“There’s a time and a place for transparency in the user interface and Mac OS X usually is right on the mark (unlike Windows Vista). However, Sheets, the animated window that holds buttons for some modal dialogs needs work,” David Morgenstern blogs for ZDNet.
“Apple this week released an update to its developer documentation on Mac OS X’s Human Interface guidelines to cover changes in Leopard. Since, I’ve been annoyed about the behavior of the Save/Save As dialog windows (I almost called it a ‘box,’ which is the Classic Mac OS nomenclature), I decided to look at the rulebook,” Morgenstern writes.
“Mac users are familiar with Sheets, even if they don’t know the name for them. It’s the window that drops down from the title bar of the Save dialog window and holds the buttons and other relevant text,” Morgenstern writes.
“Sheets are used always for ‘document-modal’ dialogs, that stop the user from doing anything else within a particular document until the dialog is released. Unlike, application modal dialogs that stop everything in the program, these document-specific dialogs let users click to other documents in the application,” Morgenstern writes.
“My beef with them is that the Sheet covers up the document at the very moment that you might want to refer to it. Depending on the size of the document window and the content in the window, the Sheet can cover up all the content to make a decision about the name,” Morgenstern writes.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Print dialog Sheets also never fail to cover up FAX numbers, just when you need to see them.