Aqua Taskforce

MicrowaveDave wrote on December 14, 2008, 9:32am

This is one of the reasons why I HATE iWorks and all the other iCrap applications but still use AppleWorks and third-party tools. Tex-Edit Plus, AppleWorks and Word have WYSIWYG font menus but most other apps these days seem to use the OS X font picker. Apple seem to have gone out of their way to kill off WYSIWYG in OS X. With a WYSIWYG font menu it takes all of 10 seconds to scroll through a menu of 200 fonts and pick something suitable, but could take 5 minutes using the font panel because you must manually click each and every single font to see the font preview. Arrow keys don't work so you have to use the mouse, which is another serious design flaw. Designers may love the font picker because they already recognise font names from years of experience, but anybody who wants to just put together a quick flyer or party invitation won't know fonts from their names.

The font picker in OS X is possibly the worst piece of design to ever come out of Apple. It appears in front of whatever you're trying to edit so you can't actually see the document. I have a huge monitor so I can see more of my document, not so I can lose 20% of the screen taken up by font and colour panels. Also the font picker doesn't belong to any particular application or window so sometimes the displayed font may not be the active font in the active document. Most of my clients who recently switched from OS 9 to OS X are horrified by how un-user-friendly the most basic and seemingly simple tasks have become.

mojo2012 wrote on December 16, 2008, 11:21am

I too hate the color and font dialog. I always hated that flowing window that doesn't really belong to a certain window. Imo, this concept has major flaws.

MicrowaveDave wrote on January 8, 2009, 1:42pm

It's Shareware so costs money, but people annoyed by Apple's un-user-friendly font menus may like to try this software, which is supposed to add a WYSIWYG font menu with styles and sizes:

http://www.yousoftware.com/fonts/

I don't use Tiger or Leopard on any of my production machines so can't test it myself, maybe somebody can let us know if this software is any good.

BlockadeRunner wrote on March 4, 2009, 4:34am

1) Once again, what was Apple thinking? This should be one of those checkboxes in the Preferences, you know like, "Show Fonts menu in actual fonts (WYSIWYG)". Maybe system-wide, maybe application specific, but something! Anything is better than nothing! Give the user the option!

2) A work-around is to use FontBook to create "collections" of fonts for specific purposes. Put your favorite decorative fonts in a group, your favorite serifs in another group, and so on. This takes some initial setup, but the payoff is fantastic. Your groups now show up in EVERY app that uses the OSX font chooser. I know, it doesn't beat an actual WYSIWYG menu, but it's better than scrolling through dozens of unorganized fonts.

3) With that said, the presence of WYSIWYG font menus is a thin excuse for using such outdated (and I might add: unstable) software as AppleWorks 6 on Mac OS X. I'd even recommend using Word instead. ClarisWorks, later called AppleWorks, was a beauty on OS 8.6 - 9.2 and I loved it. But lack of WYSIWYG font menus is a poor exxcuse for not upgrading to superior programs like Pages and Keynote.