On May 6, 2013, at 8:20 PM, Steve Mills <smi...@makemusic.com> wrote:
> On May 6, 2013, at 16:58:10, gweston <gwes...@mac.com> wrote: > >> In light of the great opportunity for user confusion - because a little >> rectangle around the number is hardly a "clear" indicator - and the reality >> that many users do not have a number pad, I think the solution I'd recommend >> is to rethink the choice of key equivalents so as to obviate the problem. > > So a rounded rect around a number is not a clear indictor that it's a > different character? Not really, no. I would imagine this would be particularly unclear for many East Asian users, who seem to enjoy putting western numerals in circles or other shapes for reasons to which I am not privy. > People have been able to clearly see the difference between í, ì, and i for > hundreds of years This is a terrible argument, and you know it not to be true. If you showed those three glyphs to a non-Western person, would they be likely to discern a difference? Depending on the arguments I pass, even my _computer_ won’t distinguish between them. By the way, you forgot to include “dotless i" in your example of clearly-differentiable glyphs. But that’s probably because you don't speak Turkish and thus wouldn't recognize a difference between it and a dotted i. But you might complain if hitting the wrong one didn't activate the menu item you expected. > , so that's a pretty lame excuse. I've never been confused seeing these > numpad glyphs in good ol' Carbon menus. That's because at some point you learned their meaning. There's nothing intuitive about putting a number in a round rect to indicate anything is different about that number, much less _what_ specifically is different. For the record, I believe I’ve only encountered this convention in Adobe apps. If this were a more practiced convention on OS X, then I'd be quite more disposed towards your argument. But so-called “real” Macs have been shipping without numpads for quite some time, and developers in general have no reason to assume users are familiar with numpad-variant shortcut indicators. > >> That said, if you insist on going down this path, it might work to include >> NSNumericPadKeyMask in the key equivalent mask for the item. > > This only affects the key used to trigger it, not the appearance of the glyph > in the menu item. I agree with you wholeheartedly that this right here is a bug. If Apple decides to fix it (not likely, I’d guess) then they might pick a more meaningful convention than enclosing the numerals in round rects. > >> But seriously: Think about how much you want to annoy notebook users first. > > OK, we'll annoy them by taking away key equivs they've been used to using in > our app for the past umpteen years. On the one hand, it sucks to break habit. On the other hand, the vast majority of Apple computers sold nowadays do not have numpads. This includes desktops. Maybe you ought to consider adopting shortcuts friendlier to such systems? Perhaps you can silently maintain the old ones for backwards compatibility using an app-local NSEvent monitor. > > Why is it that people on these lists prefer giving their opinions instead of > technical knowledge? There was a specific technical suggestion offered to you, to which you replied and which is included inline in this email. You seem to be agonizing because it did not result in the effect you desired. As for why the replies to this list do not consist solely of technical suggestions tailor-made to the requestor’s rubric: how many times have you agonized over a solution only to realize you're tackling the wrong problem? Moreover, we don't know your constraints. We don't share your motivations. We are not mechanical Turks and do not live to answer within parameters. --Kyle Sluder _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
