Posted by Daniel Lyons
Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:45:00 GMT
See, I used to have an iPhone. Back in the day.
“Your iPhone… is a brick!” And my lust for those sexy Evernote, Jott and other apps is to blame.
Oh, while I’m complaining about people, fuck the ICFP organizers this year. See any missing languages on their supported languages list? Like, I dunno, Lisp? I’m not going to be able to compete anyway, but I’m really annoyed at the whole setup this year, including the cash prizes and the team limitations. I guess the last two years really were anomalies. I’m glad I got my shot when it was at its best, before it jumped the shark.
Looks like it’s going to be one of those days.
Tags annoyances, apple, icfp, iphone | no comments
Posted by Daniel Lyons
Tue, 30 Oct 2007 06:14:00 GMT
The upgrade rocks, overall.
It took about an hour to install. My observations:
- Wow, everything is so translucent and pretty it’s so hard to remember two years ago when we all kissed Steve-o’s feet for removing this feature in Panther.
- Time Machine is really neat. But did we really need an absurd new button for it?
- Tell me this is usable, with a straight face:
- Help now comes with bonus shitlight:
Much has been made of the dock. It’s really ugly. I take that back. It’s really pretty. So pretty I keep on staring at it. Distractedly. Did you ever use a mirror for a desk? How about get a bunch of soft blue LED track lighting for it. I suppose I’ll get used to it eventually. It’s not like we get a choice. And the side dock is glitchy, if you can stand having it on the side in the first place.
I have been playing a lot with Emal. The todo function is nice enough I can probably give up on OmniOutliner with the horrendously ugly icon now (and I have been using org-mode with Emacs for everything more sophisticated anyway). The RSS functionality is nice but without folder hierarchies I may be stuck with NetNewsWire. I’m going to try and live without RSS for a few days and see how much I really care about it.
The new Safari is somewhat nicer. Nice enough for me to give it a shot, foregoing Firefox for a few days. The new iChat is a pleasant surprise. The new Terminal is slightly nicer.
Time Machine seems to be a bastion of weird UI considerations. I can’t take a screenshot within it. Clicking the close icon on the window you’re working with closes Time Machine but keeps the window around. Otherwise it seems to be pretty excellent; it has the kind of completely unobtrusive UI that would frighten and confuse developers of a certain obnoxious, intrusive and unreliable backup program. It looks like the best backup program ever.
You’re going to want a Firewire 2 drive. After a few hours of rearranging my files it’s re-backing up 4.6 GB of stuff, and it has to take a complete snapshot when you first get it running. Fortunately, it’s pretty smart about doing it in the background, but of course it slows things down a bit. Disconnected operation is going to be the key concept here, plugging in whenever you want a snapshot taken.
Apart from the usual BS about the usability and looks, it seems to be great. No troubles so far.
Tags apple, leopard, mac | 2 comments
Posted by Daniel Lyons
Wed, 04 Oct 2006 02:33:05 GMT
AIM sucks. Whenever I log in from home I get kicked off from time to time, presumably because the work account logs itself on randomly. This is probably iChat’s fault but I just can’t bear to use Adium.
I always used to like using the laptop in the dark, but with the illuminating keyboard, it’s really excellent. It’s like reading under the covers with a flashlight. A guilty pleasure.
Never trust anyone who says it’s better to let cats come and go inside and out. What they’re trying to do is trap you in a life of subservients to the felines, opening and closing the door at their every whim. Cats should be indoor or outdoor, not both.
I won’t put OmniOutliner in my dock anymore. The icon is simply too ugly. I’m halfway thinking about trying all those different stupid outliners like Circus Ponies Notebook because I hate the OmniOutliner icon so much. I even commented about it on The Unofficial Apple Weblog.
In an act of self-aggrandizement, I learned last week that apparently this guy Bozdune really liked my comment on Slashdot about SGI from last fall. It really made my day to see someone liked my comment, and to find out a year later made it even nicer. Of course nobody has yet noticed my reply to this pro-abortion atheist schmuck. I’ll come back in a year and check. I’m sure the Bryghts have dispatched one of their liberal dittoheads to quell the rebel.
The fast went well yesterday. It’s much easier to perform a day-long fast if you’re in the Synagogue praying rather than, say, at work with your face-feeding fellow workers or watching an endless stream of crispy chicken commercials at home. I napped during the break, which took care of that pesky time during which I would have been tempted to eat.
Oh, and a few weeks ago, I made prickly pear jelly. It actually wasn’t as hard as I thought it was going to be. My folk’s neighbor Lois showed me how with one batch, and then I made a triple batch a few weeks later with a little help from the folks.
There. I think it’s a blog again.
Tags abortion, apple, icons, jelly, judaism, laptops, writing | no comments
Posted by Daniel Lyons
Wed, 13 Sep 2006 03:46:00 GMT
I haven’t seen anyone talking about the album art importing. I’m pretty happy about that—but thinking about deleting all the album art I manually applied (which sucked, by the way).
The new interface is nice, like anything new is. It’s hard saying now whether it’s really preferable to Aqua. It’s certainly less eye strain. I suppose it bothers me more that there are now five or six different UIs for the Mac than the precise appearance of this one. Consistency comes first—well, right after smooth curves and anti-aliased fonts. If you get that much right, it’s pretty hard to completely screw it up. Unless you want some kind of sci-fi movie interface. Then you really screw up. The magic of Aqua is that Apple aimed for over-the-top and expensive, and really nailed it without screwing up the usability.
One thing I’m certain of: I wish they had stuck with the green icon; my dock is slowly turning monochromatic blue, but for the outrageously bland OmniOutliner Pro icon and the electric purple TextMate icon. I’m so glad we have sixteen million colors—what is that, sixty-five thousand lickable light blues?
UPDATE: The album art retrieval sucks. I can’t drag ‘n drop album art into the art well anymore, either, I have to open up the Get Info window and drop it in there. It’s also a memory hog. But boy-oh-boy are those pretty album art transitions something!
Tags apple | no comments
