One of the things I do in my profession is to design user interfaces for software. Most people probably don’t give much thought to how buttons, windows, menus and other elements come together to make your software experience understandable and enjoyable, but software professionals spend alot of time figuring those things out. Today a collegue sent me an excellent article called Visualizing Fitts’ Law, which describes a basic principle for deciding where user interface elements are placed on the screen and how big they should be. Although most of them probably don’t know it, one of the reasons that Mac people hate Windows is because the placement of menus doesn’t take advantage of infinite width.
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Since I’m a lifelong Windows user, and I know nothing about Macs….explain to me what you mean about infinite width. In 20 words or less, please… 🙂
OK, I just did what I expect you’ll do to explain – I looked it up on Wikipedia. Now I get the concept, but I don’t get how Windows doesn’t use it in the placement of menus. Or whatever. lol So still explain to this User who is mostly happy with her Interface…….
Windows puts the menus for each application in the window for that application. For example, if you want to choose “Copy” from the “Edit” menu, you have to click inside a window (nevermind that there is a keyboard shortcut to Copy, this is just an example).
On the Mac, every application’s menus appears at the top of the screen. Obviously, only one set of menus can appear at a time so that set belongs to the “front” application – the application that you are currently using. When you switch to another application, the menus switch to the new application. I’ve found that this is confusing for long-time Windows users and I hope I’ve explained it well enough.
But the advantage on the Mac is that the menus on the top of the screen have “infinite width” (as defined in the linked article). In other words I don’t have to “aim” at the menu in the vertical dimension – I only have to push the mouse to the top of the screen where it will stop even if I push it farther than needed.
Microsoft came closer to utilizing infinite width when it introduced the Start button in Windows 95, but, as I recall, there was a little bit of space between the bottom of the screen and the button. XP remedied that but it’s still only a convenience for just one button (although a very important button).
Now the little window buttons they added along the bottom, those are more useful
I did a quick Google search and found this article that explains the differences in menu acquisition. I also found another article that mentions the Windows/Mac thing in passing. Both quote legendary UI guru Bruce Tognazzini.