usability
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Engineering the DS Lite: 2 Nintendo hardware vets speak
Ever wonder what decisions go into a hardware redesign? Thanks to the latest edition of Nintendo's Japanese online mag, we finally get a portable peek into the DS Lite.Two Nintendo engineers who worked on the cuter DS sibling reveal how they pulled off the svelte new look while maintaining things like usability, battery life, and cost.Who knew that the new stylus was made "longer and wider to accommodate older users" (the Brain Age demographic who'd taken such a shine to the now shinier little system)? Durable, reliable hardware: it's what Nintendo does best. Let's hope they continue that trend with the Lite, as well as whatever other slicker iterations of the handheld that we're tempted to purchase -- or repurchase -- in the future.[Thanks, Princess Zelda; also via DS Fanboy]See also: Nintendo DS proven toilet-safe Playstation 2 goes silver (redux)
Stop manually maximizing your windows
This rant about Mac OS X, multitasking and usability is brought to you by the letter Q and a disgruntled design student:I heard something snap in my head today as I sat down at the back of an art history lecture hall (where outlets are, I follow) and got to peek over the shoulder of a girl using a 15" PowerBook in front of me.This girl was using Safari to browse MySpace and - arguments about that site's damage to civilization as we know it aside - the browser window was 100% maximized across her 1280 x 960 display, obliterating what I would estimate is at least 1/3 of useful screen real estate. Then, she switched over to Word to keep working on a paper - again, Word had been manually maximized across the entirety of her widescreen display which was throwing easily half of her usable screen space into the garbage. Unfortunately, she is just one of many I have witnessed throwing away all sorts of useful screen space while using Mac OS X.Men and women, boys and girls, please: Mac OS X more or less offers only one way to manually maximize windows across your entire display for a reason - because they don't have to be that large. "Multitasking" is defined as "the simultaneous execution of more than one program or task by a single computer processor." If we apply that definition to a person's ability to multitask, it means that you too are able to work on and look at more than one thing at once - which is why Mac OS X intentionally makes it difficult for one application to dominate the entirety of your display (Applications, such as Firefox, that don't obey the Mac OS X windowing rules I'm referring to are exempt from this post).While the various tricks and design ideals that Mac OS X uses to accomplish this fantastic feat of productivity-inducing magic are outside the scope of my rant, I just want the word to get out that it is actually safe to trust your operating system's judgments in these kinds of matters. Tell your parents, inform you friends. I'm especially looking at you, switchers. I know the way Mac OS X handles windows and changing their size is strange, but trust me - once you get used to it and wrap your head around why it works this way on Apple's side of the fence, you'll be overjoyed with all the extra screen space you just reclaimed.So go ahead, live on the edge: use that green "best fit" button and the Window > Zoom options, and be happy that you've taken a positive step towards getting just a little more done on your Mac.
My other issues with iWeb
Adding to the small pile of gripes with the new technology Apple is using with iLife 06, such as complaints about iWeb's bloated CSS or RSS standards and photocasting, I just developed a beef that I haven't really seen mentioned yet: the crummy new URL scheme for iWeb sites, both on and offline.First of all, in the olden day the .Mac "homepage" did't seem to be case sensitive, as in: homepage.mac.com/user will get you to the same place as /User. iWeb is a bit pickier, as a wedding site I'm working on lives at web.mac.com/myuser/iWeb/Wedding/, but /wedding/ will result in a 404 error. Yes, a friend already reminded me that "Unix = case sensitive," but I don't care. While this could be labeled a minor complaint, my fiance and I have plenty of family members who aren't too hip on these computer thingies. They're going to get confused by something silly and minor like this, and I'm sure our relatives aren't the only ones.Next on my list is the URL scheme itself. web.mac.com/user/iWeb/sitename? Could that get any less friendly? Granted "homepage.mac.com" might seems a little unprofessional to some, but this new scheme feels pretty cumbersome and just plain ugly. Why couldn't we simply have web.mac.com/user and web.mac.com/user/othersites, Apple?Last but not least is how the new sites are organized in a user's iDisk. Old homepage sites still live in iDisk/Sites/, while shiny new iWeb sites live in iDisk/Web/Sites/iWeb/sitename. Nevermind a discussion about how needlessly buried that file structure is - I'm sure this dichotomy of old/new sites and content is going to confuse plenty of .Mac customers if they ever want to get at any of those files, or make a backup of their sites or entire iDisk.But enough about my gripes, what do you guys think: do iWeb and its underpinning .Mac support have more issues besides CSS and standards? Let's hear your thoughts.
What would you change about the menu bar?
This time around the "What would you change" topic I thought I'd forgo an actual app and post on a part of OS X; the menu bar, in fact. While I really dig the menu bar and how it works, it leaves much to be desired in the customizability department. For example: I don't know of a way to increase its width or the font size, and it would be great if there was some kind of a power-user option to make it easier to hide the menu bar altogether, instead of only some apps (like Photoshop) being able to do it. Or how about the image I have here: a comparison to XP's system tray, which includes a crude icon management system of hiding 'inactive' system tray icons. Fellow TUAW blogger Scott is quick to point out, however, that this hiding of inactive icons on XP is a great way of allowing all sorts of unwanted software to install itself and run right under your nose. Nevertheless, if you have a lot of icons up in the menu bar, it would be great to have some way of managing all the clutter besides simply dragging them around manually with the command key.So what say you, TUAW readers? Since we can't even get Macworld press passes I'd say it's a safe bet that Apple won't be taking notes, but a good UI conversation might be a nice way to pass the slow-news holidays.
