Membranophonist’s Ramblings

In the Now Playing table view, I’d like the total length of the album displayed in a hidden row that only appears when scrolling beyond the track rows:

After releasing the screen, the total row is hidden again.

Mike Davidson posted a critique of the number of steps required to change battery life-extending settings on the iPhone. Off the top of my head, I proposed what I mocked up and posted below; an always available means of switching among configurations.

1. Tap the battery icon at the top right of the screen. This target is potentially problematic given the relatively small size and its proximity to other controls.
   
   
2. Tap the name of a configuration to activate it or the disclosure button to the right of the label to view/edit its details. The Add button opens an Untitled configuration with the default iPhone settings.
   
   
3. Edit the settings by sliding one or more sliders or tap the oval to edit the configuration name.
   
   
4. Edit the name and tap Done. The sliders remain manipulable.
   
   
5. The configuration has been renamed. Tap the OK button to return to the configurations list.
   
   

November 12 Update: Minor changes to better follow iPhone conventions, larger thumbnails with alpha channels.

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!

Due to differences in Kind labeling, the same (PDF) or similar (PowerPoint and Keynote) filetypes are not grouped together when sorting by Kind alphabetically.

I’d like the Kind column in the Finder to provide secondary sort options, similar to the Album column in iTunes 7.

Clicking on the column header label would switch between the alphabetical Kind sort and Kind by Category, which would group files by the basic type. The mockup shows PDF, other vector formats, word processing, presentations, spreadsheets, and finally bitmap images. The order of categories would need more consideration.

Issues

• The category is not explicitly stated.
• Most people don’t know the difference between a vector-based image and a bitmap, making the groupings seem arbitrary.
• There are many custom filetypes that don’t fit easily into a category; what is a Curio document? Technically, it is a package, but it’s essentially a compound document.

Apple

• The iPhone looks great and will sell extremely well. I will not be buying one because I use my phone maybe once every three days and hate phones in general. My interest in the device relates to the design; multi-touch interactions, the possibility that it is using a vector-based UI, the use of animation, etc.
• Somewhat ironic that Nokia probably wrote some of the code that the lightweight version of Safari uses.
• Being based on OS X technologies, does the iPhone support text-to-speech and VoiceOver? Blind people use phones too…
• The Apple TV box is interesting, but I’m not much of a television viewer. Pass.

I understand the desire to keep the focus on the iPhone (probably why iTV/appletv was announced early), but I was/am most looking forward to the full revelation of Mac OS X 10.5, something I’ll eventually use every day professionally and personally. I assume that a substantial overhaul is underway, meaning the final design is not ready to show off. Perhaps full resolution independence is coming earlier than expected!

As for hardware, I’m eager to see when the latest Intel quad-core processors find their way inside the Mac Pro towers. Assuming the aforementioned resolution independence support, high DPI (160, perhaps?) displays with embedded cameras would also be nice.

Others’ Thoughts

• Rob Griffiths: Expo reaction: iDisappointed
• Dan Wood: iPhone … YAWWWWNNN if you can’t develop for it

Independent Mac Devs

These announcements were made circa, if not at, Macworld.

• The forthcoming version of Now Up-to-Date & Contact has some nice touches. Overkill for me, but for someone like my father, who has a huge contact list that plays an important role in his everyday business, it’s probably worth a spin.
• If you are happy with Address Book for your contacts, but need a more flexible calendar, check out the recently released even-t 2.0 beta.
• GyazMail finally has IMAP support. I’m not wild about the interface (searching specifically), but I know a lot of people dislike Mail for various reasons.

Star ratings can be assigned to any filesystem object (kMDItemStarRating) as of Mac OS X 10.4. There is currently no way to do this in the Finder, but it is possible using third-party tools such as Desk Lamp.

What if that rating could be sent to the application’s developers along with comments and certain system information that could help them put the feedback in context? If someone is complaining about the performance of your heavy-duty application, you want to know if they are running it on a B&W G3, right?

1. Assigning a rating from the Finder

   

2. The Send Feedback dialog
   
3. The Send Feedback dialog expanded
   

Implementation Notes

• The Send Feedback button would be disabled until the user either assigns a rating or types in the text box.
• Feedback would only be sent at the user’s initiation and with explicit permission; no annoying dialogs when you upgrade an application or change the rating.
• Ratings would be carried across version changes.
• Feedback destination address(es) would be defined somewhere within the application bundle’s .lproj folders, allowing feedback to be sent to different addresses based on language.
• If multiple applications are selected, multiple feedback windows are opened (the same behavior as the Info windows).
• An option to submit ratings and comments to MacUpdate, VersionTracker, and Cool OS X Apps would be nice.

(Not the 5/4 song by Milcho Leviev on Billy Cobham’s “A Funky Thide of Sings”)

The pop-up menu would allow switching between Moods and Genres.

Comments on iTunes 7.

Visual

• The second the main window came to view, I noticed that iTunes 7 does not use the system theme alternate row color, neither Aqua (#edf3fe) or Graphite (#f0f0f0). The color itself (#f1f5fa) is more subtle than either one, so I’m okay with the change.
• Not a fan of the bottom button design.
• Not a fan of the scroll thumb look. The arrows are nice.
• I would much prefer a drop shadow to the reflection effect in the middle view. In addition to being more visually subtle, shadow depth could be used to indicate selected albums.

Interaction

• A Shift+Scroll wheel behavior in the Cover Flow view would be nice, perhaps jump 10 albums.
• I like the three-mode Album column and hope that such functionality becomes a part of the development frameworks for use in other software.
• Album covers are not pervasively treated as proxies for the album itself:
  • Covers do not have contextual menus for revealing the album folder in the Finder or opening the Info window for the entire album.
  • It is not possible to select multiple albums by Control-clicking on their covers in the middle view, which instead selects just the first track of each album.
  • The cover drag proxy icon is a generic iTunes document with the number of tracks badged rather than the album cover:
    
• The software still lacks the smarts to automatically relocate all the tracks of an album when iTunes loses track of them. If every track from an album is “missing” and I manually locate and fix the association for one, iTunes should automatically compare the track list to the file list in that folder and fix them!
• The Command-1 and Command-2 shortcuts were unbound from the main iTunes window and the Equalizer respectively, but not bound to anything in their place. The Keyboard Shortcuts list (accessible through the Help menu) still lists them as bound to the windows. Rather than rebinding them as they were pre-7.0, two alternatives make sense: the View switcher (consistent with the Finder) or to star ratings (consistent with iPhoto).
• The addition of Album Artist is great for jazz nerds; I can keep my Art Blakey and Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers albums straight without having different artists displayed and creating multiple folders.
• Unless you have selected the “Don’t show this again” checkbox, the “Get Album Artwork” command should have ellipses at the end as it requires further user input to execute.
• The plain Album column is not good at handling identically named albums. The tracks from McCoy Tyner’s Illuminations are interleaved with those from the Santana & Alice Coltrane album of the same name.
  
  You get jazz nerd points if you know how McCoy Tyner and Alice Coltrane are connected without consulting a resource other than your brain.
• When in the middle view with the browser open, if you select a single track and then hide the browser, the track you selected is deselected and the view scrolls to the top. Annoying.
• “No/Yes” dialogs must die. If Microsoft’s use of them was the reason for their prevalence in iTunes, they should disappear soon seeing how the Windows 6.0 guidelines now recommend using verbs as labels (just like the Apple HIG).
  
  

Miscellaneous

• Still a crappy video manager.
• The Gapless Detect-O-Matic didn’t get Santana’s Caravanserai or Borboletta.
• As I might have said before, the reason I’m so critical of iTunes is because I use it a lot.

• Not so stingy with the RAM in the Pro models! I want one.
• Who will be the first to use the Time Machine APIs to create a web browser history?
• Regarding the interface of virtual desktops Spaces, Mac Murrett created a switcher called Workspaces that worked like Exposé for desktops several years ago, though it only runs on 10.3.x. I used several tools in an attempt to capture how it looks, but they all captured only the active workspace, not the tiled view of the four available.
• Hip-hop producers should make sure they save an old version of Mac OS X for voice sampling. Alex is too realistic for their purposes.
• Interface Builder 3 will make my life easier if I can create prototypes with animation and such.
• The iChat background compositing feature is one that many will use once or twice, then abandon when they realize how useless it is. Everyone but your annoying friend. You know the one.
• The metadata editing capabilities of 10.5 have not been publicly detailed, but they are the one thing I’m really looking for. I want to be able to USE all the metadata Spotlight already supports. Of late I’ve been using Desk Lamp to assign keywords (TAGS, BITCHES!), ratings (out of five stars), and project titles to files and folders. Desk Lamp is still early in development and not all that stable, but it is the only tool I know of that exposes this metadata that is otherwise inaccessible (unless you get down and dirty with the command-line or a hex editor). The hierarchical filesystem must die.

From the customization page for the iMac and MacBook Pro:

Both Apple and customers lose:

• Apple hinders the purchasing of their software.
• Customers wanting multiple packages have to complete multiple ordering and installation processes.