I’ve been an Apple guy since 1980. Apple ][, Apple //gs, and a whole series of Macs. Like many of my kind, I gave up on Macs during the “Copeland” days, as Mac OS became more and more unstable, and Windows became more and more usable.
Then OS X happened, and I wanted to believe. But it was going to take a lot of convincing. By the time the Mac Mini came out, I had heard enough good things, and the Mini was clearly designed for someone like me. I have lots of monitors and keyboards laying around. I ordered a Mini.
So yes, OS X is better, and the UI still looks and acts like my old Macs, for better and for worse. It still locks up here and there, but now, there is a terminal window - I can “kill -9″ any iLife app that happens be misbehaving. Hooray! Progress.
So far so good, but I then started noticing the things that surprisingly have NOT changed. The most bothersome bit of user interface that Apple has stuck with since 1984 is the “menu bar at the top of the screen” paradigm. This made sense in 1984. The main justification for putting the menu bar at the top of the screen is that the top of the screen is “infinitely deep” - if you want to align the mouse with the menu bar, you don’t need to be very precise, you can zoom up there quickly and the mouse pointer “hits” the top of the screen and you’re right there. User interface studies have shown that these “deep” areas of the screen are the quickest to navigate to.
When Apple released the “multifinder”, a feature of Mac OS that, for the first time, allowed you to run more than one application at once, the single menu bar at the top was kept. It would just switch to represent the application that was active, hiding the menu bars of any inactive application. Right away this was bothersome, because it is sometimes hard to tell what application is active, and thus difficult to determine what application’s menu bar you are using. Every menu bar is almost identical - “File”, “Edit”, “View” - are standard in almost every application. Out of the corner of your eye, it is tough to tell if the menu bar has accidentally switched out on you due to a stray mouse click.
In OS X, the menu bar includes the name of the active application. But when you are focusing on the menu bar, your concentration limits your field of view such that the application name doesn’t register. If you have a Mac nearby, start up Safari and look at “View” in the menu bar. Look at it as if you were about to click on it. See how your brain concentrates just on that word? The selections to the left and right of “View” are a quick glance away, but the word “Safari” is a blur. Your brain doesn’t notice it. Now, glance down and “accidentally” click anywhere on the desktop (activating the Finder), then glance back up at View. Quick - is it a different menu bar?
Longtime Mac users have no doubt trained themselves to double-check the menu bar before clicking anything on it (an extra bit of thought that likely cancels out the time they saved by having the menu on a “deep edge” of the desktop). I have not trained myself to double-check the menu bar before clicking it - I expect it to be correct. I am used to having the menu bar inside the application window, so I always know where the menu bar for a given application is. On the Mac, I only know that an application’s menu bar is at the top of a screen, somewhere in a big stack of menu bars. But I’m never quite sure where in that stack my menu bar is. If Mac OS treated application windows this way, all stacked in the same spot, with only the “active” window visible, it would be outrageous. With multiple applications running at the same time, piling all menu bars on top of each other in the same exact spot on the screen is not a smart idea. The menu is just one other part of an application, certainly not a part that should be hidden from view most of the time.
The argument for “deep” areas of the screen, areas that are quicker to navigate to, is a relic of the days of single-screen and small-screen systems. Today, really good, large, flat LCD panels are inexpensive and getting cheaper all the time. Two and three-monitor setups will become more common with, say, graphic designers and video producers. Home offices and iLife users will also continue to enjoy larger screens or multi-screen systems. Where are the “deep edges” and “deep corners” on a multiple monitor system? How convenient are the deep edges on a huge monitor? The absolute edges still exist, but they may be a long, long distance from my mouse pointer. If I am using a 3-monitor system, and I have an application running on each monitor, it seems a bit crazy to make me travel all the way to the special “menu bar” monitor, make sure that the menu I want is at the proper z-level in the stack of menu bars, make my menu selection, then drag my mouse all the way back to the monitor where I am actually using my application.
Microsoft’s decision to put the menu bar “inside” each application may have been, at the time, a simple way to differentiate Windows from Mac OS, but the decision has aged well. The Taskbar, originally found in Windows 95, is anchored on an edge, but is something that is used infrequently, so I don’t need to constantly navigate back to it when I am using applications. All of the functionality I need for my application is right there in the application window, I always know where to quickly find the menu bar I need, and I always know which menu bar goes with which application.
Mac OS X now has the Dock, a user interface element very similar in functionality and purpose to Microsoft’s Taskbar. Mac OS needs to take the next step and put menu bars inside of application windows. In a world where I can be running 20 applications, each with their own screen real estate, I should be easily be jumping from one application to the next. It is very hard to justify a single, static location on my potentially huge desktop where all 20 of the menu bars are stacked up, obscuring each other, making it impossible for me to see them all at once. The original idea of the menu bar was to allow users to “discover” the functionality of the application. When the menu bar is hidden away, I can’t do that, and worse, I may be discovering the functionality of the wrong application before I realize that the menu bar showing isn’t the one for the application I thought I was using.
There are only two defenses for the current Mac OS menu bar positioning. Defense #1 is that some studies done 10 or 20 years ago show that items at the edge are quick to navigate to. But using a mouse with any application requires hundreds of precise mouse navigation movements (button clicks, sliders, radio buttons). In a great user interface, menus are rarely used, so having them be “faster” to access with the mouse is irrelevant. And with multi-monitor and very-large-monitor systems, the speed and convenience of that edge of the screen just doesn’t exist. Forcing a particular screen edge to be shared by all applications becomes an annoying inconvenience and a waste of all of this glorious desktop real estate we can now enjoy.
Mac OS Menu Bar Defense #2 is that the current situation is such an ingrained part of the Mac OS user interface that it just can’t be changed now. Maybe current Mac users would get all confused and give up if the menu bars moved inside application windows (I doubt it). Maybe new users would have a hard time understanding where the menu bar is (but the current Mac OS menu bar situation is not intuitive - how would you explain it to a new user?). Apple has not hesitated in implementing other massive, yet needed, changes in Mac OS. Putting menu bars where they belong should be next on the list. It’s time for Mac OS to steal one from Windows.
Where will the menu bar be for all of the applications I have running with no currently open windows?
Right now I’m running Safari, Firefox, iTunes, and Fetch and only the Firefox window is open. Where will the menu be for iTunes with no open window?
On my Windoze XP box, when I close a window, the application is no longer running. What’s up with that?
Menu bars belong where they are. It works just fine the way it is.
I completely agree - the single menu bar is nonsense, at least there should be a UI choice to have one classic Mac style and have them in each app window instead.
It becomes even more annoying with multiple monitors when the menu bar for the image you are editing is on another screen and necessitates moving the mouse across two screens to chose menu items.
“Where will the menu bar be for all of the applications I have running with no currently open windows?”
In the same place where other systems put it when you close all the content windows: at the top of a little blank window.
Of course, most off the world considers applications that hang around when all their windows are closed to be badly behaved. This sort of behavior is a leftover from the fact that the Mac was basically single tasking for a long time.
“Of course, most off the world considers applications that hang around when all their windows are closed to be badly behaved. This sort of behavior is a leftover from the fact that the Mac was basically single tasking for a long time.”
I can see the point of doing it both ways — The dock indicating that firefox is still hanging around even if it is locked up is far more useful than what happens on my Windows machine where I have to dig 10 levels deep to 1) Notice that firefox is actually still running and 2) close it.
I am not sure how best to handle the situation. I agree about the menubar problem not working well anymore — this is the case particularly on a multi monitor setup. You should not have to drag your cursor 5 linear feet to get to the File menu. It’s ridiculous. I think the best compromise would be to have a menu bar on each monitor. Iniitally I thought that the best idea would be to have a menubar showing the menu of the application active on that monitor, but then how do you address an application that has windows on multiple monitors? Where do you put the menu. I have come to the conclusion that the most utilitarian approach would be to replicate the same menubar across all monitors. It’s worth noting that such a utility could be written now to shadow the menubar — I wonder if someone will do it ?
this would be acceptable : when the mouse cursor changes screen, the menu bar follows the mouse and places at the top of the screen where the mouse is