The latest release of Spark appears to have discarded some important UI features that make it a proper Mac OS X application. The ones that I have noticed so far:
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The menu bar has been removed from its proper place at the top of the screen, and attached to the roster window. This may be acceptable on Windows, but it was working just fine on the Mac with the menu bar in its proper place before, and I can’'t see any good reason to discard the Apple Human Interface Guidelines now…
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The OS-specified keys for moving within text
option-(left/right) arrow to move by a word, command-(left/right) arrow to move to the beginning/end of a linehave been discarded in favour of the Windows-specific versions–control-arrow to move by a word, control-(home/end) to go to the beginning/end of the line. Again, while these may be fine to Windows users, Mac users are used to a different set of keys, and it is a royal pain having Spark not follow the standards. -
Related to the above, the keyboard shortcut for moving between tabs has been changed to option-(left/right) arrow. Now, there’‘s not yet any standardized shortcut for this on the Mac…but this one conflicts with the standard shortcut for moving by a word in text, and doesn’‘t match any of the tab-navigation shortcuts I’‘ve yet encountered, on Windows or the Mac. The most common I’'ve seen is what Firefox uses, Ctrl-(PgUp/PgDn)–which, I believe, Spark used too in previous versions. Why the change?
Also, not exactly a Mac UI feature, but scrollbars and buttons seem to have about 15 pixels of their graphics cut off on the left…there’'s just white, then the graphic picks up at the correct point.
I apologize if I’‘m coming on somewhat strong; I just don’‘t understand why Spark is removing Mac-like UI features that were already there in favour of Windows’’ equivalents…
Timothy Collett