December 2010
30 posts
System Preferences iOSification
Maybe System Preferences will look like this in Mac OS X Lion.
For reference, here is what it currently looks like:
I never use the Back or Forwards buttons. I think Show All is all that is necessary.
InstaFavor — The Brooks Review →
Ben Brooks:
I have been getting scattered reports that an article (not linked list items) are showing as “unavailable” in Instapaper for iOS. This of course annoys me to no end and must be incredibly frustrating for you — the reader.
I have been seeing this problem when sending ‘original content’ pieces from The Brooks Review and Daring Fireball to Instapaper using Reeder for iPhone. (Not...
Adobe Loves Web Standards
Supposed to be an SVG example. Screen shot taken from Safari. Is Webkit’s own SVG rendering not good enough?
The Mighty Eagle Soars — The Brooks Review →
Angry Birds sends out a notification after an hour, reminding you about the super item/bird you can use. I can’t work out Ben’s tone; he seems very upbeat about this.
This seems like a pretty good way to subtly remind your users that your app exists.
To me this sounds terrible, and not in the least subtle. What concerns me is if other apps follow Angry Bird’s lead, which is likely,...
“Be warned, however, that repeated bump charging will wear your battery faster...”
– ‘Byron G’, in an article on batteries
Pun intended?
Apple’s Christmas present to me: a firmware update for my Time Capsule. How lovely.
Reeder and the Keyboard — Shawn Blanc →
I have decided to post this again after Tumblr lost it last week.
Shawn Blanc has a look at keyboard navigation in Reeder for Mac. It’s a good analysis and worth reading if you care about this stuff. I can’t find a single sentence that I don’t agree with.
In an update, Shawn writes:
Dean Mayers points out that Reeder’s keyboard shortcuts are the same as those used by Google Reader itself...
Inconsistency in Settings
Here is an inconsistency in the iOS Settings app on iPhone.
When airplane mode is turned on, the row in the list for ‘Carrier’ is removed, shifting everything below upwards.
In contrast, when airplane mode is turned on, the row for ‘Phone’ settings stays visible but is disabled by being greyed out. A clear label reads ‘Airplane Mode’.
The problem here is the lack of consistency. I see...
Merlin Mann: It is done. Adieu, Quicksilver. →
It was a good run. So long, old friend.
I love LaunchBar—but she’ll never be another you.
Merlin has switched to LaunchBar. As Patrick Rhone says “if Merlin is jumping ship, Quicksilver really is dead.” I miss Quicksilver dearly, and know it’s not coming back. (I feel similarly about Leopard’s spatial Exposé.)
Merlin taught me basically everything I know about Quicksilver. I...
Accessibility for iPhone and iPad Apps — Matt... →
All iOS developers should read this. As Marco Arment says: “Excellent VoiceOver UI is extremely little effort that yields massive improvements for many people.”
Daring Fireball: Title Junk →
John Gruber puts a spotlight on the ungainly webpage titles used by many companies. It’s good to care about these things.
I’d like the change the titles on this site to put ‘Douglas on Tumblr’ last, and to use a dash rather than a hyphen. Not right now, but it’s on my list.
Despite chaos in out postal system due to all the snow, my Glif arrived today — on schedule. Rock steady cat movies are the order of the day.
Lost Posts
Well I did a little burst of posts here, then stopped. I’m rather discouraged, because I had some posts in the Tumblr Queue which seem to have been destroyed. So not only is Tumblr often not available when I want to use it, it’s losing my posts.
Yes, I’ve already told Tumblr Support.
Tip: run Pastebot in the background when putting together a blog post on an iPhone. Pastebot can run for ten minutes in the background. Periodically copy the whole post, just in case something bad happens. (For example, an app gets pushed out of memory and does not implement full state saving.)
From Ars Technica:
For instance, users that have jailbroken iPhones would like to have a modified version of iTunes that does not ask to update iOS when the device is plugged in, since the update might overwrite jailbreak modifications,” Freeman said.
Try these:
iTunes > Preferences > General > Check for new software updates automatically — OFF
iTunes > Preferences >...
Instapaper Blog Archive →
I found this interesting nugget on the Instapaper Blog from February 2009. Instapaper was at version 1.4 at that point.
Beta PDF support. I’m still not convinced that I can do this well — I can’t resize the font or provide a text-optimized layout, and there are some issues with trying to use the Read Later bookmarklet on a PDF URL. Once you get it saved, it will be just like reading a PDF in...
The Brooks Review: On Caps Lock →
I also applaud Google for purging the caps lock key from with Chrome OS machines. I disabled caps lock on my Mac a long time ago and I never miss it. Apple is uncharacteristically conservative with their keyboards. Consider what they’ve done with mice, and the low number of buttons on all iOS devices.
I heard that caps lock was a hang over from type writers. Due to the mechanical...
Some Thoughts on the Instapaper App’s Interface
The Instapaper iOS app’s interface is pretty good already, but I felt like doing some designing so here are some thoughts I had. I’m not creating this post because it’s important, but because it’s fun. Term has just finished, so I have free time right now.
Problems
The Share panel contains actions that are not related to sharing.
The Share panel is clunky and does not scale very well as more...
Apple - iPhone - Tips and Tricks →
To my surprise and delight, I learned something new from Apple’s iPhone tips page:
Get back to your draft.
In Mail, touch and hold the Compose button to switch to your last saved message draft.
Could be useful on occasion, although unfortunately this does not seem to work across quitting Mail.
Update: Just to clarify, I don’t manually quit apps. I mean when Mail is forced to quit by...
ignore the code: Saving Documents by Proxy
Lukas Mathis discusses the benefits of saving files by dragging to a destination already on screen. Worth a look.
I mocked up this this idea about a month ago:
It’s a static image; there is no working code. The principle is that you drag an icon out of the menu bar to a folder that is already open. Lukas points out that the destination could even...
“
Not only does my Mac now “just work”, it “just works NOW”.
”
– Remiel: Making the leap to SSD
Bringing iOS to the Desktop: Why You Should Get... →
I agree with the overall point of this article and enjoying reading it. However, I disagreed with many of the smaller points and examples.
I wrote a more fleshed out version of this post, which was unfortunately lost due to an apparent bug. :(
