Gregory Todd Williams

Dear KDX,

I hate you. Your appearance has been shocking and offensive ever since I first saw you. Your features list reads like a checklist of bad interface design. Your insistence on using custom GUI widgets instead of system-native alternatives provides me with constant disappointment and frustration. These same custom widgets are, I presume, responsible for your complete failure to interact with Panther’s Exposé feature.

Your ability to flaunt the Human Interface Guidelines, a document with almost twenty years of experience behind it, is appalling. (Apple’s own seeming disregard of this document as of late is no excuse.)

There is only one menu bar at the top of the screen; don’t put menu bars in windows. The menu bar reflects the principles of perceived stability and aesthetic integrity. It provides a stable location for people to look for commands.

Or not. Did you know I spent over a year using you before I found out that the striped box next to the close window button on a window’s title bar was a menu? The fact that some of the functionality available on that menu isn’t available anywhere else certainly didn’t help. Oh, and Control-F??? What happened to multiple decades of precedent for searching with Command-F?

Ideally, users should be able to drag any content from any window to any other window that accepts the content’s type.

Like files perhaps? Or maybe folders? Maybe not.

I guiltily admit to still using you based on the demise of Hotline and the poor quality of its third-party replacements, but each moment of use is painful. So stop sucking, kthanks.

Love,
Greg