See, sometimes Windows does it right. I forget where I was reading it, but I recently came across someone bitching that a significant failure of OS X was that the Trash wouldn’t restore files to the place they came from. Despite the idiot-ranting tone of the post, I had to agree. It’s something Windows has done for ages, and is a simple, very useful feature. Well, Apple decided to steal back from Redmond and will introduce a “Put Back” feature into the Trash in Snow Leopard, if the following screenie is to be believed:
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.
I. Love. ArtRage. I’ve used natural-media drawing/painting tools for a loooong time, and have yet to find anything as fabulously great as ArtRage. The main thing it has going for it is simplicity; it takes about ten minutes of dicking around to figure everything out. As opposed to Painter, which has one of the densest, most incomprehensible interfaces I’ve ever seen. How on earth can artist-types figure it out?
ArtRage is a great example of a branded interface: distinctive, but doesn’t get too far in your way or require a lot of thinking to figure out controls. It lives in a single window and (almost) every control is replaced:
I’m generally not in favor of replicating system UI, but in this case, it works. I will say, however, that the modal dialogs, scrollbars or context menus are the weakest part of the interface. However, opting for consistency was probably the right choice.
On the plus side, the UI is clearly optimized for tablet input: The tool palette has big buttons, sliders both linear and circular are easy to manipulate with the more fluid, gestural input a stylus provides.
My very favorite bit, however, comes from an astoundingly clever bit of programming. The application uses PNGs as stencils, with black areas ending up knocked out and white as masked. To add to the library of stencils, all the user has to do is drop images into a directory, and they show up in the list. Not compiled in, not in some crazy database. Brilliant. Want to add a new section? Just add a directory; it’s name becomes the label. Don’t want to bother? There’s a GUI option to import stencil images into the individual file you’re working on. This is the best kind of extensibility: easy for the user who wants it, completely unnecessary and transparent to the user who doesn’t.
And the quality of the output? It’s certainly as close to real paint, pencil, marker and crayon as I’ve ever seen.
If you have a Wacom (does anyone else make them?) tablet, download it. If you don’t, buy a tablet, then download it. It’s one of the few truly pleasurable applications to use still around.
Drool. That’s the best word for how pretty and functional the new Web Inspector is.
Functionality-wise, it’s pretty much just an implementation of Firebug (as far as I can tell, I’m not a hardcore web developer), and that’s good for me. If there’s one thing Apple’s good at, it’s taking an existing good idea and polishing it with professional interaction and visual design. Something that other big software company (the one that pays my bills) could learn from.
UPDATE 3/9: Also, this context menu is killer. Most of the time I need Firebug, it’s to answer “hey, what’s the computed style of this thing I’m looking at.” In Safari, I can do that with a right-click:
Some of the best UX is the simplest. I downloaded Google Notifier, mounted the disk image, copied the binary to /Applications, launched it from Spotlight. Naturally, Spotlight chose the version on the disk image, not the local version. Well, look at the awesome dialog that resulted:
Not just reminding me to not run it from the disk image, I’m offered the option to fix the problem right there. I assume this is dead simple to program (unless launched from /app, show…), and I’d love to see it more often. It’s a perfect example of going the extra mile to exploit the sorts of things a computer does best. Even though it’s a small feature, this definitely gets an EPIC WIN.
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.
