John Gruber Obsessed with Weather Widget
It's official. John Gruber, of Daring Fireball fame, is completely and utterly obsessed with Dashboard's Weather Widget. Not that long ago, he was posting lengthy discussions of how to hack the weather widget, so that you could force it to refresh and eradicate all doubt that you may possibly be looking at an out-dated weather report.
This time around the widget, he's got his eye firmly planted on some bad UI design. Turns out that a lot of people are getting the wrong city's weather, because they type in something like "London" and click the "Done" button, and get London, Wyoming's* weather rather than London, England's weather. Why? Because they are supposed to hit return first, which pulls up a list of Londons to choose from. Gruber goes on to complain: "Needless to say, the confusion here is caused by a decidedly poor UI design. The Weather widget provides absolutely no indication that you need to hit return after typing your city name. And considering how mouse-oriented the entire Dashboard UI is, its no surprise that many people assume they just need to click the Done button after typing their city name. And the Done button has to be clicked which means input validation has to be invoked by the keyboard, but dismissing the configuration panel with the Done button has to be done with the mouse. The right way to do something should be the obvious way." Amen.
Hopefully, since Apple is now hiring good people like Mike Matas, UI design nightmares like those that plague the Weather Widget, driving normally astute pundits like Gruber to obsess over them, will soon be a thing of the past.
*Note: I don't know if this is an actual place. I made it up for the example for this post.
