Sune Foldager wrote:
Can I place a vote for following Mac OS UI convention where possible? I fully applaud the philosophy behind no prefs window, but as a user I spent my first few minutes using TextMate frustratedly hunting for the prefs.
Why? Did you need to change some setting you couldn't find anywhere? Why is looking through the relevant menu (view for view-related, behavior for most edit-related etc.) so big a problem? I don't see that it is. IMHO of course.
I needed to change a setting. App menu > Preferences was the *first* place I looked, because the convention is that that's where settings are kept. I didn't look through the menus - why would I? That's not where you set preferences.
App menu > Preferences is a convention that 99% of users will be familiar with. 99% is a lot of people to annoy, no matter how good your underlying philosophy.
So you think that people will actually be _annoyed_ by this?... I should hope it takes more to annoy people... the advantage of this is that there are hot keys for most things that you then can change quickly, without venturing into a prefs window.
Yes, it annoyed me. It doesn't take much to knock a user off his stride.
It's a longish read, but a valuable one: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/fog0000000249.html
An important extract:
"So that's what days were like. A bunch of tiny frustrations, and a bunch of tiny successes. But they added up. Even something which seems like a tiny, inconsequential frustration affects your mood. Your emotions don't seem to care about the magnitude of the event, only the quality."
drew.