March 25th, 2010
Not quite as linkalicious a day as Wednesday was.
-
Turns out there’s been a GIMP plug-in for a while that comes close (very close?) to the same effect as Adobe’s Content-Aware Fill: Resynthesizer. Color me impressed. (via AppleNova)
-
If you’re troubled by today’s common usage of the word “literally” (which is arguably everything but literal), you’re literally gonna have to argue with Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Figure(ratively)s. (via reddit)
-
I’ve been looking into creating a DSL of sorts. Sadly, Ruby probably isn’t an option, as the underlying architecture is .NET 2.0-based. The Python-inspired Boo could be an option (looks like there’s a whole book about this very use!), but what really intrigued me is Writing Your First Domain Specific Language. The “language implementation kit” the author uses, Irony, sounds all kinds of interesting.
-
750 Gigabytes, in a laptop-sized hard drive. (German article) Yowza. Mine, from April 2006? A mere 100.
-
“Improving download behaviors in web browsers” takes a look at the current state of browsers’ download UIs. (For entirely unrelated and largely irrelevant reasons, I had done some brief research on this very subject just a few weeks ago.) I’m confused by two Safari “The bad” items:
- Doesn’t indicate where the file came from or when you downloaded it.
- No indicator of download progress if you can’t see the download window
Those are true within Safari itself, but it seems fair to point out that the Finder (where, y’know, file management belongs) actually does both. A file downloaded via Safari will show the original URL in the Get Info window, because there’s a special “Where from:” piece of metadata stored along the file. Secondly, during the download, the file’s icon will show a little progress bar (strictly speaking, the icon keeps getting set to a new one with the progress image becoming part of it). Lastly, if you kept default configuration of having your Downloads folder in the Dock, it will bounce when the file is done.
Again, not strictly in-browser UI, but nonetheless very smoothly integrated in the OS as a whole. I only pick nits because, all in all, it’s quite a nice article. (via proggit)
January 5th, 2010
As judged by anecdotes, as well as by going through the various demo videos (yes, this means I haven’t held one in my hand, so my knowledge is limited):
Things I’m jealous of:
- Much nicer e-mail client. It’s (obviously) Gmail-specific, but it comes with so much functionality I sorely miss on the terribly limited iPhone OS’s Mail.
- Better spelling suggestions/correction. Multiple choices presented in a horizontal band as you type.
- Speed and specs. The UI looks much smoother than iPhone OS 3.1 does on my (admittedly now-aging) iPhone 3G. In large part, I’m sure, due to four times the RAM (512 MB vs. 128), and a much faster CPU (the Cortex A8-like, ARMv7-based Snapdragon at 1 GHz, rather than Apple’s custom ARMv6-based chip at 412 MHz). Speaking of specs, a honorary mention goes to the far higher resolution — 854×480 vs. 480×320, which should provide benefits in the long run.
- Background applications. This is one area where I’m curious to see what direction Apple is heading in.
- Notifications. Not shown much in the demos, but supposedly decent. iPhone OS handles them absolutely terribly. One alert on top of another and you’ve got yourself a user-hostile mess.
Things I’m not so jealous of:
- Inferior browser in-page navigation. It’s not just that Android’s default-shipping browser lacks multi-touch zoom; it’s much more importantly that, as the demo video illustrates so nicely, double-tap-to-zoom picks a seemingly random area (in this particular case, a portion of the picture) to zoom in on, quite unlike Safari on iPhone OS, which would have shown the entire picture, left to right. Pictures is one thing, paragraphs is another; it appears Safari is much smart about figuring out what you want to focus on. This may seem like a minor point, but is in fact a huge win in user experience for iPhone OS.
- Ugly text rendering. The fonts look like Linux. Oh, right. Googl eneeds to invest some R&D money here.
- Inconsistent UI. In the demo videos, this is most noticeable with toolbars — or, more generally speaking, the layout of controls within the apps: each of the shown apps appears to have its own idea of where to place the buttons, and what size, shading, background color, etc. they ought to be. It’s far from bad, but it’s hardly good either. iPhone OS, despite having multiple variants of control styles, gives a clear impression of existing overall design guidelines.
Android has been developing at a rapid pace, which puts some wonderful pressure on Apple to hopefully make a nice leap with iPhone OS 4 and beyond, but it’s nowhere near the point where I’d even consider switching.
