Mac UI Design Rocks
Thursday, 5 October 2006 08:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
daMac's design for "Accessibility" features are awesome.
First, I use screen-zooming all the time. alt-mac-equals to zoom in, alt-mac-minus to zoom out. But for some reason it's turned off by default: (Preferences -> Universal Access -> Zoom -> turn zoom on)
Second: speech recognition. It's a fun toy, at least; It can navigate screens and windows reasonably, though I'm too impatient to rely on it.
This morning's discovery, the reason for this post: any application can be apple-scripted; the GUI can be worked via programming. This includes reading or setting the values of any user-editable field on the screen.
In more practical terms, even if (say) I can't convince the developers of Cha-Ching to add an applescript interface, I could write a simple Quicken import right now. Using features which were built into the OS to provide accessibility for people who can't use the regular GUI. Thank you Apple.
More details about GUI Scripting here.
First, I use screen-zooming all the time. alt-mac-equals to zoom in, alt-mac-minus to zoom out. But for some reason it's turned off by default: (Preferences -> Universal Access -> Zoom -> turn zoom on)
Second: speech recognition. It's a fun toy, at least; It can navigate screens and windows reasonably, though I'm too impatient to rely on it.
This morning's discovery, the reason for this post: any application can be apple-scripted; the GUI can be worked via programming. This includes reading or setting the values of any user-editable field on the screen.
In more practical terms, even if (say) I can't convince the developers of Cha-Ching to add an applescript interface, I could write a simple Quicken import right now. Using features which were built into the OS to provide accessibility for people who can't use the regular GUI. Thank you Apple.
More details about GUI Scripting here.
