November 20th, 2012
The UI is littered with swipe ambiguity, where similar (or identical) gestures have different outcomes depending on subtle details in how they’re activated or executed. For example, start swiping from the right to the left and you will either scroll the screen horizontally or reveal the charm bar, depending on exactly where your finger first touched the screen. This was very confusing to the users in our study.
Obviously, I wholeheartedly agree.
July 3rd, 2012
Andrew Kim sets aside three days to rebrand Microsoft. Holy crap.
May 21st, 2012
GitHub just released GitHub for Windows. Remember what I said about GitHub for Mac? And about git getting easier? It goes ditto for this application.
December 28th, 2011
Last night I needed to transfer an EPUB file to Eliza’s Kindle from my Mac. It turns out that Kindles no likey the EPUBs. (I didn’t know this, I’ve never really used one.) So, after a bit of searching I found Calibre that, while it doesn’t have the best looking UI, is sort of the Swiss Army knife of e-book management.
August 11th, 2011
When I switched to the Mac I was surprised how easy it was to install and uninstall applications in OS X compared to the horrible installer workflow and the Add/Remove Programs Control Panel of Windows.
For those that are unaware, prior to Lion installing an application on the Mac went something like this; download a .DMG file which would mount to your Mac much like putting a CD in the disk drive and dragging the application icon into your Applications folder. That’s it. Drag, drop, installed. To uninstall an application you just delete the application from your Applications folder. Done.
The caveats to this process were the need to unmount the DMG after you’ve installed the application and then trashing the leftover DMG files in people’s Downloads folder.
However, with Lion came the promise of simplifying this process even more. Why? Because, although the above process seems simple it wasn’t nearly as simple as Apple had managed to make installing and uninstalling applications from iOS. On iOS you open the App Store, click Install, the application’s icon shows up on your device’s Home Screen. If you’d like to uninstall the application you tap and hold the icon, an “x” shows up, click it and confirm that you want to uninstall the app. Very simple.
Lion wanted to bring this very same workflow to the Mac. The workflow goes very much the same; Install applications directly from the Mac App Store, the application’s icon shows up on Launchpad, click and hold to uninstall the app from your Mac.
However, on Lion not all applications are created equal. Some applications were installed prior to, or without the use of, the Mac App Store. Perhaps you downloaded the application from the web or you simply have it installed from long before Lion. Either way, these applications still show up on Launchpad – they just can’t be uninstalled from Launchpad.
Which is why I think uninstalling applications on Lion is arguably more difficult for some people because the workflow for one application is different than the workflow for another application. If Apple could have allowed for applications that were not installed via the Mac App Store to be uninstalled using the same workflow they would have. There must be some very good reasons why they can not – however, I thought that they should have at least showed a dialog to instruct the user on how they can uninstall the application anyway.
For instance, if I’ve got Launchpad open I can drag the application’s icon to Trash on the Dock. Shouldn’t this uninstall it? If I was in my Applications folder and did the very same thing it would. So why not from Launchpad directly to Trash? Why even allow me to drag it over the Trash? Why not show a message when I do this: “Sorry, but you’ll have to open Finder, navigate to your Applications folder, and remove the application from there manually.”
I’m not sure why Apple didn’t find some way to either make this easier or to inform the user how to accomplish this simple task. But a few years from now, when 90% of all installed Mac applications have been installed directly from the Mac App Store, Apple will no longer need or care to worry about this issue. And perhaps that alone is reason enough for them not to care about it now.
November 15th, 2010
Usually when there is a war there is a winner and a loser and a lot of casualties in between. It would seem that in the browser wars there is no clear winner, no clear loser, and the bodies are piling up. With no end in sight.
Here are the statistics for the last 30 days here on my personal site. Internet Explorer is still #1 in spite of every single geek on the planet wanting it to simply go away. But it isn’t winning by much. Firefox and Safari are pretty close behind and Chrome is catching up quickly.
The Safari number includes both iPhone and iPad as well as the Macintosh and Windows. The Mac and iPhone split up the biggest portion of this with Windows and iPad nearly tying.
Interestingly, if you combine Chrome and Safari, which both run the Webkit rendering engine, then Webkit clearly stands out as the #1 rendering engine for all HTML/JS on my site.
So it looks like it is Internet Explorer vs. Webkit – at this point – as being the two main contenders in this war. Firefox, which is doing very very well on its own, is beginning to show signs of lagging behind both Safari and Chrome in their growth rates. This could all change in one day with one killer update from Mozilla – but I’m not holding my breath.
So why do I say that there are ton of casualties in this war? Because the people who spend all of their time building websites and applications have more browsers to build against than ever before, not less. More screens, more devices means more problems. Choice for the end user means headaches for the builders.
This problem probably won’t go away even if every browser manufacturer united under the banner of Webkit. If they did the spirit and motivation of competition would be gone – leaving only the end-user to suffer from lack of progress.
It appears that this war is not going to end and the bodies will continue to pile.
November 9th, 2008
So you use Windows. I’m ok with that I guess. Oh, you also browse the Internet with Internet Explorer? Version 6? Well, I just can’t live with that. In fact, I doubt you and I would get along at parties.
But, such as it is you are here, reading something on my site, and so I should – at the very least – show you a site that you can read. I didn’t say that I’d cater to you. No no, none of that here. But I will try my best to have my site display just well enough that you can read this – and perhaps switch to another browser.
While at Podcamp Hawai’i I pulled my site up on a screen in front of an entire theatre full of people. There was only one computer available to me that was already hooked up to the projector. I thought “How bad could it be?”. Well, it was pretty bad. My site looked like this. Yeah, that bad.
So today I pulled out a ton of negative margins, a few class specifications that, for reasons I will probably never know, Internet Explorer does not support – and now you can see that the site looks relatively normal in IE.
I could probably do better with my site’s document code and styling to set myself up for multi-browser success. I know this. But, seriously. You could do much better if you’re using Internet Explorer as your browser-of-choice. So there.
October 10th, 2007
My friend Matt, a fan of all things Apple and future switcher, owns a laptop. Actually it is a tablet-PC and has all of the latest hardware and software including a 64bit processor and gobs of RAM. Though my blood runs thick with Mac-cells, I know a good piece of hardware when I see it, and Matt’s laptop is top-of-the-line. There is only one problem; it came pre-installed with Windows Vista.
I’ve only got limited experience with Vista but from that limited experience I have drawn the opinion that if I were forced to use the Operating System full time I’d likely jump off of a bridge. This isn’t to say that I’m not willing to admit that in many ways Vista is vastly superior to its predecessors (like, say, in the security department) but I don’t even like the way that it does these few things better. You know what? We’ll get into this at a whole different time, b’okay?
So Matt has a great laptop that runs Vista. Fast forward to ‘the other day’ and Matt picked himself up a brand-new shiny iPhone. If you know Matt, and some of you reading this do, you’ll know that at this point Matt’s blood is practically boiling with excitement. He probably can’t shut his mouth for even a second and his hair has gone straight. This kid wanted an iPhone pretty badly.
Matt Dottle approves
Matt calls me: “Dude, I got an iPhone! Now what do I need to do? Just go home and plug it in right?” My reply: “Yeah. Everything should work man you just bought an Apple product. Go home. Make sure you have the latest version of iTunes and you should be all good.”
I think by now you realize where this is going. Matt installed the latest version of iTunes, plugged in his iPhone and received the following message: “iPhone not recognized in this version of iTunes.” This message is a bit of a misnomer but I’ll skip right to the part where I explain what is going on here.
During the iTunes installation Vista blocked the iPhone’s USB driver from being installed.
It is pretty much as simple as that. I don’t care if there are good or bad reasons for why this happens. And I don’t care whose fault it is because I’m blaming both Apple and Microsoft for not displaying an error message about how to fix the issue. But I think this sucks.
Oh, you know what sucks worse: If you are running Windows Vista 64bit you can not use iPhone. You will get this same error message mention above only you won’t be able to solve the issue like we did. It is merely a footnote on Apple’s Web site under minimum system requirements for iPhone. I am not sure if this is Apple dragging its feet on a 64bit driver for Windows or if this is something on Microsoft’s end.
So here is how you fix it in the 32bit version of Windows Vista; You need to turn off UAC, User Access Control, before you begin the iTunes installation. So if you’ve already installed iTunes, uninstall it using the same installer that you used to install iTunes, then turn off UAC by opening your Control Panel and searching for User Access Control in the top right hand search box. Install iTunes again, and voila!
I’m happy that there is a solution, and I’m not that bitter, it just took way too long to find the answer to this problem and I would love to see Apple or Microsoft handle this issue a little better. Having a better error message would go a long way I think.
Combine this UAC headache and the fact that we couldn’t activate iPhone for him until the next day and you see why we were frustrated.
My next story will be about Epson’s printers. Have you had any crappy tech experiences lately? Pingback this post if you have.
January 15th, 2007
The numbers make it obvious, but the experience makes it real.
Recently I’ve had a lot of family members, friends, and even people I’ve never met before tell me that they were “thinking of switching” to the Macintosh platform or, in their words “gettin’ a Mac”. Obviously we’re seeing switcher stories pop up all over the place, even some guys at Microsoft said they wanted to jump ship.
I really think that the main reason that more people have not switched to the Mac faster was due to misinformation. A lot of people didn’t even know that Apple made computers let alone how much better the experience was on one when compared to a computer running Windows. Most of the people I’ve spoken to, that are going to make the switch very soon, are doing so because they’ve owned an iPod and have enjoyed that experience. Or, they’ve seen my computers and really desire to be able to do some of the same things I am able to do without giving it a second thought.
I think that some of the consumers are starting to finally see the truth in the entire Mac vs. PC war that has raged on for far too long. It isn’t a question of being better or worse, it is a question of actually working and being easy to do.
The war is over.
[tags]apple, Microsoft, macintosh, windows, ipod, mac, conversion, thoughts[/tags]
[slug]conversion-rate[/slug]
May 2nd, 2006
If I could write like John Gruber, my article on the subject would have been written like his article on the subject. I guess that is why I send him my money every year. Well earned John, well frickin’ earned.
[tags]journalism, john gruber, daringfireball, macintosh, viruses, virus, windows, microsoft, apple[/tags]
