Sunday, January 9, 2005

Aqua Margins

Going against the guidelines, the new public beta of NetNewsWire drops the margins in its main window. Jonathan Rentzsch:

The controls have been pushed to the absolute bottom. The lists abut the left and right sides of the window. Not a pixel of margin. The new UI looks simpler but actually does more.

I agree. It’s a simple change, with a dramatic (positive) effect.

1 Comment RSS · Twitter

Jonathan says "On normal Aqua windows, [the margins] don't do anything." I disagree; margins give you an area that you can click on to bring the window to the front, without having to worry about whether the app has click-through on its controls, and if so, will you be changing its state when all you wanted to do was bring it to the front. I realize that this usually isn't a problem with Mac apps like it is with most Windows apps, but using Windows at work during the day has gotten me in the habit of looking for "safe" areas to click on to make a window active.

Leave a Comment