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Figure 14-10 Proxy icons in windows with saved and unsaved changes

Dimmed to indicate unsaved changes

Command-clicking the title or the proxy icon displays a pop-up menu illustrating the document path (note that you do not place a standard pop-up menu control in the title bar to provide this behavior). As shown in Figure 14-11, the document path displays the document itself and all containing folders up to the volume that contains the user’s home directory. Because Mac OS X is a multiple-user environment, it’s especially important to show the complete path of a document to avoid confusion.

Figure 14-11 A document path pop-up menu, opened by Command-clicking the proxy icon

Toolbars

A toolbar is useful for giving users immediate access to the most frequently used features in an application. Any item in a toolbar should also be available as a menu command. An application-wide toolbar in its own window is also called a toolpanel (or less frequently, a tool palette); for more information, see “Panels” (page 222). This section describes toolbars that are part of a window with other content.

Toolbar Appearance and Behavior

In Mac OS X v10.5 and later, all windows that contain a toolbar display the unified toolbar–title bar appearance by default. This includes windows that were designed for earlier versions of Mac OS X, but are running in Mac OS X v10.5. For example, Figure 14-12 shows a Tiger version of Disk Utility running in Mac OS X v10.4 (on the left) and in Mac OS X v10.5 (on the right).

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Figure 14-12 Many Tiger applications automatically receive the Leopard look when running in Mac OS X v10.5 and later

Tiger Disk Utility window on Tiger

Tiger Disk Utility window on Leopard

Toolbars can contain a few types of controls and both standard and custom icons. Mac OS X v10.5 provides a small set of controls that are suitable for use in toolbars; standard Aqua controls do not belong in toolbars. Mac OS X v10.5 also provides a range of standard images you can use in toolbar controls, such as the Action menu and the Quick Look symbols, both of which are used in the Finder toolbar (as shown in Figure 14-13). See “Window-Frame Controls” (page 249) for more information on the controls you can use in toolbars. See “System-Provided Images” (page 151) for more information about the sytem-provided images you can use and see “Designing Toolbar Icons” (page 148) for information on designing custom icons or images for a toolbar.

Figure 14-13 Many standard icons are available for use in window-frame controls

Quick Look

Action

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When the user clicks an item in the toolbar an immediate action occurs, such as opening a new window, switching to a different view, displaying a menu, or inserting (or removing) an object. In preferences windows, toolbar items often function as mode switchers: When the user clicks a toolbar item in a preferences window, the entire content of the window changes. This type of toolbar item should maintain its pressed state to indicate which item is currently selected. For example, Figure 14-14 shows the RSS pane of the Mail preferences window. Notice the background highlighting that indicates which toolbar item is the active one.

Figure 14-14 The RSS pane of the Mail preferences window

An application or document window that includes a toolbar should provide a control in the window’s title bar area for showing and hiding the toolbar, as shown in Figure 14-15. You should also put commands for showing and hiding the toolbar in the View menu (see “The View Menu” (page 180)). A preferences window that contains a toolbar that functions as a mode switcher should not have a toolbar control.

Figure 14-15 The toolbar control

Show/hide toolbar control

Toolbar items can support click-through, which means that the user can activate the item when the containing window is inactive. You can choose to support click-through for any subset of toolbar items; for guidelines on when this might be appropriate, see “Click-Through” (page 218).

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Designing a Toolbar

Note:This section provides guidelines for designing a toolbar in an application or document window. Although a preferences window can also contain a toolbar, some guidelines for designing such a toolbar differ from the ones in this section. For example, the items in a preferences toolbar should not be available as menu commands and preferences toolbars should not be customizable. See “Preferences” (page 75) to learn more about choosing items to include in a preferences window and “Preferences Windows” (page 238) for more information on the look and behavior of preferences windows.

To help you decide what items to put in a toolbar, consider the user’s mental model of the task your application performs (to learn more about the mental model, see “Reflect the User’s Mental Model” (page 39)). Keep in mind that a toolbar has limited space, so it’s important to include items most users need regularly and to avoid including items that are used very infrequently. Using the user’s mental model as a guide, examine the functionality of your application and identify the most useful features, commands, and objects.

Then, try to identify logical groupings or rankings of the commands and objects you’ve chosen. Place the items that should have the highest visibility in the left end of the toolbar. For example, one good design is to place more frequently used toolbar items to the left of less frequently used items. Another successful arrangement is to position toolbar items according to importance, significance, or place in an object hierarchy. In this design, the most important or significant items, or the ones closest to the root of the hierarchy, should have the highest visibility and are therefore towards the left end of the toolbar.

Often, you can define logical subsets of these features and objects, such as a subset of commands related to the manipulation of a document and a subset of commands related to the objects on a document page. When this is the case, you can then arrange the items in each subset according to importance or frequency of use, and then use the same criteria to position the subsets in the toolbar. Figure 14-16 shows three ways to arrange toolbar items.

Figure 14-16 Three options for arranging toolbar items

More frequently used

Less frequently used

More significant

Less significant

High-level objects

Low-level objects

For example, in the default Keynote toolbar, items are grouped by functionality. Then, Keynote positions the groups so that they range from items that handle slide decks and slides to items that provide inspection and selection of object attributes. Specifically, slide creation and management items are on the left, slide contents and object management items are in the middle, and object adjustment and selection are on the far right. Figure 14-17 shows about half of these groups.

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Figure 14-17 Toolbar items arranged by functionality

As you design the appearance of the toolbar items themselves, you have two options. First, if the features you’ve chosen lend themselves to iconic representation, you can create a recognizable image to stand for each one. Depending on the overall look of your application, decide whether you want to place the images in capsule-style toolbar controls or to use them as free-standing icon buttons. For example, both Pages and Mail use recognizable images to represent important commands, but Pages displays its images as icon buttons and Mail uses capsule-style toolbar buttons, as shown in Figure 14-18. For more information about icon buttons, see “Icon Buttons” (page 261); for more information about capsule-style toolbar buttons, see “Controls for Toolbars Only” (page 254).

Figure 14-18 Two styles for toolbar items

Toolbar items are icon buttons in Pages

Toolbar items are capsule style toolbar controls in Mail

Second, it may be that you can use the system-provided images to clearly represent all or most of the commands you’ve identified for display in the toolbar (these images are described in detail in “System-Provided Images” (page 151)). If this is the case, you can choose to place these images in either the rectangular-style or capsule-style toolbar controls. For example, Finder includes several toolbar controls that display system-provided images, as shown in Figure 14-13 (page 197).

Important: If you choose to use system-provided images in your toolbar controls, be sure to avoid creating new meanings for them. For example, use the Action gear symbol in an Action menu only; don’t use it to stand for “build” or “advanced.”

The default set of toolbar items you provide should fit in the default window size, and the order in which they appear should reflect the user’s mental model in some way. However, users should be able to customize which items appear in the toolbar and in what order. Additionally, a toolbar should display items with text labels by default; users should be able to change the display to items only or text only. You can provide these options with a Customize Toolbar command in the View menu.

Make sure that every toolbar item you create has an associated menu command. However, you should not create a toolbar item for every menu command, because not all commands are important enough or used frequently enough to warrant inclusion in a toolbar.

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