Ugh. Just ugh. I suppose I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that, in fact, most heavy users of Illustrator prefer this behavior, but I absolutely hate it. It used to be, if you selected a text block, and rotated it, it would, in fact, rotate the text to whatever angle you released the mouse at. Not any more. It now rotates the block, but not the text within:
Now, then, you must perform an extra Transform operation to get the text rotated. The UI for this sucks already, so I see this as a big step backwards in what is otherwise a really wonderful iteration on a generally great app. Fail!
Calling a web app wrapped in a system window does not make it a desktop application. The concept of AIR is great: write once, deploy anywhere applications that can combine the best parts of web apps with desktop. Too bad they all suck. I have yet to find an AIR application that’s useful for day-to-day serious use. They’re usually fluffy, heavy, useless things not unlike the all-Flash web interfaces of a few years ago (no coincidence there, the same people write them). They’re toys.
Not that I haven’t tried. I forced myself to use eBay Desktop for a few weeks, but had to give it up. All the latency and wierdness of a heavy, transactional web app, with nonstandard controls and mediocre interaction.
I tried again with TweetDeck, which has some really awesome features, but again fails for its half-assed system integration. Here’s the list of of things that suck about it:
(Right now) 159MB of wired memory in use (While it’s idle!)
No menubar (Mac)/notification bar (Windows) icon (see Google Notifier or Foxmarks for how to do a utility app right)
Horrific Flash text rendering
No Growl (or similar) integration
No keyboard shortcuts
Nonstandard controls for everything
Built-in notification brings the fucking window to the front every time
Note none of these problems are specific to TweetDeck itself, whose developers have valiantly tried to shoehorn in things like notification. It’s all AIR’s fault.
Could you solve these things? I’m not sure; probably not. Until every OS manufacturer adopts a common toolkit for drawing UI (not bloody likely!), developers will have to rewrite things for each target platform. For now, I’m going back to Twitterrific and hope they beef up the feature set to match the almost perfect UI.
About Me
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.
