If Leopard shipped and it looked essentially the same as Tiger, I think most non-programmers would pass it by. Satisfying UI Design Is Often Illogical ★ Found it via the aforelinked article by Scott Stevenson. I read this long ago in Tognazzini’s Tog on Interface, and have been looking for a URL to it for years. Not only is this decision not boring, the user actuallyĮxperiences amnesia! Real amnesia! The time-slice spent making the Deciding among abstract symbols is a high-level cognitiveįunction. It takes two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to This contradiction between user-experience and reality apparentlyįorms the basis for many user/developers’ belief that the keyboard The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than.Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than.We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts: We’ve done a cool $50 million of R&D on the Apple Human Interface. Make My Logo Bigger Cream ★įrom the book of “It’s Only Funny Because It’s True”.
It’s faster, has better integration with the OS, the Aqua L&F is significantly improved, it has full support for 64 bit and a huge raft of bug fixes and miscellaneous improvements. The rumors of Java 5 being horribly broken beyond all usability on Leopard are, quite frankly, bullshit.
Python on Leopard ★Ĭhristopher Lenz: “As I haven’t seen anyone writing much about the state of Python development on Mac OS X Leopard, here’s a quick rundown.” ( Via Simon Willison.) Java 5 on Leopard ★ This is one of the best “let’s compare and contrast a few apps in the same category” reviews I’ve seen in a long time. Jon Whipple’s comprehensive comparison of DrawIt, Acorn, and Pixelmator. But so far that’s not bothering me.Linked List: October 2007 Wednesday, 31 October 2007 Image Is Everything: Comparing DrawIt, Acorn, and Pixelmator ★ On LibraryThing, I have to type each one in if I want to base a search on the ISBN. The only feature missing that I cared about using in Bookpedia (as far as I know - the site’s creator adds new features so quickly it’s hard to keep up!) is that Bookpedia allowed me to scan books’ ISBN bar codes with a Cue Cat scanner (unmodded, even), making book entry really fast. At this rate, it’s going to take a while to get all of them posted, but it’s fun. I’m fourth among people using that tag.)Įvery couple of days I bring a handful of books down from the bookshelves upstairs and enter them into LT. I don’t think I can ever catch up with the user called dean, who has 7,998 books online, but I’m hoping someday I can catch up with languagehat’s books tagged “language”, at least. Additionally, there is the competitive aspect - I want to post more books in certain categories than others have. There are RSS feeds for each user’s catalog, their reviews, books with specific tags - just an amazing number of potential RSS feeds to follow. I can read other people’s comments, and post messages on their profile pages. (Which is fine with me, as an introvert.) I can see who has a library most like mine (I realized one of my friends was there because her library matched mine so well), and who owns the books that I own.
Probably it is the social aspect, though it’s not social in the sense of live conversation or anything like that.
What is it about LibraryThing that keeps me adding books? (Slowly, yes, but surely.) I mean, it’s just a database of one’s books, right? And I already owned Bookpedia - which is really a nice program - to catalog my books, though I never managed to get very far. You might have noticed the bit in the sidebar here that says “Potential Reading” and shows 5 random books from my library - that’s a LibraryThing feature. I’ve been meaning to post about LibraryThing since I joined back in September.