Photoshop: Background layer feels like a relic, genuinely can’t see a point in having it there anymore and I’m fucking sick of pressing ‘Layer From Background’ get rid of that shit in CS5 please.
Ohh turns out you can just double click it then hit return too, Thanks Flambino
How’d I miss this one? Oh, right, it’s completely non-obvious and there’s no tooltip. Anyway, if you click the replied-to icon, Mail will find and show you the reply. Nifty!
An icon without a label is inexcusable. I can hardly believe this one, it’s such a blatantly awful mistake, and such an easy one to fix. See these icons?
They’re lovely images, actually, but I have no idea what they mean because they lack tooltips on hover. So, cart. Someone’s going to buy it? Someone’s already bought it? What? I never quite figured that one out. Dollar sign is easy enough: Money has been exchanged. The box? Shipped? Received? Nope: it means “Shipping label printed.” Star with a pencil? Write something? Written something? At least the next one, the star with an envelope gives some clue. They’re “Feedback left” and “Feedback received.”
Why did I have to think about that? It’s not the user’s job to figure out your iconography, certainly on a web page, where fixing the problem involves nothing more than adding title="This picture means this thing" to the link tag. Epic fail.
Here was a nice surprise: Visual Studio points out which of your typefaces are fixed-width, therefore most suitable for its code view. Simple, (pleasantly) surprising, elegant. Interestingly, I didn’t notice the explanatory caption at the time; it was obvious. Even better.
Your faithful correspondent, J.D. Welch, has been a professional print, web & UI designer for ten years. Starting with PageMaker version 3 in the early nineties, he has worked in media ranging from student newspapers to sprawling desktop applications to magazine ads to websites for nonprofits.