Lately I’ve been trying out iGoogle. It bothered me that it was always three columns; that’s too many for my little iPod touch. I finally gave up searching through the help and googled iGoogle columns, and found instructions on changing the number of columns.
I don’t know yet if this will be enough for the layout to fit my iPod touch’s screen, but it’s definitely a start!
The one category nobody’s talked about when comparing Acorn and Pixelmator: Will the company spam you?
So far, I’ve been spammed by Pixelmator’s partners twice. I posted to their support board asking them if they were aware of this, and they deleted the post. I’ve posted the same question again, on the grounds that maybe (just maybe) they deleted the post by mistake. It’s also possible they didn’t know about the spam runs. Still, it isn’t looking too good.
For those curious, why do I categorize it as spam?
There’s other factors, too (like I don’t know the company that sent it) but in all honesty, those two are enough to categorize it as spam: It’s unsolicited commercial email.
On the other hand, Flying Meat has never spammed me.
Pixelmator has at this point eliminated themselves from the finals. Looking at the products, it makes me sad that one of them had to win this way. But there’s no way I’m buying something from spamtards.
The Finder is generally pretty good at reformatting the data column to show dates without truncation. Give it enough space, and it will display the date as “Friday, November 23, 2007, 12:52 PM.” A little less and it is supposed to drop the Friday part. A little less and it switches to a numeric format.
Unfortunately, it seems less than perfect. Sometimes it keeps the long format with columns that are too narrow, as seen in the following picture:
Why? I don’t know. It seems they put so much effort into this already, it’s hard to imagine why they didn’t make the final push to make date columns always usable.
Radar #5612934.
A few days ago I re-added a search field to this site. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was; the CSS was a little fussy, but that’s more of a fun puzzle than a hard problem.
However, it took a long time to get the search field itself (which uses <input type="search"/>) working nicely on the iPod touch. Of course, it turned out to be my fault: My CSS had an extra } in it just above the entry that limited the field’s width. So the width is properly limited to something reasonable now. On the other hand, the search field doesn’t seem to get a different appearance from the text field or the search history. I can live with that.
It seems to degrade fairly nicely on other browsers. Of course, it doesn’t get the grey “click here to search”-type text, but I don’t really feel that’s worth adding. Hopefully, this will be adopted by the standard and end up in other browsers, too. In the meantime, I can live with this limitation, too. It certainly makes the code cleaner.
More on the input tag another time…
This will surprise no one, but Mobile Safari is not exactly like desktop Safari. Most of these differences are limitations, but one stands out in my mind as a feature.
Namely, that’s the ability to zoom out to get the big picture of a web page.
It’s true that this is a lot less necessary on the desktop due to the large screens on many systems, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t necessary at all. On my PowerBook, a lot of things scroll. Even on this iMac I’m using write now, the “New Post” screen scrolls.
A large image is already zoomed out in desktop Safari, so why not a large web page? I should be able to hit, say, F7 and have the page fit my window and click to zoom in on a part of the page.
While Apple is at it, they can add some indication that you’ve been zoomed out to images.
Here’s an example of the current view, using Macworld’s website:
You see a bit of the page, and can scroll for the rest.
But here’s what the zoomed out look would look like:
(In reality, this might be zooming out too much.)
Now imagine that scrubbing with the mouse pointer shows the area in more detail:
We haven’t got an obvious win yet, but we’re well on the way to something useful. I bet Apple’s engineers could make this an obvious win.
My brother bought a PS3 a few days ago. My wife just saw it when I was poking around at its wireless controls. She said “It looks like a panini grill.”
The worst part is: she’s right.
Wait, did I say worst part? Because the worst-er part is that when I shared this with mx, he told me that the rumors are the early models got as hot as a grill, too.
Games look incredible, though, don’t get me wrong. It’s just not my kind of thing. I’m still searching for a Wii.
But if only it had a way to open! Then I could make grilled cheese, if I also had some cheese.
aria2, a command line utility to download a file from multiple mirrors simultaneously. For Unix, Win32 and Mac OS X.
I’m leaving this post as is for posterity and because I think the point is valid… but the target definitely isn’t! Check out Ken Chase’s excellent reply below. If you look at this discount as a bonus for beta testers, it becomes really reasonable. I wasn’t aware that OmniFocus’s beta was that wide-spread. So this goes from a “Suck eggs, Omni!” to a “Well done, Omni!”
I remember years ago asking The Omni Group about a feature that was critical to me in OmniWeb. I’d heard they were adding it soon, so I asked them for details.
The guy who replied1 told me something very simple: “If it doesn’t do what you want, wait. Don’t buy anything that doesn’t already do what you want.”Over the years since, I’ve really appreciated this advice, and wished every customer would live by that rule, and every software company would advocate the same rule. It’s simple honesty, really. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like The Omni Group still lives by this rule, because OmniFocus is now available with introductory pricing that goes away as soon as the final release ships, pressuring people to buy now. How could beta software possibly deliver?2
Maybe it was a Wil Shipley philosophy that Omni has left behind. I must admit, I’m not sure that Delicious Monster lives by this rule, but I strongly suspect they do. Whatever the cause, it’s a shame Omni lost it. I like honest companies; they’re refreshing.3
Mac OS X Hints describes how to make Leopard’s menu bar opaque. Much easier on the eyes.
