new Safari interesting. In 2006 Jeffrey Zeldman had a blog on Safari’s superior handling of fonts and CSS. http://www.zeldman.com/2006/11/27/safari-beats-firefox/ Another site has a discussion on Safari’s handling of color photographs http://www.flickr.com/photos/darknesis/1424292900/. (Safari uses color management, and, given Mac’s use in the design world, if you’ve set up your system with color management, that matters.)
In my case I purchased a Mac Pro primarily to assist me with composing orchestral works and operas, as well as to create virtual realizations of the orchestral sounds. So power and an efficient operating system were my main concern. To my surprise I discovered that OS X has its own audio system (core audio) built into the operating system. This was providing better results than I had been having with Windows XP, but the real surprise came when I realized that OS X came with its own format for handling virtual instruments. Windows typically uses VST for this purpose, so that if you create a virtual cello section, it is processed through VST (developed by Steinberg). All my scores were set up for VST, so when I discovered that I could also set them up to use OS X’s Audio Units (AU), I could do a direct comparison.
The short story is that AU simply blew VST away. All problems that I had had with loud climaxes for full orchestra overwhelming the system during playback simply disappeared. The sound was also better in other more subtle ways.
So one of the things that I have been discovering is that Apple’s efforts to control many aspects of the whole system (from the operating system, hardware, audio system, and so on down to encouraging the use of Cocoa in writing software) have real performance benefits. Frankly, I am still a bit stunned by the improvement over my high-performance XP PC (which goes into storage today).
Randall Shinn
Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Mar 26, 2008 at 09:12 PM
That’s very interesting. Seldom can anyone articulate exactly what it different about the Macintosh interface.
Interface convention and minimalism aren’t necessarily counterposed, if the convention implements a minimalist design philosophy, as I think it does here.
Would you provide a few examples of exceptional actions?
Chris Thompson wrote:
>As for the two button issue, the real motivation in my view is not simplicity or
>minimalism… it’s to encourage OS X interface conventions. On Windows, the
>dominant interface convention is “subject-verb”. That is, you click on an object
>(the subject) and then right click to select which “verb” to perform on that object. On
>OS X, property sheets are the dominant interface convention. You select the object
>you want to modify, then select items from its property sheet, generally floating to
>the right. Interfaces which depend too heavily on the subject-verb metaphor are
>generally not seen as respecting OS X conventions, since context menus on OS X are
>supposed to represent exceptional actions. These conventions do matter…
>consistency in feel and behavior is what makes Mac applications easy to pick up
>quickly.
>
>That said, all Mac laptops now support two finger right click to make life
>easier for people switching who instinctively reach for context menus.
>
>—Chris
Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Mar 26, 2008 at 09:18 PM
Stephen R. Diamond wrote:
> But the
>minimalist design philosophy cuts much deeper than that. Efficiency is prized over
>power. I think that might be of the essence of what you buy into when going Macintosh,
>the emphasis extending even to hardware design, where minimalist mouse-design
>tradition now means that the user must hold down the control key to open in a new tab with
>one click.
In fact, you DO obtain a Windows-style context menu, although I didn’t find the feature documented.