The document compares the user interfaces of Apple's iPhoto and Microsoft's Windows Live Photo Gallery. Both programs take similar approaches to browsing photos with a navigation pane and photo display area. However, iPhoto uses pull-down menus while Photo Gallery employs Microsoft's ribbon interface. The document examines how various common tasks like editing photos are accomplished in each program. It concludes that both programs make photo management accessible but that Microsoft's ribbon interface is not as cluttered as some claim.

1. 07/09/2011 08:57
blog.bestlaptopbattery.co.uk
Which user interface do you prefer? Apple
vs. Microsoft
Which user interface do you prefer? Apple
vs. Microsoft
Everyone has an opinion about user interfaces, but
most people don’t have enough experience to back
those opinions up. That phenomenon makes any
Mac-versus-Windows debate confusing. But there’s
a nearly perfect test case to compare Apple and Mi-
crosoft UI design philosophies: Windows Live Photo
Gallery 2011 versus iPhoto ‘11. I dive in.
Everyone has an opinion about user interfaces. The
trouble is, most people don’t have enough expe-
rience to back those opinions up. Among PC and Mac
users worldwide, most use one platform regularly
and rarely if ever use the other.
The overwhelming majority of Windows users have
no hands-on experience with a Mac. Even worse,
the millions of Mac users who switched in the past
few years have only distant (and probably painful) That widespread lack of recent experience makes
memories of old Microsoft products. They get to the recent debate over Microsoft’s Windows 8 inter-
compare their modern Apple experience with the face choices even more muddled. Mac users have
memory of a Microsoft product they literally rejec- heaped scorn on Microsoft’s decision to adopt the
ted, and naturally they prefer the present. ribbon throughout Windows 8, saying they prefer
Apple’s “simple and elegant” user interface designs.
Most Mac switchers hear “Windows” and visualize But are those opinions justified?
the interfaces from whatever versions of Windows
and Office they used before they switched—usually As it turns out, there is a nearly perfect test case we
Windows XP and Office 2003—that have been ra- can use to compare the two companies’ approaches
dically overhauled. to user interface design. Both Microsoft and Apple
recently released significant updates to their flagship
digital photo management/editing programs in the
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past year: Windows Live Photo Gallery 2011 makes
extensive use of the ribbon; Apple’s iPhoto ’11 re-
presents the latest iteration of a product that was
introduced in 2002. At the time, Apple called iPhoto’s
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user interface “simple and elegant.”
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2. 07/09/2011 08:57
blog.bestlaptopbattery.co.uk
Which user interface do you prefer? Apple vs. Microsoft
At its “Back to the Mac” event in late 2010, Apple Page 3: Changing the view
chose to lead off the announcements with iLife ’11,
and iPhoto was up first. Digital photos figure pro- You really can’t ask for a better head-to-head com-
minently in advertising from both Apple and Mi- parison than this: Microsoft’s ribbon versus the
crosoft. That’s no surprise. Managing digital photos traditional pull-down menus used in iPhoto.
is something everyone everywhere does with their
computer. It’s fair to say both companies have made
major investments and placed big bets here.
In this post, I’ll show you what you have to do to
accomplish specific tasks using these two programs.
My goal isn’t to declare a winner, but rather to pro-
vide a more detailed look at each program’s design
and to discuss the design principles underlying each
one. If you’re a Windows user, you can see where Page 4: Editing photos
Microsoft has “borrowed” from Apple. If you’re a
Mac user, you can see how the Windows UI has This is where the comparison is most interesting.
evolved in the past five years. Microsoft’s design puts every photo-editing tool in
the ribbon. With iPhoto, Apple has editing tools in
Some of the differences between the two programs menus and editing panes, with access to some com-
are purely esthetic, but there are significant func- mon tasks well hidden.
tional differences as well. I’ve taken a task-centric
approach here so that I can show the similarities
and highlight the differences.
I’ve divided the comparison into four distinct areas,
each of which gets its own page. Here’s an index, if
you want to jump straight to a specific page.
Page 2: The main interface
There are a surprising number of similarities Page 5: Simple or cluttered?
between the two programs, and one very large
difference. Ultimately, the decisions that UI designers at Apple
and Microsoft have settled on reflect much larger
design principles. I’ve included a description of those
principles and some conclusions here.
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3. 07/09/2011 08:57
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Which user interface do you prefer? Apple vs. Microsoft
The main interface
Here’s a closer look at the primary user interface
for each program—the part that lets you browse
through your collection of digital photos.
This is what you see when you open Windows Live
Photo Gallery: The similarities are striking. Both programs use a
traditional browsing view, with a navigation pane
on the left and photos from the selected location/
album on the right.
In the navigation pane, Apple’s font palette is thick
and bold; Microsoft’s default fonts are smaller, ligh-
ter, and thinner. Those differences are mostly esthe-
tic, but another aspect of the navigation pane is
functional: In Microsoft’s vision, the primary means
of navigation is through a tree control, in which all
or part of the folder hierarchy can be collapsed or
expanded with a click of the mouse.
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And this is the main iPhoto window:
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4. 07/09/2011 08:57
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Which user interface do you prefer? Apple vs. Microsoft
You can think of each tab on the ribbon as the equi-
valent of a pull-down menu. But an old-school menu
is really just a flat list of commands, with cascading
menus listing additional commands for some op-
tions. Using the ribbon, the choices on each tab are
similar, except they’re arranged from side to side, in
groups using a mix of icons and text. Some unique
visual controls are mixed in as well, like this list of
themes for slide shows.
iPhoto uses the standard menu bar for an OS X app,
which is always at the top of the window. That can
be inconvenient on a very large monitor if the iPhoto
window is anywhere other than at the top of the
screen. But most Mac users long ago adapted to
this convention.
You’ll notice the ribbon isn’t visible in the screen for
Photo Gallery above. That’s because I made a simple
customization. It’s a feature included specifically to
address the concerns of those who think the ribbon
is cluttered, ugly, and messy. Double-click any tab
heading to collapse the ribbon so that it looks indis-
tinguishable from a traditional menu bar.
Click any tab heading and the contents of that tab
appear, ready for you to make a selection, after
which the tab’s contents disappear again. In this
configuration, the tab headings work exactly like the
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top-level choices on a menu bar. Double-click a tab
heading to change the view so the contents of the rib-
bon always appear. This is the Home ribbon, which
contains the most commonly used commands:
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5. 07/09/2011 08:57
blog.bestlaptopbattery.co.uk
Which user interface do you prefer? Apple vs. Microsoft
Both programs offer a selection of common com- The Windows 8 blog, with its epic posts from Steven
mands in an always-visible toolbar at the bottom Sinofsky and the Windows team, is just the latest
of the program window. For Windows Live Photo in a long line of similar efforts. Jensen Harris, who
Gallery, these include two Rotate commands (coun- led the development of the original ribbon in Office
terclockwise and clockwise), as well as a Zoom sli- 2007, wrote an eight-part series of blog posts titled
der. iPhoto offers a Search command (click the ma- “Why the UI?”
gnifying glass to reveal a search box) and a Zoom
slider on the left, a Slideshow command (not shown) I am certain that Apple’s designers do just as much
in the center, and five buttons on the right that ex- thinking, research, prototyping, and testing as their
pose different parts of the iPhoto interface. counterparts in Redmond. But they don’t talk about
that work. Instead, the results are described in press
Here’s what you see at the top and bottom of each releases and promotional web pages with terms
program window. like “easier than ever” and“incredibly easy.”
The thing is, those adjectives refer to specific pro-
ducts and activities, and not to the user interface as
a whole. With iPhoto ‘11, Apple lavished a tremen-
dous amount of attention on its revenue-producing
services, like the ability to create cards, calendars,
and books—a lucrative business at a minimum of
$29.99 each.
In the lower right corner of the iPhoto window is
a second menu bar, containing the five commands
shown above. When you include the nine main
menu options, that’s a total of 14 places to click,
compared to five for Windows Live Photo Gallery.
On the next page, we’ll see how well that works.
Simple or cluttered?
If you walk through the process of creating one of
One enormous difference between Microsoft and these products, it is indeed easy, and Microsoft has
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Apple is the amount of public communication each no competing business.
company puts out. In the last five years, Microsoft
engineers and executives have written the equiva- On tasks that involve free services, Microsoft and
lent of several big books about the process of desi- Apple are more evenly matched. For instance, sha-
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gning and building the user interface for Windows ring to a Facebook album from Windows Live Photo
and Office. Gallery takes one click from the Create tab and a
trip through this dialog box:
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6. 07/09/2011 08:57
blog.bestlaptopbattery.co.uk
Which user interface do you prefer? Apple vs. Microsoft
terms. I’ve shrunk these screens down so you can
focus on the general layout of controls rather than
the details. Which one looks cluttered to you? For
what should be a simple editing task, there’s an
awful lot of cruft in that iPhoto screen.
From iPhoto, the process is simpler—maybe a little
too much so, in fact, as with one click I inadvertently
uploaded 200 photos from a local folder on my Mac
to the wrong Facebook album. Oops.
Ultimately, my experience with the two programs
Ultimately, I have to disagree with anyone who calls says both do an excellent job of making photo ma-
the Windows Live Photo Gallery interface “messy” nagement and editing tools available to a nontech-
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or “cluttered.” It might be fair to call it “full”—in- nical audience. Each has its own set of quirks, but
deed, the ability to put a lot of commands into a tab each one also rewards users who spend some time
without appearing bloated is one of the design goals learning the program.
of the people who designed the ribbon.
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If you go back to 2008 and look at the version of Win-
This side-by-side comparison of the two programs at dows Live Photo Gallery that was available before
work (cropping a photo) makes that point in visual Windows 7 shipped, you can see the tremendous
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7. 07/09/2011 08:57
blog.bestlaptopbattery.co.uk
Which user interface do you prefer? Apple vs. Microsoft
evolution of the user interface. That version used
a hybrid of a menu and toolbar that looks positi-
vely primitive compared to the current incarnation.
The Windows Live programs released in 2009 with
Windows 7 were better looking but still don’t have
the cohesive design that more recent versions do.
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