Hi again,

I have been “playing around” with Ubuntu for maybe half a year now an it may seem a bit bold to state that I could teach the open source community what they’re doing wrong or where they have failed upto now. Anyways, I want to point out one specific point that is *highly* annoying, and this point is “consistency”. I guess I have to explain that a little more:

Coming from OS X, I remember one thing in particular that I liked about working with it. It’s the consistency in using applications. There are a few things you can rely on when using OS X in as much as maybe 99% of all the cases:

1) Shortcuts

On OS X, I can be almost as-sure-as-hell, that the key-combination of “Apple-Q” quits an application, for example. The same goes for other *very* common shortcuts, like “Apple-X” for “cutting”, “Apple-C” for “copying” or “Apple-V for “pasting” stuff. This is not true for open-source apps and it is a *very* bad thing imho.

The second part of “consistency”.

2) The position of certain menu-items.

In fact, I forgot two important menu-entries within OS X-applications. One is “Help” which is always found (if I remember right) on the rightmost-menu of an application and is most always accessed with “Apple-h”. The other one is “Preferences”, which (I think) is always in the leftmost main-menu-point and is most often accessed with “Apple-,”.

The point I wanted to make is: Even if one does not use these Shortcuts, on OS X one can be sure to find the Preferences in the same menu in almost every application. The same goes for the Help-function.

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Yes, one can state that because of the nature of the open-source community, such a standard can’t be forced, but I think that’s untrue. The reasion why on OS X one can rely on these shortcuts is because Apples’ own functions automatically provide these shortcuts without the need for a programmer to specifically state that he wants it to have. If you use Apples own development-tools and use the standard menus that Xcode (Apples’ development tool), the shortcut is just there. This, imho, is what the Linux/Unix/Ubuntu-developers should do as well. A developer should not have to care for shortcuts for menu-entries that are as often used as Quit, Copy, Paste, etc. In fact, Ubuntus’ (or is it Gnomes’?) programming-libraries should provide a basic application-structure that already includes certain menu-items with an always consistent menu-shortcut, in always the same place.

While I do not like Apples’ paranoic tendency to try to control the users’ behaviour on too many steps, I *do* like the consistency of OS X. And *this* is definitely something, the open source-community should adopt, imho. Putting a certain menu-item in the same place in (almost) every application would be good for “newbies” or people who just do not like shortcuts, and using well-known standard shortcuts for commonly used functions would serve “geeks” who want to do things without the mouse. Until then, people in both groups will be annoyed by too many of these inconsistencies.