Membranophonist’s Ramblings

In no particular order…

1. The lack of full resolution independence (or at least mention of it) is not entirely surprising given that there is really only one Apple display (that of the 17″ MacBook Pro) that could really use it.
2. I’m hoping the menu bar background’s opacity can be adjusted using a command line switch. I don’t want the menus to be harder to target due to lower contrast. My desktop picture is covered most of the time anyway.
3. The the new Dock item text labels provide better contrast against light backgrounds such as the bottoms of windows that are stretched to full screen height, abutting the top of the Dock.
4. Is the ADD-like parsing shown in Mail available to all applications that display text, similar to the pop-up dictionary? I hope so.
   • Will users be able to send detected phone numbers to their Bluetooth cell phones directly without syncing? You don’t necessarily want to create a contact for every number you dial.
   • Will users be able to directly add bookmarks of detected URLs that are not formatted as hypertext links?
5. iCal allows natural language input of dates and times. Finally.
6. I like the binding on multi-page PDF thumbnails.
7. Safari 3 allows Private Browsing to be engaged in the same manner as the Restart/Shutdown/Log Out commands in the Apple menu; hold down Option to make the ellipses disappear, indicating that the confirmation dialog will be skipped and the command executed immediately.
8. The confirmation dialogs in Safari 3 are annoying. Why these when you could implement Undo? I’m guessing this was considered but discarded for technical reasons. If so, it should still be the goal. Confirmation dialogs suck.
9. The default Download stack is a good idea and something I’ve done for years, though in the form of a simple list-view folder on my desktop with a custom icon, sorted by date.
10. Looks like Apple might finally be getting serious about gaming. In keeping with the Bungie Halo premiere tradition, Microsoft should now (attempt to) buy Id and make their next game an XBox 360 exclusive, then release a Windows version a year or two later.
11. The pseudo-3D reflective Dock is downright silly. Also, it means the perspective of many Mac OS X application icons is wrong when sitting on the Dock. The HIG has recommended for years that they be designed as though the user is looking at them from roughly a 45° angle. Now the Dock presents them as though they are (more logically) standing in front of you. Look at the Keynote, Pages, and iMovie icons. They just don’t look right. Utility icons are supposed to be designed as though they sit on a shelf, so most of those should look fine.
12. Gitta Salomon must be happy that Apple is finally implementing something similar to her Piles Stacks research.
13. At first glance, the new Finder folder icons are very bland and less visually distinct from one another, particularly in ~/. They do not leverage color as a preattentive variable, relying instead solely on shape, whose effectiveness is reduced by being enclosed in identical forms (the folder itself).
14. Where is the ability to apply your own metadata to files? Spotlight is vastly more useful when you can actually use its metadata capabilities. Eli pointed out in conversation that metadata isn’t really sexy enough for a demo. True, but I don’t see any info about it on the site either.
15. The Finder and QuickLook info sections are misleading on the value of document thumbnails. Beautiful, unique Apple iWork templates and PDFs are shown, not the zillions of very similarly formatted simple Office documents that most people actually work with. Believe me, it’s not as useful as it looks on the site.
16. No virtualization. Good. Apple should not be expending their limited resources to largely support running other operating systems. Also, the market seems to already be well-served by the two existing virtualization products. Sorry, Rainer!
17. The poorly named Back to My (.)Mac is welcomed. I find .Mac useful, but the functionality increases over the last several years have been, by Jobs’ admission, trivial.
18. Another standards-compliant and supportive browser on Windows is a good thing. I do like it as a way of subverting Microsoft’s continual efforts to dominate the software frontier (witness Silverblight). Frankly, I think John Gruber is right that the primary motivation is search engine revenue.
19. I find it amusing that Jobs touted desktop development in the D5 interview, saying the iPhone’s Google Maps app simply could not be done using web technologies (probably true), now tells third-parties that they have to use… web technologies.
20. iWork and iLife announcements will probably be made at the time of the 10.5 release. New consumer software is needed to show off the already announced capabilities.
21. The largest benefits to me will probably not be the interface, but the re-architected threading, filesystem, network, and memory management systems. Higher performance in all those areas will boost my efficiency.

Regarding the title of this post, I’m only 62% serious!