Archive for May 18, 2010

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Adobe CS5’s Non-Standard Cursor

Pierre Igot:

Using a non-standard alternative animation instead of the SBBOD is not going to do anything to improve the performance, perceived or real, of the applications. It just looks like a really poor way to try and mask the applications’ responsiveness issues instead of actually dealing with them.

Using the standard Mac OS X indeterminate progress spinner as a cursor is just bizarre.

Update: Jesper’s take.

Update 2: Igot’s follow-up post.

Aperture 3: The Ars Review

Dave Girard:

Aperture 3 includes a ton of workflow tweaks and improvements—so many that covering every little one would be excessive. Sure, the new feature page has some padding like “Space Bar Playback”—that’s a bit of a stretch as a feature. But there are lots of touches that make version 3 a more comfortable, well-rounded workspace for importing, sorting, tagging, developing, and exporting images.

Aperture 3 is really, really good, except that it’s so much slower than Aperture 2. If you have a notebook, even a recent MacBook Pro, I think you pretty much need an SSD, whereas Aperture 2 worked fine for me with a 5,400 RPM drive.

Since there’s no standardized metadata format for faces and names, Aperture 3 lets you export the names in photos as IPTC keywords, which can then be embedded into image for Spotlight or image bank searches. Nice to see that this feature was thought through so well.

Unfortunately, Aperture does not store the faces information as securely as the other metadata. Also, there’s no way to organize faces. I continue to use keywords instead.

RunRev on iPhone OS

Steve Jobs (February 2010):

Something like HyperCard on the iPad? Yes, but someone would have to create it.

Kevin Miller, CEO of RunRev, a HyperCard successor (May 1010):

Steve Jobs has now rejected our proposal and made it clear that he has no interest in having revMobile available on the iPhone or iPad in any form.

It sounds like they had proposed to compile revTalk, much like Adobe did with Flash, and support all of the iPhone OS APIs. Not a surprise, given Section 3.3.1, but it’s too bad because the iPad seems like the perfect way to deploy a HyperCard stack.