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The long list of appleisms in the Aqua UI go on and on. apple seems to pride itself with these quirks but when they are subtle they can lead to user confusion. The subject of today's abuse is the ellipses in menu items.
What? There are ellipses in menu items? You mean just randomly? No, ther actually is are very intentional time they are added to the end of menu items. Genearally they are used when selecting the command from the menu alone won't finish the command. Go ahead and look at the File menu of the browser you are in. Close and Work Offline are commands that just suddenly work. Save As and Open do have the ellipses because you need to enter the name of a file or page to finish it.
But let's say you had an item on the menu "Crash Browser" (in Netscape 2.0 this was accomplished with complex javascripts). As a good UI since the command has potentially sever effects dialog pops up asking "Crash Browser: Are You Sure?" So should this menu command have ellipses? On Gnome, Java, KDE, and Windows, yes. On MacOSX, no.
Label the menu item with a trailing ellipsis ("...") only if the command requires further input from the user before it can be performed. Do not add an ellipsis to items that only present a confirmation dialog (such as Delete), or that do not require further input (such as Properties, Preferences or About). [ GNOME Human Interface Guidelines ]
Ellipses (...) are punctuation marks that indicate the omission of one or more words that must be supplied in order to make a construction complete. In your menus, you can use ellipses in a similar way: to indicate that the command issued by a menu item needs more specification in order to make it complete.
If a menu item does not fully specify a command and users need a dialog box to finish the specification, use an ellipsis after the menu item. For example, after choosing Save As..., users are presented with a file chooser to specify a file name and location.
Do not use an ellipsis mark simply to indicate that a secondary or utility window will appear. For example, choosing Preferences displays a dialog box; because that display is the entire effect of the command, however, Preferences is not followed by an ellipsis.
Notice that every item in a menu that first opens a dialog requiring additional information must be labelled with a trailing ellipsis (...) (e.g. Save As..., Open...). There's no space between the menu item and the "...". A simple confirmation dialog is not considered a dialog that requires additional information. [KDE Standards]
However, not every command that results in the display of a window should include an ellipsis. Do not include an ellipsis for commands that simply display a window or view or change the existing view within a window. Similarly, do not use ellipses for commands that display a collection of objects or options, unless the intended action requires that the user select or confirm the selection of one or more elements of the collection. Also, do not include an ellipsis for commands that may result in a confirming message box. [Microsoft Windows User Experience]
Java comes the closest to no explicitly prohibiting it, but it is a very long stretch to say that a confirmation dialog is "more specification." And What about Aqua?
An ellipsis character ( ) after a menu item or button label indicates to the user that additional information is required to complete a command. You should use an ellipsis in the following cases:
An action that requires further user input to complete or presents an alert allowing the user to cancel the action. Examples include Find, Go To, Open, Page Setup, and Print.
An action that opens a settings window. The main function of settings windows is to allow the user to change some aspect of the application, not the document content. Examples include Set Title, Preferences, and Options.
A very long wided debate can be had about where ellipses means "not done yet" vs. "window coming" (and I am sure at some point they had one or more of those in Cupertino), and if someone was determined to make their app behave properly on Apple they might consider changing the text when an Apple platform is detected. But that's just too much effort for a subtle cue that most users probobly miss anyway.
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