Tag: Windows

Some thoughts on the unintuitiveness of the Mac’s Menu Bar

(This post is adapted from a rambling Twitter thread I just posted.)

I was just reading Nick Heer’s post on transparency in macOS Big Sur and it got me thinking about a related issue I recently dealt with. This is not a new and questionable UI design choice Apple foisted upon us in 2020. It’s a fundamental UI element that dates back to the original 1984 Macintosh.

The Menu Bar.

Although the Mac (and, technically, the Lisa before it) was a ripoff of the original experimental graphical user interface (GUI) developed at Xerox PARC, there is one thing about the Mac that is distinctly different from every other GUI that exists, be it any iteration of Windows, Linux GUIs like GNOME or KDE, the old Sun workstations, even the NeXT OS that Steve Jobs led the creation of after his original ouster from Apple, which formed the basis for Mac OS X and everything Apple has created in this century.

The Menu Bar.

Every other GUI puts a row of menus into the window for each app. On the Mac, the Menu Bar is affixed to the top of the screen, and changes context based on which app is in the foreground. There is a conceptual detachment between apps and their windows on the Mac that does not exist in any other modern operating system, and if you don’t fully grasp that concept, it makes the Mac considerably more confusing to use.

I was reminded of this recently when I had to provide a bit of “tech support” for my parents. My parents are in their 70s. But they’ve had Macs since I first convinced them to buy a candy-colored original iMac over 20 years ago. They’ve only had Macs, although now they do most of their “computer” activities on their iPhones or iPad. But they still use the Mac for banking, printing documents, and a few other tasks that are still a bit obscure to them on the iPad.

And even though they’ve been using Macs for over a quarter of their lives, they still don’t “get” the Menu Bar.

We were on a FaceTime call and they asked me to help them figure out a problem they were having with their Mac. They were describing a weird problem they were having with Safari, and I just could not understand what the issue was. They were describing a sidebar with all of their email in it, and that they couldn’t make it go away.

Since we were doing FaceTime on their iPad, I eventually asked them to turn the iPad so I could see their Mac screen.

I know that their email is through Gmail (because I set it up), so I was expecting to see the Gmail web interface. But what I was actually seeing was the Mac Mail app’s interface. What? How did they manage to get Safari to display that? Then I realized what the problem was.

The Menu Bar.

They had Safari open, as the foreground app, but they didn’t have any Safari windows open. They also had the Mail app open; in fact, it was the only window open on their desktop. But because Safari was the foreground app, the Menu Bar, was saying “Safari” and had the Safari menus.

Why wouldn’t they have just clicked on the Mail window which would make it the foreground app? Seems obvious, but they are nervous novices, and they’re reluctant to click anything, ever, if they’re not sure what will happen. (I know they are not alone in this.)

I told them how to quit Safari, and then how to quit Mail, and they thanked me for fixing their problem. (Did I really though?) But it left me frustrated with the Mac.

Damn it, the Menu Bar is confusing. As loyal as I am to the Mac, putting menus within an app — making it so that the window is the app — is a lot more intuitive and logical than the way the Mac does it. How can an app be open if all of its windows are closed? It doesn’t make sense. Once you conceptually understand foreground and background apps, and have some technical understanding of how the computer works, it’s easy enough to take it all for granted. But at the surface level — which is all the average non-technical user grasps — it makes no damn sense to have the Menu Bar detached from the app it affects.

If there weren’t a thousand other reasons I prefer the Mac, I would be inclined to say that this detail alone makes Windows a superior OS. But it’s not.

How to install Windows 8 on a MacBook Air

No longwinded backstory in this post. I’m just posting this here so I can remember it if I ever have to install again, since I seem to keep forgetting.

If you’re trying to install Windows 8 (or Windows 7) on a MacBook Air, and you boot to the Windows CD (from a SuperDrive, of course), you may find that when you try to select the BOOTCAMP partition, you get an error stating that Windows can’t be installed on this drive, because it’s in GPT format, and you need to have an NTFS partition.

Well, it doesn’t matter if you have that partition formatted as NTFS or not. The error is happening because of the way you booted up!

Quit the installer, and restart, holding down the Option key. Then when the disk selection comes up, don’t select the Windows installer, select EFI Boot instead. That’s it!

Did Adobe actually mock up these Mac OS X screenshots on Windows? (Yes… I’m pretty sure they did.)

So, for reasons I’d rather not get into, I had to break down and install Flash Player in Safari today. (OK, I’ll get into it briefly… due to a rather obscure bug, Chrome — my preferred browser — has been crashing repeatedly on me whenever I try to upload a file. Long-term solutions aside, I had an immediate need for a way to use a Flash-based file uploader, so I had to install Flash in Safari.)

On the final page of the Flash Player download process on Adobe’s website, they offer a series of helpful screenshots to guide the most novice of Mac users through the process of locating and running the installer. Only… no, wait. Those can’t be real Mac OS X screenshots. The fonts are all wrong! So is the anti-aliasing, if you want to get really geeky about it. They’re mostly Arial, with the trademark overly-hinted anti-aliasing of Windows. Strangely though, it looks like the text label under the disk icon in the first screenshot is in Helvetica.

The real telltale sign for me though was the white mouse pointer arrow. Mac OS X has a black arrow. (The Mac has always had a black arrow, and Windows has always had a white one… presumably one of Microsoft’s infringement-suit-skirting superficial changes to the GUI in the early days of the Mac/Windows rivalry.)

I have come to expect subpar user experiences from Adobe, a company whose products I once loved so dearly. But this really takes the cake. I can’t even quite comprehend how screenshots like these were produced. It’s impossible to get results like this on a real Mac. Do they have some weird proprietary in-house Mac emulator that runs on Windows? (Actually, that might explain a lot.) Did they actually meticulously create these “screenshots” in (the Windows version of) Photoshop? Or do they have a Windows application specifically designed to generate fake Mac screenshots for all of their documentation? I’m at a loss to explain it, but there’s no way it wasn’t significantly more work than simply, you know, taking screenshots on a real Mac.

See for yourself… (Note: The image is slightly scaled down here to fit the page. Click it to view at full size.)

State of browser/OS/device usage on Underdog of Perfection, June 2012

I just had a look at my Google Analytics stats for this site. I made some interesting observations.

First, I saw iOS, iPhone and iPad showing up as separate devices. I wondered if iOS was a composite of both, but I realized Google was actually counting them separately. Looking at the daily stats it was clear that they made this switch on May 29, where before that date iPhone and iPad were being reported, and afterward it was just iOS. I’m not sure why they did that, but I am sure there was a very deliberate reason behind it.

Anyway, uncovering this switch was not relevant to my data observations, so I changed the date range to only encompass dates after the switch, June 1 to 20.

Here’s what I found:

True, I am a Mac user, and have for a long time favored Safari (although I recently switched my default browser to Chrome). But I don’t really spend that much time admiring my own work here on the blog. (Yes… not that much time.) So I don’t think my own activity skews the data here too much.

Do I then think this reflects the Internet as a whole? Absolutely not. I’ve learned over time that most of the people visiting my blog are stumbling upon specific posts based on a Google search, and these are almost always posts that are about diagnosing and fixing particular Mac-related problems. So, Safari’s dominance is logical (especially if Mobile Safari for iOS is lumped in here, which I have to assume is the case).

It’s nice to see Internet Explorer under 10%. And that’s all versions of Internet Explorer. But… what the heck is RockMelt? Yes, I am asking the two of you who use it.

Yes, even despite my blatant and unrepentant Apple bias, Windows still slightly edges out Mac in the stats. Interesting, then, that Safari is the most popular browser, since I suspect there are even fewer Windows Safari users than there are RockMelt users. But of course, we’re back to iOS. If you combine Mac and iOS, the total is well above that for Windows, and explains Safari’s #1 spot on the browser list.

Among mobile operating systems, iOS demonstrates a Windows-in-the-late-’90s level dominance. This despite the fact that Android famously holds greater market share in the US. Yes, my content will naturally skew my stats Apple-ward, but this data also, I think, reinforces the idea that iOS users actually use the web a lot more than Android users do.

BlackBerry and Nokia… how cute. Where’s Windows Phone?

And finally, we have mobile screen resolution. Now that Google doesn’t separate iPhone and iPad anymore, this is pretty much the way to distinguish between them in the stats. These resolutions are not the actual resolution of the screens but the pixel-doubled effective resolution used in the web browsers on Retina Display devices. 320×480 is the iPhone (even though the iPhone 4 and 4S have 640×960 screens), and 768×1024 is the iPad (even though the new iPad has a 1536×2048 display).

0x0? Really?

What I think is most significant here though is not the iPhone/iPad split at all, interesting as it is. It’s the fact that once you get past those, there’s no standard whatsoever on Android. That’s something to remember for those of us working on Responsive Web Design.

Fun with site usage stats, part two

Back in February, I wrote about web browser usage by visitors to my site. Some of the discussion over my recent redesign has prompted me to do it again. Here we go!

Web Browsers

Compare to last time: Firefox has jumped from 34% to 47%. That gain has come at the expense of both Safari and IE, which have dropped from 33% to 27% and from 28% to 17%, respectively. (Note, of course, that I’m rounding the actual percentages to whole numbers because talking about “16.88%” makes me feel like Spock on Star Trek, and I’m enough of a geek without that.)

Also worth noting: Chrome. It is stuck in fourth place, but its share has jumped by 4.1% from 1.44% to 5.54%. (OK, in this instance I needed to Spock it up a bit.)

Operating Systems

Once again, as a Mac user who also (unfortunately, despite my feeble efforts at self-promotion) represents a hugely disproportionate amount of the total traffic, I’m skewing the results here a bit. Still, I have not significantly altered my own usage of the site since February, but in that time Windows has nonetheless dropped from 56% to just under 50% of my total traffic, while the Mac has gone from 29% to 43%. Interestingly, in February, iPhone/iPod represented over 12% of the traffic but now they’re just over 4%. Linux has stayed pretty even, in between 2 and 3%.

OS/Browser Combinations

In February, IE/Windows was the dominant combination, at 28%. Now it has dropped to fourth place, at 17%. Firefox/Windows has gone from #2 to the top spot, even though it just inched up from 25% to 26%. Safari/Mac and Firefox/Mac each went up a spot as well, moving into second and third, and going from 21% to 24% and from 8% to 18%, respectively.

Conclusions

This is far too small and skewed a sample to say a whole lot about trends on the Internet as a whole, but what I’m seeing here overall is that Mac usage vs. Windows is up, and Firefox usage vs. anything else is also way up. Specifically I’m seeing a significant surge in Firefox/Mac… which may suggest, I suppose, that I have been visiting the site a lot more lately than I did in February. Or maybe not.

It’s also worthwhile to look at the raw total numbers in the traffic. In the time between then and now I’ve split up room34.com into a number of separate sites. The totals back in February were across the board on room34.com; for October we’re looking at stats strictly from blog.room34.com. The date range is the same: 30 days. (The original data was from January 19 to February 18; the new data is from September 20 to October 20.) Back in February, the data I analyzed represented 2,845 unique visits to my site. This month’s data represents 3,810 visits, an increase of 965, or 34%. Since the old stats included visits to a lot of pages that are now parts of other sites, the increase in blog traffic is even greater. So while it’s probably true that I’ve been spending more time looking at the blog myself in the past month, vs. February (considering I just did a redesign this weekend), the majority of the traffic increase is most likely not from me. In fact, it’s probably quite likely that my own percentage of the total traffic is quite a bit less than it was in February. Traffic here spiked on October 13-14, when I posted a reply to Derek Powazek’s blog on SEO — visits to that single page, just on October 13, represent more than 10% of the total traffic the entire site saw all month.

Let’s take a look at the OS/browser breakdown for just that one day, October 13, 2009:

The traffic from this one date was likely responsible for some overall skewing of the totals. Derek Powacek’s blog appeals most strongly to Mac users, which would explain why the Mac/Safari combination is in the top spot (Safari being far more popular in general on Macs than Firefox, for the same reason IE dominates Windows — it comes with the OS).

Lessons to be learned? Well, if I want traffic, I should write about SEO. The SEO bots (both human and software) seem to love it. But beyond that, I think there probably is some valid evidence here that there’s some real movement in the directions of both Mac and Firefox. Something that sits just fine with me!

Final Thought

What’s the deal with this “Mozilla Compatible Agent” on iPhone and iPod? I haven’t seen that before, but I assume it’s one of two things:

1. A Mozilla-derived alternative to Mobile Safari, available only on “jailbroken” iPhones.
2. An embedded client in an app like Facebook, which allows you to view web pages without leaving the app.

I’m inclined to guess that #1 is correct. I’d be surprised if any Apple-approved apps were running a Mozilla-based web browser; it seems it would be far easier and more logical to develop legit apps using the official WebKit/Mobile Safari engine. I haven’t seen any hard numbers (nor do I think it would be possible to obtain them) on the percentage of iPhones in use that are jailbroken, but if this assumption is correct, and we can assume that the ratio of “Mozilla Compatible Agent” to Safari on the iPhone/iPod platform represents at least the percentage of iPhones that are jailbroken (since I’d assume some jailbroken iPhone users still use Mobile Safari), then the numbers are staggering indeed.

However… given the fact that over 8% of the total traffic on October 13 came from this user agent, and I myself visited the site numerous times on that day from my (non-jailbroken) iPhone, to monitor and respond to comments, I suspect a much more innocuous explanation. But a brief yet concerted effort to find an explanation on Google turns up nothing. Anyone in-the-know out there care to shed some light on the situation?