It was only yesterday that I was rounding the corners and preparing the champagne for the re-release of the Word Dice. Well a few hours ago Version 2.0 of the Word Dice went live for you to use. Use the Scrabbinator wisely. Dicement day has arrived! Here’s whats new: Continue reading
A few weeks ago, I released version 1 of my Scrabble Scrabbinator aka the WordDice. When I originally released it, I despised the how the content was laid out and how so much screen space was being wasted by content that is rarely used. My interest in HCI definitely fueled my guilt.
Recently I upgraded my Microsoft Office for Mac suite to the 2011 edition. I havn’t really used it much since, however I have recently started using it and have discovered a very annoying issue.
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.