Membranophonist’s Ramblings

I didn’t see anything on the Snow Leopard Enhancements and Refinements page about Detectors being added anywhere but TextEdit.

I finally redeemed two iTunes gift cards last night, finding the process generally straightforward. That said, many Macs now have iSight cameras built-in. As proven by Delicious Library, an iSight can also function as a barcode scanner, moving the bulk of the input burden from the user to the computer.

A second barcode (which creates a bit of confusion) would not have to be added if the scratch-off alphanumeric code could be recognized as such using OCR. With foreknowledge of the typeface and the processing power of modern Macs, this seems technically feasible.

In case the camera is in use by another application, the Scan via iSight button is disabled and the application name is displayed.

There would have to be some conditional rules to hide the mention of optical scanning and the attendant button on Macs without a compatible camera.

I find myself wasting a lot of time creating calendar events that share a lot of properties, but differ in time of occurrence and duration. Auto-complete still requires per-field interaction.

For example, a band may rehearse regularly, but not on a fixed, repeating schedule that can be cleanly accommodated by a calendaring app’s recurring event interface. You want to be able to easily create an event involving the same people (your bandmates), usually at the same place (your rehearsal studio), with a varying date and duration.

Templates to the rescue.

Event Templates Pane

• Once dropped to the calendar area, the template title text is given keyboard input focus to allow renaming from the default.
• A Custom sorting option allowing the user to arrange the templates however they like might be useful. The set of templates you use may change over time as you work on different projects.
• Double-clicking a template opens the editor.
• Modifications to events created from templates do not propagate back to the template.
• Deleting a template has no effect on events created from the template.
• A menu command allows a stand-alone event to be used as the basis for a new template.

Event Template Editor

• Modifications to templates do not propagate to events created from them.
• As they exist outside of specific dates, only a default duration is set on a template.
• All other properties can be set as with normal events.

Problems

Templates would not work cleanly in Contactizer’s All events list view. What happens when you drop a template event to the list? A title field and date/time picker could appear at the drop point. It’s still likely to be less input than creating the event from scratch.

Mac OS X’s DVD Player allows users to set the title and a jacket picture for each disc. Some DVDs specify the jacket picture already, as in the case of Samurai Rebellion. These two pieces could be used to better present the DVD on the desktop.

1. Disc Info
   
2. Jacket Picture
   

Put them together…

I want to be able to add contacts, events, and tasks to Contactizer Pro without having to move to its space (virtual desktop), open a New Thing window, then move the New Thing window to the space displaying the information I want to save. That is a lot of overhead just to arrange your windows to begin inputting information. Simple task additions are already possible using the Quick Task Entry window, which provides a subset of the full editing window functionality. My proposed solution: New Thing commands in the Dock menu that open a Thing editing window in the current space.

These commands will be less useful if Data Detectors become globally available in a forthcoming release of OS X, though detectors cannot determine what textual information prompts users to create tasks or projects given the lack of a common semantic structure.

1. I want to add a friend’s upcoming gig to my calendar, so I right-click on the Contactizer Dock icon and select the New Event command.
   
2. The New Event window opens in the current space.
   
   Event or Appointment? One term, please.

Dot dot dot

The File > Backup Databases and File > Restore Databases commands should have ellipses as they require further user input to execute. The file picker that appears after selecting Restore should open to the last backup save location.

I find the dots below days with scheduled events useful in the mobile Calendar application. They should appear in iCal’s mini-calendar as well.

Using a few different size dots based on the number of events scheduled would allow users to see which days are particularly busy without having to switch the main view mode to Month or view the particular day — without adding much visual clutter. Granted, I don’t have the busiest schedule.

Finder

Largely to make it easier for those who don’t know about the Info window or how to control file sharing, a button in the banner at the top of shared nodes:

The button would open the Sharing pane in System Preferences with the particular folder selected.

Mail

The dialog asking for confirmation before permanently deleting messages marked for deletion or as spam is really irritating. As with the Restart/Shutdown/Log Out commands in the Apple menu and the Private Browsing command in Safari, holding Option should suppress the confirmation and execute the command immediately.

Going by the HIG for the use of ellipses in command labels, the Erase Deleted and Junk commands in the Mailbox menu should have them.

Based on Pages ’08 (3.0.2). Some of these apply to Numbers and/or Keynote as well.

Template Selection

1. The template category and template selector panes should allow type-ahead selection when either pane has keyboard focus. The category selector only jumps to categories based on the last input single character matching the first letter of a category label rather than performing string matching; if I type Le, Envelopes is selected rather than Letters. The template selection pane does not provide type-ahead selection at all.
2. Using Sim Daltonism, the yellow inner border used to indicate the selected template is hard to see for those with certain color perception impairments.
   
   This could be addressed by giving the selected template a distinct background shape.
   

Document Metadata

1. I’d like to see an Insert menu command to insert the document’s Title metadata, a variable that would automatically update when the Title is edited in the Inspector. Same with Author metadata.
2. If input before saving, the Title metadata string should be suggested in place of “untitled” as the filename when saving, with the complete text selected if the user wants to enter their own. Characters allowed in the metadata but not in filenames would be automatically replaced.

Miscellaneous

1. An Export All command in the File menu or some Automator actions to export documents in bulk would make it a lot easier to use Pages as the authoring application for documents to be viewed and edited by those using Word. The current process requires selecting the Export… command from the File menu, confirming the export format, confirming the file name, potentially accepting the replacement of an existing file, then potentially reviewing compatibility issues if special Pages dynamic information like date strings were used. For each document. All these options would have to be provided in an Automator export action, but the decisions would have to be made only once.
2. The chart data editor should display the series symbols next to their labels rather than a square color swatch.
   
3. Stealing a feature from MS Office (which is not generally recommended!), comment bubbles should display users’ IM presence status, providing a direct way to contact a person about their contribution to a document.

A bit of visual pleasantry for chat clients.

If you have Firefox 3 or Opera 9.5, check out the 4 frames in an animated PNG:

For browsers that do not yet support aPNG, here is the frame-by-frame:

1. Double-click on a contact in your buddy list
   
2. 1. The window zooms out from the location of the contact, starting with just the contact name and input field being displayed:
      
      If multiple contacts are selected, the names zoom out individually to a single window.
   2. The conversation display area expands between the titlebar and input area midway through the animation:
      
   3. The window appears at full size in final position:
      
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A few ideas to improve the alignment guides in Apple’s Keynote presentation software, based on version 4.0.3.

1. Allow users to simultaneously create intersecting vertical and horizontal guides by dragging from the upper left corner between the rulers. This halves the number of drags needed to create a bounding box using guides.
   1. Click…
      
   2. …drag…
      
   3. …release at desired position.
      
2. Consistent with the above, allow users to reposition existing intersecting guides simultaneously by dragging from the intersection. The current behavior seems to default to just the vertical guide.
3. Allow users to copy and paste guides between slides using commands available in the Format menu and a contextual menu that appears when Control- or right-clicking on an individual ruler or in the upper left intersection of the two. The copying and pasting of guides would exist independent of the clipboard, similar to how styles are handled. Including a ruler unit selection sub-menu would make some sense.
   
   
4. Bind Control-Command-G to Show/Hide Guides; how to bind a shortcut to this menu command using System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts is not obvious since it has to be bound twice — the command label changes from Show Guides to Hide Guides. Thanks to Rob Griffiths of Mac OS X Hints for the information on how to bind a single shortcut to a dual-state menu command.
5. Evaluate the colors of the slide canvas and objects to determine a highly visible and distinct color for guides. The default yellow is rather hard to see on a white canvas.