Joshua Kaufman interviews Loren Brichter on Tweetie's reload gesture. A good, non-technical read on finding the right way to present a feature, adding a custom gesture, and providing feedback.
iTunes zoom behavior
iTunes prior to 9.0 used a click on the zoom widget to convert to the mini player, leaving people like me who actually like to zoom a window option-clicking it.
iTunes 9.0 finally fixed this. A click on the zoom widget actually zoomed the window!
iTunes 9.0.1 changed it back to the old behavior. Many people were happy, I imagine. But people who wanted to zoom iTunes windows (or, I imagine, valued standard behavior) were left sad.
It turns out you can get the click-to-zoom behavior back:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes zoom-to-window -bool true
Tip of the hat to zadr on Twitter for this tweet.
John C. Welch (aka Bynkii, Angry Mac Bastard): Password Changes in Open Directory (One burst of profanity). For us Mac users who are sometimes a little too smug about the Mac's user interface. (The podcast: Angry Mac Bastards. Extreme profanity there, though.)
Mike Rundle: iPhone Application Design Patterns
Three20
I downloaded the latest version of Three20 today by Joe Hewitt. I read through some of the code and ran through the included "catalog" demo. If you've used the Facebook application, you've seen early versions of a lot of these controls.
I haven't written any code against it yet and I'm not up to reviewing it, but I will say this: The controls seem to fully work. They're pretty, and the code is clean.
Possibly the piece that will save me the most time going forward is the photo browser. I'm not sure yet when I'll need this, but doing it myself would be a lot of effort at my current knowledge of Cocoa Touch:
Less visually impressive, maybe, are the buttons:
But it's worth pointing out that in addition to having more varied styling, these are built on UIView not UIBarItem. These are going to be very useful. I'm not exaggerating when I say they'll make it possible to write better applications.
Three20 also has some tab controls. The top one in particular has a great sideways scroll to it, and I think look and behavior adds up to great UI device, which I can use immediately:
Next, some styled views:
Not pictured:
- Three20 includes "disk" based caching for network images.
- Three20 provides easy tools for building a text representation of the application state. This will make restoring state between runs much easier.
Some of what's in the library has been rendered unnecessary by iPhone OS 3.0, but there is enough added to make it very compelling. I plan on putting it to use soon.
Mac OS X interface flaws
Here are a few things I've noticed that just don't make sense in Mac OS X v10.5.
- Desktop & Screen Saver rolled into a single preference pane. Why? Are we that convinced that one day we're going to have a screen saver running in the background as our desktop, and the only way to configure it is to have it in the same preference panel?
- Keyboard & Mouse are a single preference panel (but Trackpad is separate). Again, why? The only conceivable answer is that Apple thought it important that the battery levels for both the keyboard and mouse are in a single preference pane, which also has an option to add a new device. But the "add device" functionality is already duplicated in Bluetooth.
- Exposé & Spaces are a single preference panel. Are they related? Well, a little, but not that much. And how does Dashboard fit in here, which is also thrown in for fun?
- Translucent Menu Bar is in Desktop, rather than Appearance.
- Scroll bar behavior is in Appearance.
- The number of recent items to show in menus is in Appearance.
- The option to automatically adjust keyboard back lighting is under Displays. (But typing "Dim" into the preference pane search only hilights the Energy Saver panel.)