3/20/2023 0 Comments Bbedit and interarchy![]() The dichotomy between my mental model and the actual user interface immediately creates issues. (I’ve left out splits and a few other things in both hierarchies.) This is the hierarchy the user interface seems to imply: Files can be opened as tabs with a tab representing the file, and tabs can be split, but different splits of a tab can contain different files. Next to the «Sites» tab, there are tabs for «Edit», «Preview», «CSS», «Terminal» and «Books.» But «Edit», «Preview» and «CSS» should be functions of a file, not a Site, and the Bookshelf is a feature existing outside of a Site. But then, there’s a tab called «Sites» in the «Site» window. A site is represented by a single window in Coda. This is how I expected Coda’s features to be presented, based on my preexisting idea of how such an application should work, and based on the descriptions found on Panic’s website.Īfter firing up Coda and creating a Site, I was immediately confused by Coda’s user interface. ![]() In my mind, this resulted in a «feature hierarchy» looking something like this: Open files can be edited in a text editor, in a visual editor (for CSS files), or previewed (for HTML files). A site, in turn, is used to manage and edit files. Its main features are a built-in documentation («Bookshelf»), text clip management, and of course Site management. Looking at Panic’s Coda site, I quickly figured out that Coda has a few different features. After deciding that MacRabbit’s Espresso prerelease was not yet usable enough for actual work, I downloaded Panic’s Coda. I recently decided that I should replace my combination of BBEdit, the Finder and Interarchy with an integrated application for web development. Safari’s previous idea of putting the tabs between the address bar and the rendered page was thus confusing, because it contradicted the application’s internal model, giving users false hints about its functionality, potentially disturbing their mental model of the application. In our example, the tabs should logically be above the address bar, because switching between tabs changes the address bar’s contents. ![]() Part of this mental model is a hierarchy of your application’s entities. It originates both from preconceived notions about your application’s subject matter, as well as from experience with your application. This mental model describes the internal logic the user assumes and expects from your application. Users have a mental model of how individual applications work. Leaving aside the terrible idea of putting tabs into the window’s title bar, 1 this layout actually does get one thing right: The window’s content hierarchy. Today, Apple released a new version of Safari, and they finally fixed something which I always thought was a strange idea: They moved the tabs above the address bar.
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