7:44 PMThursday, 27 June 2002
Apple no longer even pretends to follow its own interface guidelines. Take the Window menu. According to the Aqua HIG:
Window menu items appear in this order: Minimize, Zoom, <separator>, <application-specific window commands>, <separator>, Bring All to Front (optional), <separator>, <list of open documents>. The Close command should appear in the File menu, below the Open command.
Let's take a sample of some apps which ship with Mac OS X. Here are the items which appear before the first separator.
- Finder, DVD Player: “Zoom Window”, “Minimize Window”
- Preview, Stickies: “Close Window”, “Miniaturize Window”
- Installer: “Close Window”, “Zoom Window”
- QuickTime Player: “Zoom Window”, “Minimize Window”, “Bring All to Front”, “Show Movie Info”
- Calculator, Sherlock: No Window menu
- Script Editor: <window list>
- TextEdit, iPhoto, Chess, Disk Copy, Console: “Close Window”, “Zoom Window”, “Minimize Window”
- System Preferences: “Close”, “Minimize”
- Address Book, Image Capture, AirPort Admin Utility: “Minimize”
- iTunes: “Minimize”, “Zoom”
That makes one app out of 18, and three more which come close. How am I supposed to decide what to do here?
Another example is the project templates in Project Builder: the example strings included in Info.plist bear no relation with how they're supposed to be formatted.
Wednesday, 26 June 2002
On the last day of MacHack, Eric Albert gave Andrew Downs some help with porting his Java dock tile app he wrote for a MacTech article from JNI to JDirect. My first thought was to adapt it for showing my webcam to my parents—finally, a valid use of dock magnification. I spent an hour rewriting the code in Cocoa after spending some time on the Java version earlier today: it was a lot faster than getting the Java version to do what I wanted.
My application was very bare-bones, but it did what I wanted: displayed the webcam image in the application's dock icon and a separate window. PhotoStickies is far more full-featured, but it doesn't update its windows in the dock. If I get a spare hour later this week, I'll add a simple user interface to my code and post it.
I'm not feeling too well right now, so I'm about to go home and sleep; hopefully I will be better in time for our group meetings tomorrow morning.
Tuesday, 25 June 2002
Chuck Shotton: Doctors vs. Geeks. As an aspiring doctor and geek, it's always been my goal to have the opportunity to make some inroads in these issues. Thanks for building the awareness of them.
Richard Shindell is on the FolkScene broadcast this week. His singing brings me almost to tears at times. Eric asked for some links to streaming radio and artists I like, so here's the first. Doc Searls includes a lot of good links as well: I listen to most of them. Sad to see that SomaFM is gone: it accounted for a good 25% of the streams in my playlist. Follow the SomaFM link if you want to do something about this travesty.
Forgot to mention that I saw Louis Gerbarg using Radio at MacHack. He's upstreaming to PyCS, and his weblog is here.
Radio was performing abysmally on his iBook: I'm not quite sure why. It works acceptably on my dual G4/533: bringing up the aggregator is 3 seconds, my posting page is 2 seconds. One hint is that Radio was reporting a background usage of 15 threads. My copy of Radio currently shows only six threads. Louis, if you're reading this, please post on the DG: something is wrong and the helpful folks there should be able to troubleshoot it for you.
Another problem Louis showed me, which I couldn't resolve in the few minutes I had, was .opml files in his gems folder which were rendered regardless of the flRender preference being set to false. How do you debug the page rendering process in Radio? I know how to do it in Frontier's website framework, and to a lesser extent in Manila, but Radio has many additional layers…
