Yesterday Microsoft released a pretty big update to SkyDrive that gave all users Dropbox like functionality on Windows and Mac OS X. However for some magical reason, Microsoft decided to ship the OS X client with a very irritating icon in the Dock along with the title bar. Removing the dock icon is surprisingly easy. Keep these instructions close you can do this with all OS X Applications. Here’s what you need to do…
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On Wedneday I went to watch a student run stage performance called CSE Revue 2010 The Dark Byte. They made this awesome parody of the Inception Movie trailer!… called RECEPTION! I present it to you all here and now in all its HD glory!…(Here is a link to the YouTube Std-Def Version if the 40mb stream is too demanding for you)
I noticed that my “What were they thinking” line of posts have been me making fun of apple products. Today I thought I’d post something about Gmail’s lonely button. Here it is in all its glory!…
Right there in the centre of the screenshot is Gmail’s loanly “Compose mail” button. Hiding in the sidebar between the text based html links. I don’t see why that button deserves to steal so much of the users attention. I would think that a prominent text link would be more suited to the role. But wait! It turns out that the button isnt alone. The address book functionality has a “New Contact” button in the same place. Yea sure its consistent across apps. But does it steal users attention unnecessarily? I think it does. Im not a regular user of the web interface, let me know what you think in the comments.
Apple has been known to be a company that puts a great deal of emphasis on ensuring that applications meet users expectations. This can easily be seen by the strict review process that all iPhone applications have to go through. While watching the live keynote at 3am(Sydney time) I quickly noticed one very interesting feature within iTunes 10…
For those that cant notice what it is, the ‘close’, ‘minimise’ and ‘optimise?’ buttons are kinda… weird….
After thinking about this strange layout I have a theory as to why they did this. Since iTunes 8(or 9… im not too sure) the pesky green ‘optimise?’ button has not done what all other apple applications do… optimise the size of the application window for the content thats inside. Yea sure some applications (like firefox and even microsoft word for mac) choose not to adhere to Apples interesting philosophy of ‘optimise?’ and choose to make the button behave in a ‘maximise’ manner like on windows computers. For some weird reason, the iTunes 8 button collapsed the application window to the mini-player mode.
Does Apple think that making the buttons appear to be different to the rest of the OS mean that users will be reminded that pressing them wont do what they expect?.. I don’t know.. I most certainly don’t like it! I think today is the first day that i haven’t been able to minimise iTunes by double clicking. Sigh. Nothing I can do now but get used to it. What a bad fruit.
Playing around with the iPad you can feel that it could be more complete. In particular, here is one such example of what the App Store looked like a few weeks back…
Yes.. Its not very pretty. At least we now know that apple might be using HTML to render the AppStore!