/dev/random

User Interface FAIL

mike — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 03:57:33 +0000

I’ve set up a new Tumblr blog, User Interface Fail to collect and show off terrible user interface designs. This Tumblr was inspired by mrgan’s post about the many inconsistent sliders used in Photoshop CS4. Public submissions are welcome at http://uifail.tumblr.com/submit. Anyone who would like to make regular posts is welcome to become a member.

Ginger flower [Flickr]

mike3k — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 14:19:25 PST

mike3k posted a photo:

Ginger flower closeup [Flickr]

mike3k — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 14:18:15 PST

mike3k posted a photo:

Work in progress [Flickr]

mike3k — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 14:18:01 PST

mike3k posted a photo:

I'm having a deck put in behind my condo.

Plans for PicSlide 1.1

mike — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 03:07:27 +0000

I’m starting to work on enhancements for the next version of PicSlide. The major change is that it will now count the number of moves as well as the elapsed time.

I also plan to add a scoreboard and a way to share your best scores online, most likely with FaceBook Connect.

$10

mike — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 02:58:32 +0000

I’m joining Jonah Grant in a protest this weekend by raising the price of ICanHasCheezburger Pro & iDjembe to $10 and removing ICHC lite from sale until Monday.

You’re surfing through the App Store and come across an awesome app, and then you see the price tag, $.99. What do you think? Way too expensive? Should it be free? or are you willing to pay the price for a great piece of software?

This is the biggest problem in the App Store. People these days are so used to seeing a cool app and then downloading it for free and then they get used to it, not paying developer for their work. They don’t understand that these cool little things take time and money to make, yet they still don’t pay for these utterly cool products that people devote time and money to.

Parallels still beats VMWare

mike — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:23:01 +0000

Parallels Desktop 5 and VMWare Fusion 3 were both released in the last week, and as usual I tried both. I find that Parallels is noticeably faster running Windows 7, and it doesn’t slow down my MacBook Pro like VMware does.

When running a Windows 7 VM with 768M RAM allocated, VMWare uses 1GB of physical RAM and at least 20% CPU most of the time. Parallels uses around 632M and almost no CPU time when idle.

Parallels Coherence mode still looks a lot cleaner than VMWare’s Unity. Parallels starts up cleanly in Unity, while VMWare can’t switch to Unity until the virtual machine is fully booted & the VMWare tools are loaded. Dragging windows in Unity tends to be ugly, with desktop artifacts appearing, while dragging seems faster & cleaner in Parallels.

Parallels 5 adds a new crystal view, which resembles Coherence plus it makes the Parallels application disappear completely, with an icon added to the menu bar that lets you launch Windows applications.

Choosy is even more awesome than I realized

mike — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 01:04:10 +0000

I use Choosy so I can switch between browsers easily. Instead of having to set Safari, Firefox, Google Chrome, or some other browser as my default, if I have one browser open, links will automatically open that browser. If more than one browser is open, Choosy will let you pick which one to open a link in.

Today I discovered that it’s even more awesome than I realized: It not only lets you choose Mac OS X browsers — it also supports Windows browsers running under VMWare Fusion 3 (I haven’t tried it with Parallels yet, but I suspect it will work as well). If you have both a Windows and Mac OS X browser open, Choosy will show both of them in its menu and let you open links in either one.

Lizard [Flickr]

mike3k — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 08:07:21 PST

mike3k posted a photo:

The 27″ iMac looks very tempting

mike — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 05:12:42 +0000

I’ve been using laptops exclusively for several years. I now have both a 13″ aluminum Macbook, which I bought late last year, and a 15″ unibody MacBook Pro, which I won from DriveSavers at Macworld Expo earlier this year. I use the 15″ as my desktop system at home, since it has better graphics performance and a nicer screen for editing photos, but I prefer the 13″ for traveling, since it’s lighter, more convenient, and has better battery life.

Although the 15″ is an excellent system, it’s still a lot less powerful than a dedicated desktop machine like the new 27″ iMac. In particular, I’ve been getting very annoyed with the slow virtualization performance, since it’s limited to 4GB RAM and I need to run both XCode and a Windows virtual machine, as well as Mail & Safari which max out the RAM.

I’ll most likely get the i5 quad core iMac and upgrade the RAM to 8GB.

Check your app release dates!

mike — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:57:59 +0000

When I checked my app store stats for the first day, I noticed that the only PicSlide sales were from my blog & promo codes I gave out. On further investigation, I discovered that it suffered the same fate Craig Hockenberry described here: the release date was set to Sept. 24, which is the day I submitted it, rather than yesterday, when it was approved. As a result, it wasn’t listed as a new application.

I went into iTunes Connect and changed the availability date to tomorrow, which will probably cause it to disappear until then, and hopefully be listed as a new application. If you want it now, leave me a comment to get a promo code.

PicSlide is ready for sale!

mike — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 19:16:50 +0000

After more than a month, PicSlide has finally been approved. You can download it here.

The Magic Mouse is a winner

mike — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 22:30:13 +0000

I’ll cut right to the point: the Magic Mouse is the best mouse I’ve ever used. The scrolling is so smooth & effortless that when I first started using it, I kept scrolling around just to admire how nice it feels. Unlike the Mighty Mouse, the right click works easily and I’ve never had any false clicks. I haven’t had much of an opportunity to use the swipe gestures, since not too many applications support it. The only feature I miss is the middle button click. I suspect it may be possible to implement it in a future software upgrade.

The Magic Mouse requires a software update, which is available from Apple’s download page. Without the software, none of the gestures work and the mouse movement is erratic. The new mouse preference panel lets you enable the various gestures.

I ordered the Magic Mouse as soon as Apple announced it, and it finally arrived today. The first thing I noticed was the minimal packaging. The shipping box contained only the small plastic box with some padding instead of the usual big cardboard boxes. Unfortunately a bit of sticky tape on the bottom left a bit of residue on the mouse, although it came off easily.

See the full unboxing gallery here.

WordPress for iPhone 2

mike — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 02:12:07 +0000

WordPress for iPhone 2 is now available in the app store! Although it’s free, it’s a separate application, not an update to the original WordPress app, so you’ll have to download it from the app store.

The user interface has been redesigned and it’s really beautiful. A set of tabs makes it easy to switch between managing comments, posts, and pages. The comment screen now shows Gravatars and author URLs.

Overall, the application feels a lot more polished and more pleasant to use than WordPress for iPhone 1.x.