Preferences Window, Touch ID
Overall I like what you did with 1Password 8. Looks nice, feels faster than 1Password 7.
However, some design choices are a bit annoying:
The preferences window has a top-right X button for closing the window. That‘s not very macos-like. I would expect a macOS window with the typical three window buttons at the top-left window corner.
Unlock with Touch-ID always needs an extra click, because entering the password is the default. This one is really annoying.
1Password Version: 8.2.0-44.BETA
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: macOS 11.5.2
Comments
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+1 vote for putting window controls where they belong on Mac OS. Window behavior is probably one of the biggest aspects of non-native UIs that give us Mac users grief. :-)
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This would also be fixed by having a bonafide Mac window, but CMD+W also doesn't close the preferences, it closes the whole app window. Gets me every time so far.
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@mh2016 Thank you for the feedback!
We could certainly put 3 buttons there but would they make sense? How often do you arrange or minimize the Preferences in other apps?
I believe that system Touch ID prompt will activate automatically when you open 1Password. We decided to not do that every time when the window gets focus because the modal prompt could be annoying (it is similar to what 1Password 7 did). Just like in 1Password 7, you should be able to press Return key in the empty password field to activate Touch ID.
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Re: minimizing/arranging preference windows- it certainly doesn't happen too often, so I thought I'd look and see how other apps do it. I just did a quick survey of running apps on my machine and noted that Safari's preferences window has all three buttons but only the left-most (close) is active; the rest are disabled, presumably since (as you point out) minimizing is not something one needs to do very often. Messages, iTerm, and Mail allow closing and minimization but not arranging, TextMate allows all three, and Word/Excel/Outlook all follow Safari's lead and only allow closing, as does Preview and OmniGraffle (and 1P7). The Jetbrains IDEs somewhat confusingly allow closing and arranging but not minimization, ditto for XCode. All of the above apps use a native window of one form or another for their preferences display- well, JetBrains' tools seem to be half-way faking it, but they're all also largely written in Java so it might just be some weirdness around their Cocoa integration. I personally don't have a whole lot invested in which buttons besides "close" are active, but it sure would be nice to have them be in the right place and to have the window behave like a proper window.
Turning to the Electron portion of my dock, Slack uses an in-app modal panel for its preferences dialog, with the Windows-style "X-on-the-right" design for dismissing the panel, and it suffers from the same pathological Cmd-W behavior as 1P8 currently does (in that it closes the entire application window). Gets me every dang time, and it bugs me every dang time. :-D And Microsoft Teams also has the same behavior, though that is the least of the sins against usability committed by that particular abomination of a piece of software. The only other Electron app I interact with on a regular basis is Docker Desktop, which does something a bit different- it has the preferences as something sort of like a tab rather than a modal panel/popup/overlay. It takes over the entire interface, and so the window chrome stays unchanged. This is obnoxious, too, but at least there aren't UI cues telling me to try and close the window in order to dismiss it and tripping up my Cmd+W reflexes, and it's not pretending to be an actual OS interface widget.
RStudio is an interesting case- they are also a cross-platform app, but they don't use Electron. Their preferences display is a floating in-app modal panel (meaning that it can be moved within the bounds of the main application window, but can't leave it), which I find obnoxious but tolerable largely because Cmd+W doesn't do anything, so when I enter it by accident nothing bad happens.
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@roustem, sorry if I couldn‘t explain it well enough. My point is that I‘m so used to reach to the top-left corner of a window to close it by clicking the red button, that it irritates me to have a unusual ‚X‘ button in the top right.
It‘s not that your design is unusable, just irritating a bit because it deviates from the usual macOS standard. And I cannot see a good reason why.
Regarding touch ID prompt after a bit more testing I have two observations: On my Macbook Air M1 I get the prompt as expected On a Macbook Pro (Intel) which I use with an external monitor and closed lid I get no prompt. If I click the touch ID button next to the password box, it triggers the Unlock with Apple Watch function which makes sense, as the lid is closed. I would expect that to work without the click as on the Air.
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@roustem For the preferences window it's not about that in my eyes.
It's about consistency. On macOS I have a considerable muscle memory built up around ways of closing windows - you go to the top left, or you press Cmd+W. For the preferences window or other windows like the Add New Item window neither of these work - the close button is an X at the top right, and Cmd+W closes the whole 1Password window - which is definitely not what I would intend to do.
This breaks that muscle memory and you need an exceptionally good reason for doing so - it's worse in that you have some popups in the app that are native windows and some that are not - you need to pick one and stick to it or it's just confusing. And this is a password manager - it's a tool that we don't tend to use for an extended period on it's own, it's something that we jump in and out of all day. Given that, breaking that consistency with other apps on the platform is a really bad idea - it requires a mental context-switch every time I go to use 1Password.
And given this is meant to be a desktop app and not a web page it feels like the obvious choice is to stick to desktop UI conventions - you should be starting from the point of making this feel like a real window and asking what exceptionally good reason there is for breaking the user's expectations & learned interactions, not starting from the point of breaking the user's expectations and asking what exceptionally good reason there is to not do so.
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