Ulysses' Companions' Odyssey (provisional app review)

Posted by 22111
Apr 19, 2022 at 08:04 PM

I should clarify that above, I meant that (as said, some, not too many) bold entries, in a list of regularly formatted entries, will be useful as navigation markers, not only for themselves but also for many regularly formatted entries in their vicinity, above or below, after some work and/or browsing in that vicinity; this considerably and so much fastens your “jumping” from one item to another that in list parts where there are no really important items, you should even bolden some items which are just a little bit more important than their sibling items, just in order to create such navigation markers; its’ similar to finding again houses in long streets, without or with sideroads: In the former situation, you will have to look again much longer, scrutinizing for the numbers, in the latter, you will roughly remember the location, and start your search from there. In practice, in the former situation, you will have to read perhaps 25, 30 or more titles, in the latter, not even 10.

Btw, when I say I can’t trial some software, but infer some assumptions - declared as such - from screenshots, explaining why my requirements are highly import for everyone, on any OS, for any software displaying lists and/or trees, and then get told I should not speak about specific software I can’t trial, I infer from such wholesale “contributions” that my assumptions are probably right, since just saying that, sure, the app in question allows for formatting and/or coloring tree entries, would have been so much easier, and so much more convincing.

And, by the way, there’s another phenomenon, very similar to the one described above re icons, to the left, not replacing titel coloring / formatting to the right: there where you’re ready to column-read (can’t speak for Windows OS here, might be different for Apple apps):

More and more menus are built so that if you click on the main menu to open the menu, there’s just blank space below the menu entry, the text of the submenu entries starting considerably shifted to the right. Then, it’s really difficult - read: your “flow” is broken, you have to “stop” and take conscious decisions where you should not have to “think” at all - to not move the mouse diagonally to the right, into the text, but just lower it to click into the blank space. It’s such “little things” that are harmful to your “workflow”, unnecessarily… and the deliberate non-provision of item formatting when the component used by the developer would have made that possible though, isn’t a “little thing” but a quite big fault: a deal breaker for anyone who rejects being actively hampered by their software in their work.

In appliances design, (Braun devices, Apple devices, or those British hoovers…), “less is more”; in applications design, it’s not (and in car controls neither: cf. BMW and their emulates).

Oh, and hadn’t that been their going-subscription argument, financing optimization? And remember that my considerate suggestions would not oblige anyone to do otherwise than erenow, nobody would force you to press that ^b to bolden some tree entry, that other users - who wouldn’t sign Apple’s mantra “any lack’s a feature” - would consider standard though, and for good reason.

If I’m not well informed yet, link to some screenshot or other proof now? Please?