Bad Apple UX (iPhoto and iApps generally)

Well, don’t get me started on the bloody ‘brushed metal’ look… OK, on the whole I’ve been impressed with most of Apple’s UX work. The iApps however are just plain shit and this little gem just about sums it up for
me.

A screen is a fixed-width grid. A photograph is a fixed width grid. If you want to decide how large or small an image should be in a window it’s really very simple. Depending on the resolution you’re running,
you want 1-up, 2-up, 3-up or more. What you don’t want is the ability to resize in infinite increments. What this ‘feature’ actually achieves is that you can never get the image to the size you want – the largest size which allows the display of x images in a given window.

In the pre-Nextstep, Apple design team, the slider you can see above would have been a drop-down, or a slider that snapped to the 1-up, 2-up etc sizes.

Grrrrr…