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Former Member
5 years agoPreferences Window, Touch ID
Overall I like what you did with 1Password 8. Looks nice, feels faster than 1Password 7.
However, some design choices are a bit annoying:
The preferences window has a top-right X button for clo...
Former Member
5 years agoRe: minimizing/arranging preference windows- it certainly doesn't happen too often, so I thought I'd look and see how other apps do it. I just did a quick survey of running apps on my machine and noted that Safari's preferences window has all three buttons but only the left-most (close) is active; the rest are disabled, presumably since (as you point out) minimizing is not something one needs to do very often. Messages, iTerm, and Mail allow closing and minimization but not arranging, TextMate allows all three, and Word/Excel/Outlook all follow Safari's lead and only allow closing, as does Preview and OmniGraffle (and 1P7). The Jetbrains IDEs somewhat confusingly allow closing and arranging but not minimization, ditto for XCode. All of the above apps use a native window of one form or another for their preferences display- well, JetBrains' tools seem to be half-way faking it, but they're all also largely written in Java so it might just be some weirdness around their Cocoa integration. I personally don't have a whole lot invested in which buttons besides "close" are active, but it sure would be nice to have them be in the right place and to have the window behave like a proper window.
Turning to the Electron portion of my dock, Slack uses an in-app modal panel for its preferences dialog, with the Windows-style "X-on-the-right" design for dismissing the panel, and it suffers from the same pathological Cmd-W behavior as 1P8 currently does (in that it closes the entire application window). Gets me every dang time, and it bugs me every dang time. :-D And Microsoft Teams also has the same behavior, though that is the least of the sins against usability committed by that particular abomination of a piece of software. The only other Electron app I interact with on a regular basis is Docker Desktop, which does something a bit different- it has the preferences as something sort of like a tab rather than a modal panel/popup/overlay. It takes over the entire interface, and so the window chrome stays unchanged. This is obnoxious, too, but at least there aren't UI cues telling me to try and close the window in order to dismiss it and tripping up my Cmd+W reflexes, and it's not pretending to be an actual OS interface widget.
RStudio is an interesting case- they are also a cross-platform app, but they don't use Electron. Their preferences display is a floating in-app modal panel (meaning that it can be moved within the bounds of the main application window, but can't leave it), which I find obnoxious but tolerable largely because Cmd+W doesn't do anything, so when I enter it by accident nothing bad happens.