The Cafes » Macs

There’s a common but mistaken belief that proper user interface design requires lots of pictures and icons. In fact, it doesn’t. Many concepts and actions can be fully and best conveyed by text. While standard icons for directories and disks and the like can be helpful, custom icons for an application’s unique actions rarely are. The fact is, most icons are not self-explanatory; and if they’re not common enough to be standardized, they’re not common enough to be learned easily.

Nonetheless, many applications persist in creating pointless, incomprehensible toolbars. Icon design is hard. It is not something that just any art school graduate with mad Photoshop skills can accomplish. Icon design is about conveying an idea with pictures. not merely making a 32×32 bitmap look pretty. It’s hard enough coming up with a good icon for basic actions like cut and paste. Now try imagining one for “Analyze Module Dependencies” or “View Breakpoints”. There’s a reason Susan Kare gets the big bucks.

Lately, this trend seems to have seeped into menus, where text used to rule supreme. For instance, look at this File menu from IntelliJ IDEA 6.0:

Not only do the icons add nothing to the menu items. They actually make the menu harder to scan and read because the items are no longer left aligned.
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While Mac programs usually have very consistent user interfaces, and most programmers religiously adhere to Apple’s human interface guidelines, there is one persistent glitch that continues to annoy us: the behavior of the Home and End keys. On a Mac, these keys should always, always, always move the cursor to the beginning and end of the document respectively.
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Why was VRML an also-ran in the flood of new technologies introduced in the 1990s? It wasn’t fundamentally broken or a bad idea. It wasn’t worse than other technologies of the day like Java 1.0 and Shockwave. It certainly didn’t suffer from a lack of hype, investment, or development resources compared to the winners. VRML fail for one reason and one reason only: it didn’t run on the Mac; and OpenOffice is failing now for the same reason.
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So you missed the latest episode of Lost. No big deal. It’s easy enough to find on BitTorrent, but now suppose you don’t want to play it on your PowerBook. It looks better on your 32 inch big screen TV. How do you get it there? The simplest way is to burn it to a DVD, but that takes some special software.

I’ve tried every open source media player and QuickTime component I can find for Mac OS X, and at this point in time I don’t think it’s possible to burn an AVI to a DVD with either Apple consumer software (QuickTime, iDVD, iMovie) or with open source software (MPEGStreamClip, VLC, Handbrake) or with any combination of the above.

However I have finally found a way to do this. (more…)

Gina Trapani writes on LifeHacker:

One of the drawbacks of switching from Windows to Mac is the smaller selection of free software available for OS X. Sure there’s tons of fantastic Mac software out there, but most of it isn’t free - unless you know where to look, that is.

If she were coming from the Linux world to the Mac, I’d understand her. Third party software for Linux is much freer than on the Mac as a general rule, but Windows? That’s completely contrary to my experience.
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