Thursday, March 6, 2003
Chris Turner:
I can’t wait to hear what Michael and Gruber have to say about this really good mock-up.
I tend to like using lots of separate windows. iCab introduced the idea of letting the user choose to open new windows in the background, and that has served me well. It has a command for stacking them, and in Jaguar all OS X apps can cycle through windows with Command-`. I haven’t liked the tab implementations I’ve seen because you can’t fit very many tabs in the window width before the titles become as unreadable as the Windows Taskbar (or there are awkward scrolling tabs like in older Metrowerks programs). This is worse for me because I tend to use narrow windows. The vertical mock-ups are interesting, but I agree with Dave Hyatt that thumbnails aren’t the answer. Chris says that he doesn’t like the vertical layout because it takes too much screen space. Well, I don’t see how you’d do it with less and still be able to read all the titles. I certainly don’t think a drawer is the answer. It would be better to use a design like Entourage’s folder list. That is easy to hide and show, and it fits in well with the keyboard loop. But perhaps Hyatt and crew can think of something better.
I’ve posted two new AppleScripts:
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Open in Terminal
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Opens Terminal windows for the items selected in the Finder (or the items dropped onto the droplet). If a folder or package is selected, the Terminal window’s working directory will be that folder. If a file is selected, the working directory will be the file’s containing folder.
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Reply to Mail.app Message
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Creates a window in Mailsmith to reply to the current Mail.app message. (I use Mail.app for my mailing list mail, since it handles large volumes of mail better than Mailsmith. However, Mail.app’s mail composition interface is terrible, so I wrote this script to let me do my replies in Mailsmith.)
When my brother tries to play the DVD that he just burned, the audio starts two seconds after the video, and they remain out of sync for the rest of the DVD. This problem did not occur in iMovie or in iDVD’s preview. Does anyone know how to fix this without burning through lots of disks experimenting?
Alan Green:
“Manager” has come to be a danger signal to me—warning of lack of thought on behalf of the application’s designer. It either means (a) that the designer couldn’t be bothered thinking of a truly descriptive name, and begs the question, “What else couldn’t the designer be bothered with?”, or (b) that the designer hadn’t carefully thought through the role and responsibilities of this class.
Question-begging aside, I agree.
Tim Oren:
We’re being told here that break-even is perhaps a third of the volume of a gold record.
Now, how do you make money in such a business? By maximizing the win. You aren’t really after gold records, you want platinums, multi-platinums, and bankable artists that can do it every two years, to make up for the 90% of losers and yield a profit.
IBM developerWorks:
In Python (and other languages), classes are themselves objects that can be passed around and introspected. Since objects, as stated, are produced using classes as templates, what acts as a template for producing classes? The answer, of course, is metaclasses.
Visually show what, textually show which.
—Alan Cooper
