Apple's Font Palette: A burden not a boon

To be perfectly honest, there are things I prefer about how Windows operates. It’s few & far between mind you, but they do exist. For instance, Apple’s Font Palette. It sucks.

I understand their concept – unified, system-wide toolset available to any program – but it has its shortcomings. In Windows, it’s typically handled on a per-program basis, and these programs typically have instituted the BIU (Bold, Italic, Underline) Button concept. It’s a concept that I think is well-implemented as a whole.

Why? Because no matter where you move the window, the BIU buttons are always right there, relative the same spot of the window. Yes there’s the downside that if you’re working with multiple windows the screen space required to display these elements will be repeated on each instance of the window. BUT, the Apple solution isn’t really much better: You have a floating palette that’s in the way of seeing other stuff anyhow. And if you’re working with multiple windows, now you have to move the thing around constantly to keep it out of the way of your work.

It’s especially frustrating with things like iChat. There’s absolutely no font controls on the iChat window, so if you want to manipulate the fonts you’re sending across the interwebs, you have to pull out the font palette (Command+T) and then fiddle with that. Which isn’t much a burden, until you move your iChat window around somewhere else on the screen. Then suddenly, the font controls are awkwardly distant from the fonts you’re trying to highlight & manipulate, so you have to move the font palette, which means each window move requires moving two windows. Senseless.

And what if you have two iChat windows going? Then the controls are probably in a decent spot for one, but inconvenient for the other.

I wish Apple would make this more user-friendly. In Pages, they have instituted BIU controls at the top, which is a step in the right direction. They also have a “drawer” of font controls, which I think is really a good compromise: They can keep the system-wide font palette, but instead of a floating monstrosity that is inconvenient to everything, they should make it “dockable” to windows, like a drawer.

I haven’t quite conceptually finished what I’m thinking of, but I think it’s getting close. Still though, even my half-baked concept would probably be better than their “palette” implementation.