Aqua Taskforce

Watchful wrote on August 12, 2008, 2:30am

I disagree. The average user doesn't even need to know about most of these print settings. They could get to messing around and get the printing all whacky, then not know what they did or how to make it right. And chances are if you do need those settings, you know were they are at.

Oscar wrote on August 12, 2008, 1:06pm

Maybe Adobe's way of doing this is better?

Example: http://localhostr.com/files/a7b302/Billede+3.png

r3ferrei wrote on August 14, 2008, 2:06am

The printer setup options and utilities are an absolute disaster.

Coming from a windows environment, where i never had to use a search to get anything setup, setting up a network printer on my Mac was an absolute mess. And still, it occasionally loses the ability to print, meanwhile my 2 Windows desktops and a Ubuntu box required zero setup by me.

MicrowaveDave wrote on October 1, 2008, 6:10am

Watchful, I've never met an 'average user' in 19 years of Mac consulting. Everybody has different needs and requirements.
OS 9 and Windows make it extremely easy to select between 'Black and White' or 'Colour' and to select between 'Draft, Normal, Best Quality' output.
It's absolutely infuriating having to drop down three or four levels of menus then having to click 'Advanced Options' just to make a quick draft copy of something that'll take ten minutes to print at high quality, then having to remember to change the setting back to 'Best Quality' because the option is not displayed in the main Print dialogue box where it should be.
Most people would expect that if you want to only use Black ink and not waste your valuable colour inkjet cartridge, ColorSync would be the choice, but it's not. You need to select Color Options or sometimes even 'Printer Features' because every printer uses a different box. There is no consistency whatsoever.

iandol wrote on November 29, 2008, 10:19pm

Printer dialogs are indeed a mess. It gets even worse when Adobe adds to that mess. We basically couldn't find a way to print out to a large-format printer from Acrobat under OS X in the dreadful mix of dialogs, we ended up rebooting in Windows XP for the more consistent print dialogs!!!

Tabs would be better, and something in the UI guidelines to standardize 3rd party dialogs too.

mikeschinkel wrote on December 25, 2009, 8:30am

Oh, I soooo agree with this. I almost always print a certain way and that way requires I click numerous drops downs. This print dialog is a disaster.