Did you know that Apple’s status bars uniformly suck?

Posted in Computers & Technology, Interface, UI by Elliott Back on March 8th, 2006.

They don’t make any sense–aren’t they supposed to go left to right? Status doesn’t live in a finite field:

SUCKAGE!!!!!!!!!!!!

This is an inappropriate motif for displaying status, because it doesn’t indicate how much total progress has been made, or how much partial progress has been made, but only that “things are happening,” which we already know. Waste of real estate.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 8th, 2006 at 12:50 am and is tagged with finite field, status bars, motif, apple, real estate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

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Matt Spong 2 years ago 1 point
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Actually, if an operation is going to take a long time, it's a very good idea to show some sort of animation or other indicator that "things are happening," even if it doesn't tell you how long it's going to take.

Without some sort of indicator, if the application is just sitting with an hourglass cursor or whatever, users tend to start getting restless and assuming that it has crashed.

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http://mspong.com

Elliott Back 2 years ago 1 point
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Sure, but this is ALL the status bar does--it doesn't give any idea of what's happening. A traditional left-to-right status bar accomplishes both.

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http://elliottback.com

Elliot 2 years ago 1 point
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I definitely agree. I was always confused about this issue ever since I saw the first OS X progress bar a few years back. I decided it was just eye-candy that served absolutely no practical purpose, other than to make users feel good. Maybe not showing how long something actually takes makes Apple's users feel like things are actually moving faster. At least the animation cycles across the bar more times!

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http://www.intelliot.com/

grant 2 years ago 1 point
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are you guys serious, that a windows progress bar up there, maybe its iTunes, but its probably your windows machine screwing it up. Have you ever seen a mac progress bar, its blue, and the animation lets the user know that its still thinking. you windows people are so ignorant, have you even used a mac?

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D***** 2 years ago 1 point
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I agree with Grant, have you ever seen the progress bar on a Mac?

I'm using a Mac right now and its so much better than a PC.
Ignorant PC addicts. A Mac excels against a PC so much but you PC people think its nothing;hhhuuuuuu:-(

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