In my early days as a programmer at Apple, all GUI designs had to be approved by the in-house GUI guru, who purportedly had a degree in psychology. We software engineers (aka code monkeys) found that a bit hoitey toitey at the time. Later, I realized that the problems with GUIs and such were indeed the domain of psychologists/sociologists/semioticians. It is not an obvious problem to solve, and since most software involves interacting with a human, the problem is unavoidable.

A friend of mine has a Mac, but I haven’t used them in years (since 2000). I was helping her with a DNS configuration problem, and I realized that Apple are still as dogmatic about GUI design as they were in the 80s and 90s. For example, when you click on the URL field in the Firefox browser on the Mac, it positions the cursor within the URL, without selecting anything. This is consistent behavior with the GUI as defined so long ago: a single click positions the cursor, a double-click selects the word under the cursor, and a triple-click selects the line. This was sacred behavior in the 80s and I see it is still supported by Apple, even with its current Unix-based OS.

Try a single-click on the URL field of a Windows version of a browser and what happens? You get the whole URL selected, so you can easily change the whole thing, which is probably what most people do when they click. This is convenient, but much less consistent. I’m not sure such minor things really matter, since most users are able to adapt to these tiny inconsistencies in the GUI.

I wonder if Mac users are generally better at Pictionary than Windows users…