Wishes
Post your wishes about Graphisoft products: Archicad, BIMx, BIMcloud, and DDScad.

Dialogs incompatibilities AC and Windows programs

Did You Windows users made a strange misstake and hit "don't save" on exiting AC? - Do You know why You did it?
Here is the answer - see atached pic - Can You see the difference between those 2 dialogs... 😉)
So I wish all AC dialogs inside Widnows OS were Windows compatible!!!!

Best Regards,
Piotr Dobrowolski
9 REPLIES 9
Rob
Graphisoft
Graphisoft
So I suppose you should contact Microsoft to get their request window library changed
::rk
Karl Ottenstein
Moderator
Piotr wrote:
Did You Windows users made a strange misstake and hit "don't save" on exiting AC? - Do You know why You did it?
Here is the answer - see atached pic - Can You see the difference between those 2 dialogs... 😉)
So I wish all AC dialogs inside Widnows OS were Windows compatible!!!!
Hi Piotr,

I felt just as strongly when I first learned ArchiCAD ... it drove me CRAZY the first week or three. I've gotten used to it, and appreciate that it makes the interface spatially the same whether I work on someone's Mac or my PC ... but it certainly wouldn't hurt to have a user option for choosing a "Windows style" or "Mac style" interface, so I'm voting with you. 😉

Karl
One of the forum moderators
AC 27 USA and earlier   •   macOS Ventura 13.6.6, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB
stefan
Expert
I voted "important" since I would like ArchiCAD to be more "windows"-compliant (and on the Mac that would be MacOS-compliant).

I like applications to conform to the OS they are using and as such use as much of the common settings for that OS: shortcuts, the way dialogs & toolbars work etc...

I understand that developing a cross-platform application, means you try to find a balance that works on both, but since interface and application can be seperated, the interface should have the look & feel of the OS, no matter how the application works on the inside.
--- stefan boeykens --- bim-expert-architect-engineer-musician ---
Archicad27/Revit2023/Rhino8/Unity/Solibri/Zoom
MBP2023:14"M2MAX/Sonoma+Win11
Archicad-user since 1998
my Archicad Book
Anonymous
Not applicable
I agree that this is important. There are also numerous interface features which suffer from being too Windows-like; the library manager for example. The trick is to get the best of both systems while keeping the look and feel in each. This is no small task and I think Graphisoft is doing a very good job of it. There is of course always room for improvement, and then the OS's keep changing as well.
__archiben
Booster
Matthew wrote:
... interface features which suffer from being too Windows-like; the library manager for example..
over the week-end i was having untold amounts of trouble with the library manager. i wrote some notes about the issues i was having, however also began noting some things about the library manager itself.

without going into detail and off-topic, i concluded that the windows-like 'tree' structure of the library manager could potentially be responsible for many of my troubles:

in order to present a dialogue box in a uniform manner across two platforms there simply has to be some transitionary/underlying code to make the jump between the program interface and system on at least one of the platforms, right? (and we all know which platform is the one that gets the cast-offs here don't we. )

this post was originally about windows OS, and although i am a mac user i have voted important on this for the wider issue:

where the system-level resources for user interface can be used, they should be used. let the program tap into these resources - even though they may be different from platform to platform. as well as system level efficiency the user ought to benifit as well: a mac user is likely to look for things in a different place to a PC user based on previous experience with other programs on that platform. and i'm sure that users of both platforms (matthew "think-book-power-pad" lohden) will manage!

~/archiben
b e n f r o s t
b f [a t ] p l a n b a r c h i t e c t u r e [d o t] n z
archicad | sketchup! | coffeecup
Anonymous
Not applicable
~/archiben wrote:
...and i'm sure that users of both platforms (matthew "think-book-power-pad" lohden) will manage!
I've been managing just fine with the Command/Control difference, the unreliable Alt key (Windows), and the non-functional function keys (Mac). I can certainly put up with a few more differences if they amount to improvements to each platform.

I have noticed that over the years the best software has typically started out on the Mac (i.e. Word, Excel, Photoshop, ArchiCAD, etc...) and has often degraded once the Windows programmers come to dominate development. An interesting exception that proves the rule is MS Office. A few years back the Mac versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint were becoming so bad that Microsoft had to split development into a Mac only division, and OfficeMac has been a consistently better product (IMHO) than its Windows counterpart ever since.

I would suggest to Graphisoft that they let the Mac people drive the UI decisions in general and then make the platform localizations that take advantage of the best features of both (or all three if they do decide to make a Linux version )
I use Archicad since the first PC version was relased...and since then I do some kind of cad managing apart from the architectural design.
At first I did not notice the small incompatibilities i described in the original post. My friend pointed me on the dialogs differencies... but some time ago I made such clicking - misstake myself - The funniest part is that the other guy was watching wat I was doing as we were little overdue...I still remember his face and his jaw going down 😉
The hand is faster than the eye!!!

Apart from the differencies between OS'es I can also say something about other small incompatibilities on the field of localization the program. The big problem is that Windows and MacOS were translated diffrently here in Poland and some translations made originally on MAC may be funny for PC users and of course vice versa.

Thank You for the replying posts.
Best Regards,
Piotr
I have no personal stake in this, but like Ben (I think) and Matthew (I think (to a lesser extent, since he does use windows)), I'm voting Important, strategically. Use the OS interface tools. By all means. At the same time, maybe we can get AC acting more like a Mac app and less like windows95. The compliant save dialog is a baby step in the right direction.

OTOH, consistency is nice but quality is better. I don't think GS should be afraid to use the better design even if its slightly out of spec. The Apple HIG is clearly correct here, IMO. Dialogs offer things to do, do is a verb, buttons should be verbs. 'No' and 'Cancel' are pretty close in meaning. 'Don't Save' is clear. (The one that always bugged me was Apply/OK/Cancel. What happens if I OK without applying? What if I apply and then cancel? That was in NT, maybe XP is better.) Not that any experienced user would be confused, but the issue is design principles.

In AC7, remember, the save box was yes/no/cancel, windows style. Mac people were quiet, struck dumb by Windows (oops, Library) Explorer (oops, Manager).

The one goofy dialog box I actually miss is 'Warning! The GDL script is OK.' Now it's a proper 'Information' box. Alas.
James Murray

Archicad 25 • Rill Architects • macOS • OnLand.info
The problem is not in the buttons content like "Don't Save" vs "NO" but rather their position....I ment that in all other Win apps "yes" or "save" or whatever is first - and in AC the first is "don't save".... I do not know how it is organised in MacOS. I mean the dialogs must be arranged windows-like in AC for windows and MacOS-like in AC for Mac. (first step is done in open/save standard dialog)

Anyway the top priority is program's quality over such minor compatibility problems, but they are still worth pointing out for future consideration.

Best Regards,
Piotr