[Jay Levitt]

Originally Posted by RobTrew

This illustrates the limitations of simply looking around for precedents

@Rob: I think that nails it - and it could explain the mystery, too.

@Xmas: I'm sure there are precedents for every design decision in OmniFocus. But unless you know the context in which they were designed - and unless you have a cohesive design concept for OF itself - you don't know if they fit. Design elements make lousy existence proofs.

As Rob points out, you've taken an element that was explicitly designed to upstage the window and grab our attention, and reused it in a context where it should fade into the background.

If you practice design-by-empirical-example, you'll also run into the combined resource constraints of every Mac development shop. Maybe this checkbox over here was added as a last-minute fix; maybe that graphic was supposed to be temporary but their designer broke his arm. Again: you need context. Why did that designer make that choice in that application?

I'll even walk back from my agreement on the old view bar. Yes, from a programming standpoint, it conflates data type with data value. And for 20 years, I've railed against exactly those category errors. But the iPhone has proven me wrong; there are plenty of Apple-designed controls that don't behave like a database field.

And that turns out to be fine - great, even - because users don't have mental database models (unless they're programmers). They have mental models, sure. But that model's closer to "when I click 'today', I see today's tasks" than "when I click 'today', OF selects all rows whose date value is within 24 hours".

That's why you rarely see Mac or iPhone apps that display a "list" with only one result. If there's only one result, just take me to the result! It's not what my left brain expects from a database, but it's what my right brain is waiting to see. Behaving like a strongly-typed database IS the category error; it's a layering violation, a leaky abstraction. Your object model and data structures should be completely hidden by the application. If the view bar was confusing, the solution isn't to get analytical, double the size of the view bar, and explain everything in text; the solution is to make it LESS analytical and more intuitive.

Anyway... I'm no designer, but I know it when I see it, and I don't see it. I think what OF lacks is a cohesive design aesthetic and metaphor.