Actually what bothers me more about ecto is its strange juxtaposition between modern, Mac OS X-era user interface affordances and strangely anachronistic UI details. The program has option drawers that pop out smoothly, sheets that slide down gracefully, and Aqua-style buttons that would look at home in any Apple-authored software. The whole thing, at first glance, looks very current.
One Window to Rule Them All
But then there’s the list of Entries and Drafts, where users can find their twenty or so most recent postings to their Web site. This part of the interface, curiously, resides in its own window, separated from the editing section. I guess that makes a kind of simplistic sense, but it strikes me as a throwback to the early 1990’s, when applications threw up a new window for each segment of the user experience.
What I’d like to see is for ecto to make a simple change to its layout and consolidate its two main windows into one — more along the lines of Apple’s Mail, PulpFiction or Hog Bay Notebook. Doing so would remove a lot of the awkwardness of jumping back and forth between two windows, at least for me. And, just by chance, I happen to have a quick little comp to show the ecto developers what I have in mind right here.