Good review, but I thought the bit about the back button was strange:
There's also a Back button (and a Forward button, when applicable). The entire platform's usability is much enhanced by the universal nature of this Back button. Consider this typical scenario:
You're reading an email message that contains a link to an article on a website.
You click the link and read the article.
You now want to return to continue reading the email message.
Now what? In most systems, you have to close the web browser and find your own way back to the email program, hoping that it still displays the message as you left it. With the universal Back button, you simply click Back, just as you would when you tire of a web page. Backtracking works across applications, as it certainly should, because that's how users think.
This really only seems to be true if compared against iOS. But pretty much everything else on the planet supports some way of getting back to where you started, even if it involves launching another application then simply switching tasks back to where you were (e.g. Windows or OS X).
There's also a Back button (and a Forward button, when applicable). The entire platform's usability is much enhanced by the universal nature of this Back button. Consider this typical scenario:
You're reading an email message that contains a link to an article on a website. You click the link and read the article. You now want to return to continue reading the email message. Now what? In most systems, you have to close the web browser and find your own way back to the email program, hoping that it still displays the message as you left it. With the universal Back button, you simply click Back, just as you would when you tire of a web page. Backtracking works across applications, as it certainly should, because that's how users think.
This really only seems to be true if compared against iOS. But pretty much everything else on the planet supports some way of getting back to where you started, even if it involves launching another application then simply switching tasks back to where you were (e.g. Windows or OS X).