In article <cja### [at] netplexaussieorg> , 
Christopher James Huff <cja### [at] earthlinknet>  wrote:

> The official version also breaks a few Mac OS X UI conventions, such as

Well, you could also say Mac OS X breaks all GUI conventions intelligent
people at Apple spend decades to refine.  You should not only look at the
CPU time wasting effects Mac OS X brings, but also the millions of bugs and
things it breaks.  From the useless window layering to the dock.  Nothing
works.  Hardly better than Windos in the end.  And it needs more memory than
Windos already <sigh>  But of course, under the current leadership at Apple
a consistent and easy to use user interface is no longer a topic at all.
Just look at Safari's non-standard appearance...

> putting the working Quit item in the wrong menu (and having a
> non-working Quit item in its place), MacMegaPOV is better in this
> respect. It's just more useable.

Sure, except that the interface is non-standard in every other respect.  The
Quit menu belongs into the file menu, period.  And the stupid application
menu is just one big usability madness: Maybe you did not notice, but with
the application name being the leftmost item the whole menu moves around in
every application. Add the wrong window layering and you end up with
unpredictable menu positions. I actually saw a usability test of a Mac
application recently, and it was one of the most visible problems (users
constantly ended up in the wrong menu after accidentally activating the
wrong window and not noticing they were in a different application).  So it
is clear that Apple didn't do any user testing with the Aqua menu interface
before forcing it on developers <sigh>

But of course, nobody cares about lost productivity these days in desktop
systems, only about the upfront cost of the hardware and software
combination relative to the "coolness" factor :-(

    Thorsten

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

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