Window clicking

Fri, 10 Jan 2020 09:51:00 +0000

John Siracusa and Lee Fyock published little utility app called Front and Center, which brings back classic Mac’s window management behavior in one particular aspect: when you tap one window of particular app, all its windows come to the front.

I immediately felt this fixes something that does not need fixing and started writing some tweets but…those drafts got deleted. It’s not an easy task to argue with John of Windows of Siracusa County¹ regarding window management thus I filed it under “Mac nostalgia” and moved on. It’s behavior they were both used to and what they got accustomed to. So much that they still miss it today, decades after they last used it. So they did something about that for their own pleasure, which is great power developers have.

Today though, I read John Gruber’s really nice short piece about it and this reasoning stirred my UX brain (emphasis mine):

When you switch to an app via the Dock, all its windows come forward. When you switch to an app via ⌘-Tab, all its windows come forward. It feels right to me that when you switch to an app by clicking one of its visible background windows, the whole app comes forward.

This is that one thing Front and Center changes in macOS window management. As I said, I feel that from UX point of view it’s the wrong thing to do.

When you tap an app icon in the Dock, you are choosing the app thus it’s natural that all its windows should come forward.
When you Cmd+Tab through the running apps, you are choosing the app thus again, it’s natural all its windows should come forward.
When you click a window of the app, you are choosing that particular window hence only it should come forward.

In general: no unexpected content surprises for end user. You get what you chose and macOS does the right thing, by default.

I do agree with Gruber regarding this:

Honestly, the Mac OS X system should have offered all of Front and Center’s functionality for the last 18 years.

There are use-cases where you want the whole app to come forward and there should be a way to do that. So I decided to see if it’s already there. Option (Alt) key is used throughout the macOS as a modifier to offer alternative or additional actions, depending on what you click. So I opened some Finder windows and some iA Writer windows and tried clicking and Alt-clicking. Lô and behold, it’s actually working:

simple click, brings that clicked window forward
hold Alt and click, brings all app windows forward

So it seemed it’s there already, in the OS. I couldn’t believe that Siracusa would miss something so obvious that I decided to do some more tests: opened few Safari windows.

It’s then I noticed a strange behavior: Alt+click does not bring all the windows from the parent app but actually hides all the windows from the previously foreground app and brings the one clicked window forward. WTH..? That’s certainly not something I expected to happen.

So yeah…few takeaways:

Doubting Siracusa is dangerous.
Go and buy Front and Center.
Activate Modern behavior inside it and you are all set.

Man, that episode and that discussion. An UX gold mine. ↩︎

The thin fun line

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 12:57:10 +0000

In the last few days, there’s been quite a storm in the Twitter tea pot, regarding the new hit iOS client, Tweetbot. All Tapbots apps have completely custom UI, sounds and interaction but they always managed to make it so and still keep great performance. This is the main reason for their success - the fun part in using them did not come with a price (like UI lag).

However, Tweetbot faces quite a bit criticism that its custom UI hinders the UX of the app.

Many things have been said regarding this but I find Ben Brooks’ series of complaint posts particularly misplaced. He argues that Tweetbot’s custom UI over-compliates the things without bringing anything in. He’s wrong, especially this:

“Gestures in the case of Tweetbot aren’t adding anything to the all important UX — in fact I would think they are detracting from it by straying so far from conventional iOS norms.”

Tweetbot isn’t forcing you to learn anything new. You can use the entire app with one and only gesture every single iPhone user knows - simple short tap. Tap to reveal most-used actions over a tweet. Tap the view button to load the tweet in full-screen view and reveal additional options (conversation, related tweets, block/spam report etc).

What I would have liked is that Mark Jardine has not used an eye for this icon, but instead used the default disclosure indicator, like this:

That button moves the view hierarchy further along, so the default system icon should have been used. Apart from this small hickup, the UI/UX in Tweetbot great - lacks nothing, hinders nothing else.

Seriously, just try - you don’t have to know any of the gestures (swipes, multiple taps or long taps) to use the app. But when you do discover them, you find yourself using the app that much faster.

User details are one tap on avatar away, important actions over user are one long tap away
Actions over tweet are one tap away
Share options are another tap away after the previous one (instapaper, email etc)
Conversation is one swipe away. Related tweets (answers to the tweet) are one swipe away
Reply is triple-tap away (in my case)

etc. I think it’s clear - the UI is easy to use, learning curve is almost straight line (apart from that eye icon). But the UX is greatly enhanced with gestures and it brings you that wonderful feeling of being proud that you are the power user.

You should also read this feature showdown which, in its second part, shows why Tweetbot is so good. It’s great for reading the timeline and answering here and there. I can’t imagine anyone (apart from the most egoistical jerks) writing more tweets than reading them, so this is the advantage to have. The feature where Tweetbot is able to properly load the part of the timeline you may have missed during the night is invaluable to me. Official Twitter client often loads this and then loses my place where I was so I have to scroll and find the last tweet I was on.

Ui on A+ programming moments

Window clicking

The thin fun line