Hierarchical menus suck

In Where Keyboard Shortcuts Win, Gruber talks about Tog’s findings on mouse vs. keyboard. In a footnote, he adds:

Especially with most Cocoa apps, where the Find commands are in a sub-menu, and thus take even longer to target using the mouse.

To me, this is a real problem on Mac OS. It is not one that Apple has not only completely failed to address, but has actually made worse in Mac OS X. For technical users, items in hierarchical menus are slightly more difficult to activate. But for non-technical users, items in hierarchical menus are not just a little more difficult to activate, but awesomely so. And in Mac OS X, Apple has introduced more of them!

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Your app has a job, and it isn’t updating itself.

WarpedVisions has an article on automatic updates imposing on users.

I’ve done some thinking on this subject.

Should you wait on an update check before presenting the UI? Should you ask them if they want to update? If they do want to update, should they need to go through a web browser to download the update? Should it be a standard installer?

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Mac OS X runs deleted applications

I filed this as radar #5574036, but it seems significant to share:

Imagine that you trash an application because of a security flaw. Say, it handles the URL type foofoo, and is proven to be a security risk. But the developer won’t fix it (or hasn’t fixed it yet), so you’ve removed the application from your hard drive to keep yourself safe.

It doesn’t work that way — you’re not safe. Time machine has made a copy in your time machine backup that Mac OS X will cheerfully launch without a warning.

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