I love when I hear Mac Fanboys say how much better designed the Mac GUI is.
While I do have to agree parts of the Mac GUI look nice if not nicer then the Windows, The GUI is fundamentally flawed in my opinion.
Here’s a side by side comparison of Safari on a mac vs Internet Explorer on the PC. At first glance most people might not notice this, but do you realize how much vertical space is lost on a Mac due to the way the GUI is designed? Notice how in Windows you start seeing the webpage much higher up then on the mac. In face the PC shows the page almost where Favorites bar starts on Safari.
I don’t know about you, the less scrolling I have to do in an application the better. My wrists feel better and I work faster.
Another thing in my opinion that I hate about the Mac GUI is where the Close, Minimize and maximize buttons are located. Since they are so close to the Mac Menu bar I’ve so many times when someone accidently clicked on these buttons by accident. Again it wasted space in my opinion.
Because the Mac Menu bar is at the top of the screen and the doc is at the bottom you loose even more space. While you can’t see it in the picture I provided there is a lot of White or unused space with Mac Applications because of where the Mac Menu Bar is located.
Most Mac heads come back and say while it doesn’t matter that the dock takes up so much room because “I can hide the Dock and I then I have even more space then Windows users”. I then have to say you are misinformed. The Windows Start has had the ability to hide itself since Window 95. That puts the mac still lacking in space vs the same Windows machine.
Now with all this information I am really puzzled. Of ALL people who need the most space, Photoshop/CAD users are the ones that need it most. While thankfully most people using CAD are on PC’s, there has been a stereotype that Mac are better for “Artists” because of the need for photoshop.
I laugh when my two year old sony Viao Laptop opens Photoshop CS5 and Lightroom 3 FASTER then most brand new macs. It applies loading filters FASTER. It has more visual space to work with then most macs, and it was $800 cheaper then what Macs cost at the time I bought this machine. I can count on one hand the number of “Crashes” I have had with Windows 7.
I’d love to hear other people’s comments on what they don’t like about the Mac Interface…
yt ko says
Mac doesn’t make UI decisions based on usability. If it’s good looking enough, you change your behaviour to work around the badly designed UI.
Apple is a top-down organization, i.e. you don’t have to be part of us but if you decide to join you do it our way. It’s a FIFO (Fit In, or F*** Off) culture and those who stayed are more likely to be loyal fans.
Dock is pretty, it had high-res big icons when Windows dock still consisted of mainly grey background. Look is deceiving, people tend to overlook the design flaws such as the wasted spaces on either side of the dock, and that dock+menu bar reduce the usable vertical space significantly, and that you can’t even tell how many documents are open without using Expose, and that red/yellow/green buttons have absolutely nothing to do with the meaning of close/minimize/maximize.