As a designer, I am particularly delighted by well-designed software. The dictionary application that comes with Mac OS X is one of these rare gems. It's a simple app with few features, but what it does, it does extremely well.
It gets all the small details right. Like the fact that no matter where you click in the window, typing on the keyboard will always go into the search box. You never end up with "lost keystrokes" in this app, as you would in an app that followed the strict UI guidelines for keyboard focus.
As a typography aficionado, I also appreciate the use of a beautiful, readable serif (Baskerville) that is not Times. The typographic hierarchy for entries is well-designed too, using font size, bold, italic, small caps and even a smattering of Helvetica to communicate.
Other details: auto-complete as you type, "did you mean" suggestions when you've misspelled a word, a single click to get to thesaurus entries. And a simple yet essential feature: every single word in the definition is clickable, which looks up that word in the dictionary.
I used to use m-w.com before I discovered this app. Now I only wish I could get it on my Windows computer at work.
It gets all the small details right. Like the fact that no matter where you click in the window, typing on the keyboard will always go into the search box. You never end up with "lost keystrokes" in this app, as you would in an app that followed the strict UI guidelines for keyboard focus.
As a typography aficionado, I also appreciate the use of a beautiful, readable serif (Baskerville) that is not Times. The typographic hierarchy for entries is well-designed too, using font size, bold, italic, small caps and even a smattering of Helvetica to communicate.
Other details: auto-complete as you type, "did you mean" suggestions when you've misspelled a word, a single click to get to thesaurus entries. And a simple yet essential feature: every single word in the definition is clickable, which looks up that word in the dictionary.
I used to use m-w.com before I discovered this app. Now I only wish I could get it on my Windows computer at work.
What I love the most is that you can right click on any word anywhere on the Mac* and pull up a definition. Maureen Dowd has never been more more comprehensible.
(*Except in Firefox, where it is most needed. Grr. They favor cross-platform compatibility (Mozilla-centrism) over within-platform compatibility (user-centrism.)
Posted by: D Philip Haine | July 13, 2009 at 10:47 AM