@Scott: See the article I referenced about the source list; It isn't new with 10.4's Mail.app; it has a long history in Mac OS X apps, dating from iTunes. It is now present in Address Book, iCal, iPhoto, Mail, Safari, Finder, Font Book, Automator, Disk Utility, and XCode. It is also used in many third-party apps such as NetNewsWire, Comictastic, Omniweb, and FontExplorer X, to name a few that I use.
I would think that no two of these apps' source lists behave in exactly the same way. It's certainly not the end of the world, but I think everyone involved would be served better if there was a standard widget that handled sources lists, Apple, Third-party developers, and users. My pet annoyance is that not all of these implementations support in-place editing of source names: I can't edit the name of an iPhoto album or NetNewsWire feed by double-clicking on it, yet I can edit an Address Book group this way.
Again, this is just an example. Apple has certainly not done nothing with the UI layer in the last few years, but it seems to me that the major new frameworks added since 10.2 have no parallel in the UI layer, even though Apple has clearly been putting many custom widgets in their own apps.
by Nick — Jan 01
I would think that no two of these apps' source lists behave in exactly the same way. It's certainly not the end of the world, but I think everyone involved would be served better if there was a standard widget that handled sources lists, Apple, Third-party developers, and users. My pet annoyance is that not all of these implementations support in-place editing of source names: I can't edit the name of an iPhoto album or NetNewsWire feed by double-clicking on it, yet I can edit an Address Book group this way.
Again, this is just an example. Apple has certainly not done nothing with the UI layer in the last few years, but it seems to me that the major new frameworks added since 10.2 have no parallel in the UI layer, even though Apple has clearly been putting many custom widgets in their own apps.