Slipped iDisk

iDiskAbout a month ago, I started seeing some weird problems with Open dialogue boxes from within Mac OS X applications: when selecting Open from the File menu or invoking command-O, many applications would hang for what seemed like an interminable period of perhaps two or three minutes, and I’d be presented with a spinning beach ball. Eventually the application would snap out of it, but as you can imagine, that kind of behavior is a major impediment to productivity.

In searching for a solution, I tried repairing permissions on my hard disk, updating from Mac OS X 10.4 to 10.4.2, and removing the indispensable Default Folder X enhancement for Open and Save dialogue boxes — all to no avail. After some digging around on Apple’s discussion boards, it turns out that the culprit is Apple’s .Mac suite of Web services, specifically the WebDAV-enabled iDisk feature when it’s set to automatically sync. Disabling that feature in the .Mac preference pane instantly releases troubled applications from paralysis — if you’re seeing this problem, this is what you should do.

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The Funniest Grid You Ever Saw

The Onion GridIt’s hard to deny the rightness of at least one complaint that some people have had about Behavior’s recent redesign for The Onion.com: there’s a heck of a lot of stuff on that home page. My defense is: there’s also a heck of a lot of free stuff on that home page — and througout the site, too. I’m not just talking about all of the archived content that, now unbound by the subscription model that previously restricted it from public consumption, has floated up to the front page for ready access — like old friends, they rotate in and out randomly to let you relive good times. I’m also talking about the new content that will now appear in the right-hand column, comedic tidbits released by the editorial staff every day between issues, again for a grand total of free. Not to mention the loads of ‘regular’ content that’s turned out faithfully every week. All of which justifies the abundance of advertisements — someone has to pay for all that great stuff.

So that adds up, and before long you have a page that, inevitably, people will consider crowded. I’d like to believe that we made a conscientious and serious effort at trying to present all that content with as much clarity as possible. We won’t win any awards for minimalism, but we did a very respectable job, in my opinion, that borrows best practices from online news sources that do it very well already. And we made sure to add a little extra goodness of our own: a flexible yet comprehensive layout grid that underpins every page on the site.

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