It’s nice when something surprises you in an interface in a good way.  Take for example my latest finding in MacOS X Snow Leopard (and possibly earlier versions as well). I was setting up a new login item in the Accounts panel in System Preferences and without even thinking about it, I just double-clicked on one of the items in the list.  I must have subconsciously been expecting it to launch the item just as it would in Finder when you double click on it.  But sure enough, it did launch.

There was nothing there saying that it would do this – just that intuitive feeling that it should.  And that’s what made this a good surprise.

This is something that definitely could’ve been justifiably not done.  People do not generally launch System Preferences just to launch other applications.  Nobody is going to put this on their list of must have features.  But once you are there, it feels natural to want to click on an application in the list and to expect that it would launch.

As a programmer, I am well aware that things don’t just happen by themselves on a computer.  Someone has to think about each and everything that a computer does and write some code to do it.  And someone at Apple thought that it would be worth the extra effort to make sure that the right thing would be done in this case.  Pretty cool, IMO.

Dec 11, 2009