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

>> Just look at Safari's non-standard appearance...
>
> Yes, annoyingly inconsistent look, but still easy to use. I like the way
> it handles bookmarks.

I like that too.  And I think it wouldn't be a problem at all to switch the
window theme, just a bit hacking of resources should do.  But that would not
fix several other non-standard interfaces, like the background in the
download window...

>> Sure, except that the interface is non-standard in every other respect.  The
>> Quit menu belongs into the file menu, period.
>
> No it doesn't, it goes in the application menu.

There shouldn't be an application menu of the kind that currently exists.
The same goes for preferences.  Remember that menus convey actions, not
concepts.  Do you "application" preferences or do you "edit" preferences for
example?  Sure, by concept preferences are an application property, but by
action you edit them.  hence they belong into the Edit menu.

The Quit menu item is a bit more tricky.  You may recall the OpenDoc days
when Apple tried to leave the concept of "application" behind (which would
have been a quantum leap had it been adopted by developers).  In that design
there was no "Quit" menu item at all.  Now, in Mac OS X by changing the
window layering Apple on the one hand tries to weaken the concept of
application regarding windows, but on the other hand strengthens it by
adding an additional menu for it.  And _that_ is inconsistent and the root
of all the problems :-(

>> 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.
>
> So? It's never been a problem for me. The application menu is bold, it
> makes a nice visual target to offset from. The ordering does not change,
> and the movement is not much.

The position moves.  If you tape users you will notice menu selection takes
much longer compared to Mac OS.  On average, the same tasks performed in a
usability test (that didn't seek to test Mac OS vs Mac OS X usability, it
just happened that one system in one location had 9.2.1 and the other at
another location 10.2.3 installed) showed, and which was very surprising,
for tasks that they took Mac OS 9 users 33 minutes and Mac OS X users 37
minutes to complete on average (7 and 12 users respectively).  That is a
"only" 12% difference, but on a full 8 hour workday is almost one hour of
lost productivity!  The test involved a website used with IE (because it was
available on both systems) and viewing downloaded data in Excel and
Acrobat...

> All this is irrelevant anyway...point is that the official Mac version
> of POV-Ray does not work properly under Mac OS X.

There is only a (very specific) problem with 10.2, which, as you may recall,
was released *after* the official POV-Ray 3.5.  MacMegaPOV on the other hand
was released much later...

    Thorsten

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

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

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