What makes you happy ?

At the start of the book “Designing the Obvious”, the author Robert Hoekman has this screenshot and he rightly points out that to a user it means nothing.

It’s a Windows error. It gives me no choice, no real information and it is not helpful.

is equally useless.

Apple error messages can be just as bad if not more so – I could sit pressing ‘Try again’ repeatedly because I have no clue as to why it was happening.

The top taskbar (or whatever it’s called) on the right. I have Quicksilver, menumeters info, Bluetooth, Airport, Sound, Battery, Clock, Quicksilver. Put the cursor over anything except Airport, tap the pad and the appropriate information appears instantly. But not Airport. It takes a leisurely 2 or 3 seconds to display it’s menu and list of networks. It’s as slow on the other mac. Why? Windows does it faster. I know it’s a tiny detail but sitting here hopping networks that delay is driving me nuts. Is it really stressing the mac to have it scan and update any list faster?

I’m sitting here writing an email to my wife. The screen darkens from top to bottom like a blind being pulled down. It gets to the bottom and I get a warning that I need to power down to restart. It’s not like I really have a choice. So I do. On restart the computer tells me that os x quit unexpectedly and would I like to see the report or send it to apple. I click to see. The dialog disappears. I see no report.

Nice.

But it won’t be a crash because everyone knows macs do not crash.
Must be my fault.

Lord of War
+ DVD Shrink
+ another piece of software
+ Windows Explorer
+ Zen Vision M
= me very happy indeed.

The Zen I had was full of podcasts I used at the gym so seeing the Vision M at a lower price I convinced J that me owning a new shiny gadget was very much in order. Amazingly she agreed. So yet again the PC triumphs.

Can Mac windows snap to the side of the screen?

I have several apps open but at any time it’s Firefox / Xchat that I can see. So I slide Firefox to the right and Xchat is top left. Sometimes there is – I assume – a 1 pixel gap on the right so when I flick the mouse to the right and drag down I suddenly see whatever app is behind Firefox. Annoying. So I end up fiddling around and maybe obscuring part of the sidebar simply because finding that single pixel perfection is frustrating. I’ve even shut or quit en masse because I find this behaviour so fantastically irksome. If the windows snapped to the side this would not happen.
Does os x have this functionality?

It’s been a constant irritation to find that on the Mac I couldn’t tag mp3′s direct from CDDB. Someone will pop up and say iTunes will do it but it won’t unless it first saw the CD, you have that CD or you bought it from the iTunes store. I tried several utilities which said they could do it and they all failed.
The thing is that there are so many different entries in the CDDB database that any tagging program must give you a way to go find what you want. Example: I have a UB40 album that I ripped and it’s now 01.mp3, 02.mp3 etc. For some reasons a CDDB query didn’t find it. So for a program that doesn’t allow an alternate form of data entry that program is junk.

Parallels. That’s what you want. Get Parallels. Get the Shared folders going and put some music into that or just share /Music. From Windows, now go get the CDDB MP3 Tool. Run that tool on the folder. If it’s not there, use the link and go find directly in the music database. Get the required url and execute the program. Bingo – lots of correctly tagged files ready for wherever they need to go.

It’s easy, it’s free (the tool anyway) and it has no dependencies.

I have the Director’s Cut of Leon and it’s Region 1. Most of the other DVD’s are Region 2. I’ll admit I’ve not looked (it’s late, work to do etc) but if anyone does know of a tried and trusted way to make the DVD drive forget all about that region encoding nonsense then such knowledge would be most useful. If I do find later I’ll post back.

–

So, I looked. As the macs I have are new, I have no chance it seems. Steve Jobs and Co. are eager to make sure that mac users get no leeway at all. Why do people believe this stops piracy? It doesn’t.

PC : 1
Mac : zero

Today has been brought to me by Red Bull with Jet Set Radio, Metropolis Street Racer (Dreamcast) and SSX On Tour. I am definitely going to trawl ebay for the 3-4 must-have DC games. Not that I have a choice.. no shops round here have them.

I like this opinion on Safari 3 and the links it has. And this illustrates perfectly the fantastically annoying behaviour of some of the fanboys (check the comments in the second link from Macworld). When IE7 was in pre-release it was pulled to bits by the fanboys. They went on and on about how crap it was, how crap it would be, how Microsoft couldn’t make anything decent, how Window was a steaming pile, blah blah blah. And yet Safari with all it’s crashing and security holes? It’s beta. It’s allowed to behave this way. I have installed on the Mac in Parallels and I think it’s as bad as the os x version. Use it for real? Not.a.chance. Horrible thing.

Audio. I cannot abide iTunes. I have tried to like it, tried to find a redeeming feature but there is no needle in that particular haystack. So I wasn’t using it, I wasn’t playing music. I’ve mentioned Songbird before and I quite like that but overall it seems a bit too much – there seems to be weight in it I’m not after. Again, I’ve not played music. Until now…
Play. It is perfect. It doesn’t want to sell me anything, it doesn’t want to interfere with files, it’s open source. It just wants to let you hear the music. If I could uninstall iTunes I would. (Maybe I should create a ‘Redundant’ in /Applications for all the unused stuff.. I used to hide items in the XP Start menu so there was no visual clutter. Will os x fall apart if i* is moved? No idea.) But being able to play music again – excellent.