Membranophonist’s Ramblings

Via Flying Meat Head Butcher Gus Mueller, I learned that the talented developer of X Resource Graph, Mike Piatek-Jimenez, has just released Seasonality, a weather information application. I have a few suggestions:

1. The out-of-the-box user experience would be much improved if the user was prompted to select which addresses in their “Me” card should be used as Locations. If only one address exists or two have the exact same state and ZIP, no prompt would be necessary — just load the weather information for that state/ZIP combo. The less configuration work the user has to do, the better.
2. Display a dynamic Dock icon!
   • Use the weather icon displayed in the Locations pane with the temperature overlaid as the Dock icon.
   • Allow the user to change which Location’s data is displayed as the Dock icon from the Preferences and the Dock menu. Check out the Activity Monitor for some ideas as to how this could be done.

   This would provide the “glanceability” of Meteorologist and WeatherPop in addition to the detailed information displayed in the main window. Exploit the Dock’s communicative ability!

3. Location -> Add Location… (ellipses should be displayed because completion of the command requires further user action).
4. The Add Location sheet’s Cancel button should be bound to the Escape key.
5. BUG: I saw two Help menus on the first launch! Only one is displayed on subsequent launches, so it’s not a big problem.
6. The horizontal resize splitter would probably look better without the pinstripe pattern.