Posts Tagged ‘Human Interface’

Things I don’t like about Leopard

Tuesday, October 30th, 2007

There’s a lot of things I like about Leopard, and I plan on writing about them soon. However, I found it easier to write about the things I don’t like. This is probably mostly because there are so few of them.

  • You can change a window’s view settings, and you can make them the default, but there’s no way to say “I don’t like this, just use the defaults for this window.” I really wish Apple would stop taking this feature away. I think this is the third time they’ve done so.
  • Finder doesn’t bother remembering what view you’re in. Start in a folder in icon view, and open a subfolder of it. Switch to list view. Click the back view. You’re in your original folder, but you’re still in list view. Why? I can’t imagine anyone would ever want this. Well, maybe they would with cover flow…
  • Which directly ties into this: Cover flow shouldn’t be an additional view, it should be an addition to any existing view. Cover flow is really just taking the bottom part of the window and generating previews for it. Why shouldn’t this work in icon view or (especially) column view?
  • Stacks on the dock are a complete train wreck. I hope there’s a defaults write to disable this.
  • Safari’s Find command? Sucks. Try again, Apple.

Safari for Leopard’s Find takes a step back from the Safari 3 beta

Monday, October 29th, 2007

I’ve written before about how much I dislike Safari 2’s find. The Safari 3 beta really improved things by doing a much better job of highlighting matches. Actually, it was really good:

Safari 3 in Leopard still does a better job of highlighting than Safari 2, but it introduces a new problem. The highlight now looks like a mere background color change, and the fact that it actually blocks out some of the surrounding text is no longer obvious.

Before, finding “mac” in “machine” produced mac with a strong border around it, obviously blocking out something. Now, it produces something that looks like “mac ine.” Yuck.

If there’s going to be a border there, it needs to be obvious. If Apple wants subtle, I’d suggest removing the border entirely and doing a gradual alpha blend like the System Preferences spotlight. The important part is really the brightness change.

However, it’s worth noting: Find shouldn’t be subtle. It should be as in-your-face as possible about what it’s found and where exactly it is. (And I can’t quite describe how, but the animation seems to have been made more subtle, too.)

Overall? Not much better than Safari 2.

iPhone UI Guidelines

Monday, October 1st, 2007

Apple offers iPhone Human Interface Guidelines.

Please transverse me at an object level!

Wednesday, April 4th, 2007

From time to time I like to highlight bad interface decisions. The pomposity of this text made me laugh. But now I feel so very dirty.

PDF Consultant

Did nobody ever point this insanity out? Who would ever think this was a good idea?

How Find should work

Thursday, March 29th, 2007

For years, Find has marked its matches by highlighting the text it finds. This was great in 1980 with black and white screens, where highlighting meant inverting. It was even decent in 1990, where multi-color text on a white background was the norm, and the highlighting meant changing the background color. But in today’s era of ransom note-like text, where it’s quite possible that the web page’s background consists of many background colors (including, quite possibly, the highlight color) it just isn’t enough to grab the eye.

Back in the 1990s, Apple had a solution to this for their help system.

Apple Guide coach mark

That would be a great model for Find. However, we can do even better. Seen how System Preferences on Tiger works yet?

System Preferences

So here’s how Find should work (screenshot produced by blending a “normal” screenshot from OmniWeb with one manipulated with OmniDazzle). It’s pretty clear what was found, isn’t it?

Find, as it should be in 2007

Now, I’m not meaning to pick on OmniWeb in particular. Safari should do this. Text Wrangler should do this. Xcode should do this. For that matter, every application with a Find command should probably do this. We’ve had the technology for years. It’s time to use it to make life easier for users. C’mon Apple. Make this easy for us.

Beating a dead horse

Tuesday, December 12th, 2006

My relationship with Microsoft Word for the Mac has always been a love/hate one. I can’t really describe why I love it – there’s just something about the way the main document window behaves that fills me with word processing joy, as stupid as that sounds (once the keyboard shortcuts have been de-Microsoft-ized, at least). However, the rest of the product seriously sucks.

We have multiple testing checklists that need to be followed, and items checked off, every build we’re seriously testing. I could go into a whole rant about these lists, but I think everyone who’s seen them (and especially had to use them) would agree with me on it. At the moment it has to be done, and that’s it.

Microsoft Word for Windows handles these with ease. It’s only when they’re brought over to my PowerBook that they start to cause problems.

The [[en:spinning wait cursor]] abound as I try to work with this document. A lot of it is caused by the documents being in Page Layout mode. Switching to Normal mode fixes this, but I hate Normal mode. It confuses me why I’d have to use it, considering how responsive Word for Windows is, even in Page Layout mode. Still, I can put up with this.

More significant, though: I fill this form out by repeating the formatting change that checks an item on the list. Sometimes I apply it to the wrong line, and then it’s time to Undo. Undo has about a 70% chance of crashing Word. Not every use of Undo, but just undoing this particular formatting change.

Seriously.

How did this ship? And how did Microsoft manage to release roughly ten minor updates to Microsoft Word without ever fixing this? Does the Mac team at Microsoft use Word on Windows for all their large documents? Are the Mac team at Microsoft perfect people who never use Undo? That’s a trick question. If they were perfect, Undo wouldn’t crash. (Not that I expect perfection. I can’t attain that myself, after all.)

This seriously, seriously sucks. It’s cost me serious amounts of time. What good is software that crashes all the time? Why do people – including me – keep paying for products like this?

“Programs that crash have been proven to be less useful than those that don’t.” — Apple Technote #117

Blubuntu

Wednesday, November 15th, 2006

Before my Beryl experiments, I briefly toyed with creating a new theme. I actually came up with something that I liked a lot. But upon returning to metacity I discovered that Edgy Eft has a theme that, while not perfect, is closer to what I want than what I came up with. A better starting place, if you will, though I’m still not very pleased with the title bars and will probably customize it at some point.

The theme name is Blubuntu. It is a pleasing theme with white and light grey backgrounds, accented with blue. In many ways, it’s exactly what I was looking for: A modernization of the old Apple System 7 theme.

You can install it with synaptic.

Blubuntu Screenshot

blubuntu-screen.png

Theme desires

Monday, October 30th, 2006

Here’s what I’m looking for in a theme:

  • Largely off-white. I’ve seen some cool stuff done with dark backgrounds, but it just isn’t for me. The cream you see behind this post is about as off-white as I’d get, and I think it’s a bit strong. (In fact, now that I noticed this, I’ll probably fix it before anyone even reads this post.)
  • Whiter controls. Most themes have buttons and controls the same color as the background. It all blends in together too much for my taste. The few themes that don’t have buttons that are darker than the background. I want lighter.
  • Color as an accent. While I don’t require the background color to be perfectly grey, I definitely prefer an off-white (as I mentioned above). But small amounts of color as an accent are nice.
  • Not distracting. Patterns, gradients and shadows are not for me.

Any ideas what qualifies? I realize I’m being picky here. I’d love to see a theme start from the Mac System 7 look, remove some of the patterned junk, and add a bit more color.

Things I miss on the Ubuntu desktop

Tuesday, October 17th, 2006

Been a while since I last updated, so here are a few random things I miss on the Ubuntu/GNOME desktop:

  • Top menu bar. C’mon, the jury is not out on the best location for the menu bar anymore. It’s been settled for all but the most die-hard users of operating systems that get it wrong (which is, unfortunately, most operating systems). At least offer a top menu bar as an option. I don’t think this will ever happen.
  • Custom date formats. I hate dd/mm/yyyy, mm/dd/yyyy, and so on. I want yyyy-mm-dd, which is actually the Canadian standard (even if it is infrequently used). I actually found several alleged solutions to this via google, but ultimately none of them actually worked.
  • Alt-tabbing while dragging. I can alt-tab between applications, and I can drag between applications, but I can’t alt-tab while dragging. This is something both Mac OS X and Windows have solved.
  • Stale forks. For idealistic/political reasons, up-to-date versions of some software are quite hard to install under Linux. Firefox and Thunderbird are great example of this.
  • Expose. I know there’s a hack to add it, but I’m looking for something more seamless. I imagine it’ll be in a future version.

Plug and play: Canon N656U

Thursday, September 21st, 2006

Last night I tried to connect my Canoscan N656U to a computer.

First, I tried the Mac. Connecting the device did nothing. Pushing the button on the device did nothing. A search of Canon’s website revealed a driver, but the installer seems to have been written by rabid monkeys. Eventually, I discovered how to make the installer work (you need to already be running on an admin account, because it doesn’t know how to authenticate) and restarted, to find… still nothing.

So after a few minutes of that, I decided to try to install on my Windows desktop. This worked a little better right from the start, as Windows at least noticed there was something there. I had to download a driver from Canon’s website and use some trickery to install it, but a few minutes later the scan button is launching Picasa2.

Verdict: Canon’s installers suck. Completely on Mac, almost completely on Windows.