re: Slide Different
Neven Mrgan had a few things to say about the UI consistency in Adobe Photoshop, particularly the slider controls.
It’s not the end of the world that a thumb control is misplaced by one pixel. All software ships with bugs, or it doesn’t ship. But here we are, version 11 of the app, and one of the most-used standard controls in the app is broken.
He’s not wrong about any of this. However, coming from a Windows background, I know it can be worse. Much worse.
All of you Mac users have been used to an incredible level of consistency on Mac OS X. Apple doesn’t reinvent the wheel unless there’s a very good reason to do so - like in the case of iTunes 9, where the slider looks much nicer than the equivalent OS X slider would in the same instance, and Apple has the good sense to undo the damage if they do slip up (compare the Safari 4 beta to the final version and you can see).
Contrast this with Microsoft, where UI inconsistency pretty much defines the operating system. They can’t keep text boxes the same height from application to application. They’ve had the same Windows 3.1 text installer for 17(?) years, finally putting it to rest with Windows 7 (thank god). Their programs that are separate from the OS may have something resembling the base OS’s visual design, but nothing that resembles the UI elements themselves.
The thing is, Microsoft’s laziness makes everybody look bad. Peter Bright mentions in his wonderful article about going from Windows to OS X:
Reinvention of UI devices on Windows is extremely commonplace, even in first-party applications. The reason behind this is that a lot of the UI controls on Windows are either very limited, or very inflexible, or both.
I recently wanted to write a Windows application that included a text box in a menu, similar to the “search” menus found in Mac OS X. In the end, I gave up. Windows does support menus, but if you don’t want a menu that acts 100% like the built-in menus, you’re basically on your own. There is a way to control how the menu is drawn, so instead of taking the standard appearance you can give it a custom one, but that’s an all-or-nothing proposition. You can’t have a menu that looks like a standard menu except for one item; either the menu is standard, or it’s custom, with nothing in between.
This has to be true for Adobe as well. Remember, Adobe isn’t writing an OS X application, it’s writing an OS X and Windows application. In addition, Adobe needs to try and maintain UI consistency between its own applications, independent of the operating system.
If Adobe wants to keep the Windows and Mac versions of Photoshop looking the same, they won’t be able to use native UI elements very often. The alternative would be to make unique UI’s for the programs, which would mean users of one version of Photoshop would have to learn a whole new scheme when switching. That doesn’t sound like much fun.
Adobe’s Photoshop UI is a mess, but when you look at it, it’s the same mess, whether on Windows or Mac. I’m not even sure Adobe could fix the UI if it wanted to, because if Photoshop is a mess, then Windows is in ruins. Seriously, programmers have to build their interfaces completely from scratch, using bits and pieces left over from a once-great OS that was left to rot. Unfortunately, Adobe has to program to the lowest common denominator operating system, which is Windows, and if the OS X version has to suffer, that’s the way it is.
