Category Archives: Apple

The Road Ahead

CaminoAs a delayed response to some boosterism over at Jon Hicks’ weblog, I was inspired to download and install the Camino Web browser today. It’s slow and somewhat awkward and it lacks the polish of Apple’s own Safari, to say nothing of the outstanding feature set of the Omni Group’s superb but flawed OmniWeb. Still, the browser remains in development with regular builds of its code, working up to its official 1.0 release, and it would be unfair to characterize it as anything less than a terrific piece of work.

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Window Dress for Success

Window ChromeNow that Mac OS X Tiger has given us yet another variation on window chrome — the user interface ‘parts’ that frame windows in the operating system — I got to thinking about how they all work together. Well, to begin with, I’ve more or less given up on the idea that there truly is any kind of overarching strategy at work between the various styles of chrome offered by Apple. For instance, there’s no clear reason to me why the Finder is adorned with brushed metal or that Mail 2.0 looks completely foreign from its logical close cousin, the Address Book. Even saying there was, at one point, some kind of tidy logic governing chrome styles, that original concept has taken yet another debilitating body blow.

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Temporary Insanity

Adobe IllustratorAs spring seasons go, this one has been extraordinarily busy for me so far. Between work, traveling for work and working more, we’re doing more projects and more intensive projects at Behavior than ever before. This means good things for us and our clients, but bad things for the frequency of posts here while I go crazy over work tasks.

Another reason for my slacker performance on this weblog over the past week is Adobe Illustrator CS’s new, bewildering habit of creating dozens of unaccountable temporary files all over my hard drive. There are various explanations for the cause, none of which are conclusive, but the answer seems to lie somewhere between the Creative Suite’s PDF features and Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.

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World Wide Webster

Mac OS X Dictionary Application
I’ve done a lot of trash talk about Mac OS X Tiger but I still resolutely insist that it kicks ass, and one of the reasons why is the operating system’s new Cocoa-based dynamic dictionary and thesaurus lookups. This feature has barely been publicized by Apple, oddly enough, but even on its own, it would be fair to say that it accounts for at least thirty dollars’ worth of the US$129 Tiger sticker price.

You can invoke a dictionary lookup within any Cocoa application — one of the best indicators of those is the presence of the notorious font panel, but Safari counts too — by holding down command-control-D and simply hovering over any given word. What results nearly instantaneously is a contextual display of that word’s definition as recorded in the Oxford Dictionary (or synonyms as culled from the Oxford Thesaurus). Both the dictionary and the database are stored locally on your hard drive, so the feature is thankfully not contingent on the presence of an Internet connection.

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Out of Sync

iSyncFor no good reason, I continually get my hopes raised up over the idea of clean, seamless synchronization across multiple databases and devices via my Macintosh. For example, I just want to be able to maintain a single store of contacts, at least, and have it reflected across all the various applications I use: Entourage and Apple Mail, iChat and Adium X, my mobile phone and my PDA if I ever use one again.

This just isn’t the reality, though, not even in the latest and greatest iteration of Mac OS X. In fact, if anything, synchronization has gotten markedly worse; not necessarily less reliable, but less sensical and more de-centralized. I realize there are several third party utilities designed to ameliorate the situation, but I’m frankly disappointed in the infrastructure that Apple provides in the operating system. We seem to be in a kind of transition with Mac OS X, an unfinished state wherein synching functionality, though perhaps more prevalent that ever before, remains regrettably paltry and conspicuously lacking for a clear interaction model.

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F’d up Font Palette

Font PaletteJust because I’m about to add further to the list of Tiger gripes that have flooded the Internet since its release last Friday night, it doesn’t mean that I don’t like it. I like it a lot, I really do; not just its new features and user interface improvements, but also its under-the-hood advancements, which make me feel very confident about the operating system’s long-term prospects.

But it’s a complex platform, and any time Apple upgrades it, it’s impossible to avoid baring imperfections, some old, some new. A case in point is the Mac OS X font palette, the system-wide, floating interface for typeface selection that received a major overhaul with the release of Tiger’s predecessor, Panther. It’s a fairly powerful interface for control of typographic specifications in most all Cocoa applications, and so it plays a rarely discussed but central role in Mac productivity.

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F’d up Font Palette

Font PaletteJust because I’m about to add further to the list of Tiger gripes that have flooded the Internet since its release last Friday night, it doesn’t mean that I don’t like it. I like it a lot, I really do; not just its new features and user interface improvements, but also its under-the-hood advancements, which make me feel very confident about the operating system’s long-term prospects.

But it’s a complex platform, and any time Apple upgrades it, it’s impossible to avoid baring imperfections, some old, some new. A case in point is the Mac OS X font palette, the system-wide, floating interface for typeface selection that received a major overhaul with the release of Tiger’s predecessor, Panther. It’s a fairly powerful interface for control of typographic specifications in most all Cocoa applications, and so it plays a rarely discussed but central role in Mac productivity.

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Tiger Blemishes

Several readers have noted some problems in the display of my comments entry form, courtesy of the very recent iterations of Safari released with Mac OS X 10.3.9 and, of course, Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. In essence, what were once orderly boxes now appear tumbled and in disarray when rendered by the new versions of this Web browser. The form remains fully functional; it’s presentation has just been more or less destroyed, is all. This is a byproduct of Apple’s vigilant, ongoing improvements to Safari’s CSS rendering engine, a process which I wholeheartedly support, in theory… I won’t lie to you, though, the fact that little bugs like this continue to arise annoys the heck out of me.

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