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!

Logging in to a Mac OS X user account while holding the Shift key prevents Login Items from launching. Similarly, launching OmniWeb with Shift depressed creates a new empty workspace rather than restoring your last browsing session (if so configured). I find this very helpful when I want to switch to a workspace other than the one that was last open or just start up OW quickly.

Broadening the Behavior

The Shift+activate behavioral precedent can be used to form guidelines for two general types of applications.

For applications that depend on a network to provide core functionality, Shift should launch them in offline mode. For example, feed readers would not try to sync and/or refresh feeds, mail and IM clients would not try to connect their accounts.

For document-based applications, if your application can either create a new main window (browser, document, etc.) or restore the last open window set, Shift on launch should toggle the behavior.

OmniWeb itself represents the overlap of these two types. Deciding what to do in such cases is up to the creators of the software. Also, this behavior is not useful in all software, so it isn’t necessary to form rules covering every possible application.

Communicating the Behavior

OmniWeb uses a monolog (it’s not a dialog if there is only one choice!) to inform users that Shift was depressed and therefore a new empty workspace was opened.

Ideally, the affect of the Shift key would be communicated before launch. For launching from the Dock, a modified text label perhaps. The Dock menu command should also change when Shift was held, i.e., OmniWeb’s Open becomes Open with New Empty Workspace.

The inline searching seen in the 10.5 Help menu could be used in other menus.

Providing searching in the Bookmarks menu in browsers and the menu immediately right of the Application (File/Document/Thingamajig) would also make sense. The default search scope would be filetypes the application can open or import.

This type of inline searching would provide the sort of application-specific search focus that I mocked up earlier, but it doesn’t provide an easy way to move a query between applications.

Yes, jazz bagpipes. That cat could burn!

Evolutions of the Konqueror microformats plug-in in the context of the Flock browser.

Contacts (hCards)

1. The browser indicates the presence of hCard markup on a page using an icon in the status bar. The icon provides access to the pop-up menu:
   
2. To allow multiple selection without having to repeatedly open the menu, a dialog allows the user to check individual names:
   

Contacts Service Preferences

Online Contacts Services

• Plaxo
• Yahoo! Address Book
• .Mac

Calendar (hCalendars)

A dialog similar to Add Contacts would facilitate multiple event selections.

Calendar Service Preferences

Obviously, the Default Calendar setting would only work with services that allow multiple calendars.

Online Calendar Services

• Plaxo
• Yahoo! Calendar
• Google Calendar
• 30 Boxes

The Konqueror plug-in currently works with Kontact, the KDE PIM. Along those lines, it would also be nice if browsers could pass hCards and hCalendars to external applications like Address Book/iCal on OS X, Outlook on Windows, and Evolution in GNOME.

If installed on your system, this text should be displayed in Futura Condensed, a nice sans-serif. If you are looking at this page in Firefox or Opera on OS X, it appears in that face. Safari and the latest nightly build of WebKit (13244) use the standard Futura. Setting font-stretch: condensed; has no effect.

Filed as WebKit bug #7709.

Keyboard accessibility suggestions for Measure Map, the web statistics service from Adaptive Path.

Type-Ahead Link Selection

Make the text labels of the four top-level sections links. This enables the use of the type-ahead link selection feature found in Firefox, Camino, and OmniWeb.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Assign access keys to the four primary navigation links:

1. v for Visitors
2. l for Links
3. c for Comments
4. p for Posts

The three secondary navigation items could be:

1. b for Browsers
2. u for Countries
3. t for Times

I’m leaning towards saying this would be a bad idea, but I could be convinced otherwise.

I manually added shadows to the non-selected items because pasting text created and styled with a colored shadow in Pages (or Keynote) sometimes results in a blurry mess. Perhaps that will be tomorrow’s bug report.

The Flickr photo bar in Flock should provide quick access to your contacts’ photos and those of other recently viewed Flickr users.

Friends & Family could appear at the top, followed by the other two groups.

Tags should be actionable objects.

Click the images for the full size mockups.

This combines the action menus of Mail and the keyword display method of TextEdit to allow users to find content sharing the given tag.

I agree with Rory Prior’s critique of the use of blue gradients in the Spotlight results window, so I’ve mocked up a more subdued-hued Spotlight-like design:

For the Susan Kare (Wikipedia entry for background) in you, try Open Sword’s Pixen. I’ve been using v3b1 without problems.