The first thing that jumped out at me with iPhoto ’11 and iMove were the new toolbar icons. They aren’t exactly colorful, which was something that I always liked about iPhoto ’09.
The toolbar, which iPhoto still puts at the bottom of the window, looks like QuickTime Player or iOS. My pet peeve is the bright blue highlight color in the Preferences window and sheets, which doesn’t match my chosen highlight color or any of the standard Aqua or Graphite highlights.
Dr. Drang (via John Gruber):
This is a huge resolution range. On a 11″ MacBook Air, a 72-pixel line—which would measure 1 inch long against an onscreen ruler—is just 0.53 physical inches long. On a 21.5″ iMac, that same line is 0.70 inches long. User interface items, like buttons, menu items, and scroll bars are 30% bigger on the iMac than on the Air.
I like to use dual displays, which adds the additional constraint that the notebook resolution not be significantly higher than that of my external display.
As you can see, standard hard drives perform so poorly in this benchmark—the most common operation that most people need their hard drives to do—that it’s no wonder that SSDs feel so much faster than hard drives. It’s not even close.
The difference is so stark that for many people getting an SSD would make more difference than getting a whole new Mac.
Tuncer Deniz worked at Bungie as a producer from 1996 to 1998 and served as the project lead on Myth 2, but he stayed in contact with top Bungie execs. After recently hearing the story of how Steve Jobs got angry when Bungie went to Microsoft in 2000, Deniz decided to tell us what had happened as he heard it. Turns out that Steve Jobs was angry for a very simple reason: he had wanted to purchase Bungie himself…after first turning the company down.
That might have changed some things, or Microsoft might simply have out-bid Apple.
BBEdit 9.6 adds support for directory-specific settings, a way to create instaprojects from the command-line tool, and other new features. My favorite changes, though, are that it automatically turns off soft-wrapping for large documents (as that can be really slow), and that the Translate command has been split into separate commands for HTML-to-text and text-to-HTML. This makes the sheet cleaner and lets me assign them separate keyboard shortcuts.
