Tuesday, September 30, 2003

Resizing Login Items

Pierre Igot:

There are still a number of small details in Mac OS X that simply aren’t right. My latest example is the “Login Items” preference pane in System Preferences. Why is the list limited to showing only 8 items at a time? I have over 20 items in there. I constantly have to scroll up or down in order to locate the one I am looking for. Yet I have acres of screen real estate that could be used to display more than 8 items at a time.

3 Comments RSS · Twitter


besides, os-x wastes screen-space all over the desktop. it's all too limited, bc IHMO apple wants it to be look "easy" and consumer-friendly. so we get this crippled os sporting "artificial" limits done by apple.

no real choice of fonts for the finder is also extremely annoying.
those muddy fonts by apple are MUCH to big and blurry

in the pref-panel, most panels could look much tighter which would lead in LESS clicking around and have more functions near your mousecursor... grrrumble, apple.
example-> monitors prefpanel: 3 subpages for those teeny weeny options, would EASILY fit on one page... too much clicking around again.

andi


Apple understands that choice is bad. That choices which really don't matter that much (like Finder font choice) create too much variability and destroy consistency. That being said, because we already have a method to resize windows, there is no reason not to let us resize the System Pref windows...


tarun: I have trouble believing the consistency argument when Apple has shown such little concern for consistency in other regards (e.g. metal). In any case, the great usability advantages of letting the user choose a readable font surely outweigh the loss of consistency. And, actually, on my system the Finder is the one that's inconsistent because I've changed the default font in all my other major apps.

Leave a Comment