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)
Posts in category What were they thinking.
What were they thinking: Gmail's lonely button
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.
What were they thinking: iTunes 10
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….
- No titlebar
- Vertically placed
- Smaller then all other system buttons.
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.
Is the iPad ready for the world?
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!
What were they thinking: QuickTime X
Today I want to start a new category of blog posts which discuss to bad design decisions made by companies. To start with, I want to draw your attention to Quicktime. I stopped using Windows and started using OS X back in early 2007. I have usually not looked back and regretted my move. OS X is really an solid Operating System. Which at the time didnt appear to have a formidable rival(Windows XP). Today with Windows 7, things have heated up between the operating system powerhouses and it it difficult to compare the feature sets of the 2. When there is a overlap, its interesting when making a comparison.
Since 2007 I have missed Windows Media Player for one of its best and most fundamental features which is woefully missing in QuickTime. READ MORE »