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Archive for the 'Apple' Category

More Bad UI

Does the button to the right look "enabled" to you? Does it even look like a button? It looks to me to be "greyed" or "dimmed" - states that we've been conditioned to believe are "disabled" on the Mac. Unfortunately, in this case, it's a perfectly active button! I say "bah." I say "fix it." […]

More on Apple UI

Vinay finishes up his big post on Apple's dip in UI quality with this: apple is still the premiere user interface company. they still pay a lot of attention to the user interface and human computer interaction. they're just losing their touch, and need to pay more attention to what they are doing with all […]

NetNewsWire

NetNewsWire (Pro) - $29.95 or $39.95 if you dilly-dally - is now available from http://ranchero.com/. I've been using every beta, and frankly, I would continue using the Lite version if it had the subject/creator/date headers. As it stands, I coughed up my $29.95, not necessarily because I had to or even wanted to (to use […]

PowerBook-less

It's weird being PowerBook-less. I never used the PB much, but just as I intend to go watch Boston Public while writing a longer blog entry about Mario Kart, I realize I can't. The guy I sold it to got it today. Yay for him! Now, where in the heck is my 12", Apple? C'mon… […]

Mac OS X: Where’d Our UI Go?

Matt and I were IMing today regarding Apple's blatant disregard for its own UI lately. Matt's got a further post up here, called "Death of a Dogcow," in which he lists three primary flaws and many other smaller ones. Let's investigate a bit more.

PBZone: Decency? What’s That?

Adam posts a story about an Apple Store employee in North Carolina who was fired for ostensibly accidentally posting screenshots of internal tools to his personal, public Web site. While I in no way believe that he was in the right to do so, and while I in no way believe that Apple was anything […]

Another Safari Feature

Here's another Safari feature I'd like to see: regard open windows as something more sacred than they're currently regarded. In other words, if I have four browser windows minimized (perhaps sites I forgot about for the past 20 minutes while I worked on something else, or visited other sites), and I hit command-Q, I should […]

Say Something ‘Bout Safari

Now is your chance to say something about Safari with perhaps the best chance to influence its development, UI, and eventual outcome. David Hyatt is soliciting ideas. My own list, off the top of my head: Better cookie management Something "better" than "Tabbed Browsing," but not until the 1.5 or 2.0 release No jack of […]

Encoding DVDs

I see this in top when encoding DVDs (specifically: when waiting for the Status to indicate that the Encoder is done creating an MPEG-2 movie): 3282 EncoderSer 101.5% 5:28.78 9 128 222 13.4M+ 7.11M 18.2M+ 136M+ 3281 TNSPosterS 0.0% 0:00.83 3 52 137 852K 5.82M 2.94M 113M 3280 TNSVideoSe 0.0% 0:00.35 3 48 60 496K […]

Escaping Ken Burns

The Property List for iMovie3 (com.apple.iMovie3.plist) gives some hints towards escaping the Ken Burns effect: <key>Option autoApplyPanZoomToImportedStills: %d</key> <true/> and <key>PanZoomEndZoom</key> <real>1.000000000000000e+00</real> <key>PanZoomOffsetEndX</key> <real>0.000000000000000e+00</real> <key>PanZoomOffsetEndY</key> <real>-1.907349e-06</real> <key>PanZoomOffsetStartX</key> <real>0.000000000000000e+00</real> <key>PanZoomOffsetStartY</key> <real>0.000000000000000e+00</real> <key>PanZoomStartZoom</key> <real>1.000000000000000e+00</real>

iMovie 3 is pretty awesome. I posted the other day about how it allowed me to capture video from my TiVo flawlessly, not dropping a frame while I checked email, launched applications, and otherwise went about my normal work day. I'm absolutely happy that iMovie 3 is "in a window" instead of "gosh darn it […]

Pragmatic Dave Not so Right?

Seems Pragmatic Dave needs to be a bit more diligent in his research. He says that turning on bold fonts in the terminal takes over the CPU and "ls -l /usr/bin hogs the machine for achingly long seconds." Uhhh,

iMovie 3

Today I hooked my TiVo up to my DV camera (a Sony DSR PD-150) with stereo and s-video cables, and from there via Firewire into my Mac. This allowed me to record live TV (or actually, a program I had recorded on my TiVo). I used iMovie 3, and the best darn thing about it […]

12 People Use Opera?

According to Chuq (this is sarcasm: deal with it), twelve whole people use Opera for the Mac! Surely he must be including the developers themselves, as well as their significant others. And their pets. The reality: Opera is threatening to leave the Mac. Y'know what? Fine. Like Chuq says, they had two years to produce […]

New Macs, Same Conversation

Apple today released (quite silently) new Macs, huge discounts on LCDs (chopping $3499 to $1999!), and a few other things here and there. Slashdot, of course, covered the news, and the ensuing conversation can be summed up as follows: Anonymous Coward: Macs suck Anonymous Coward: You suck l33tD00dz: I want one Anonymous Coward: all your […]