Did that grumpy old man never use a Mac?

In today’s alert box Jakob Nielsen gets angry on Adobe for forgetting the OK button on a preference dialog.

And yes, of course Adobe should have added an OK button to the Windows version of the dialog, but for Mac folks, this is how dialogs have been for ages – that is without an OK button when it wasn’t needed.

So – in this case Nielsen is right (it’s always easy to be right about obvious stuff). But with his “33 years of experience using computers” Nielsen could have at least mentioned that to exclude the OK button used to be a very common design standard for Mac applications.

Also, it seems to me that with users getting used to Ajax-style “on the fly saving” of data, the missing OK button is getting more and more normal.

1 Response to “Did that grumpy old man never use a Mac?”


  1. 1 nielsmlp

    Well – he did co-author The Anti-Mac Interface 11 years ago.

    Maybe by now he has completely forgotten that Macs exist :-)

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