Here’s a good example of user interface design on the part of Google. I wrote an e-mail just now to a client in which I was sending them a download link for some materials which I had uploaded to my server. When I went to send the message Gmail realized I had said “I’ve included”, however I had not attached anything, and gave me the above dialog.
This is great user interface feature which would have saved me many times in the past, I’m sure. I can’t remember how many times I’ve forgotten to attach files to an email when I should have.
Like hordes of others, today I downloaded and installed the new Kindle for Mac beta.
So far, it’s a very nice app. It is very simple—but this kind of app is perfectly suited for simplicity.
The app took a while to open the first time, but once it loaded I was greeted with a Register screen which allowed me to register the app with my Amazon account and associate it with my Kindle account. The process took only seconds.
Books in your Kindle account are automatically loaded into the “Archived Items” tab, which acts as a sort of bookshelf—books you have access to if you want, but not important enough to be sitting on your desk. When you go to the Archived Items, you download a book to read by double-clicking on your choice. After it has downloaded, the book will automatically be added to your home page and then opened for reading at your farthest read page. As I have been reading a few books on my iPod Touch for a while, it was very nice to have them appear on my MacBook Pro at the exact page I had left in.
Reading in the app is also nice. You can resize the window to get as much text as you want (or don’t want) on the screen at a time. It has support for your bookmarked pages, and the user interface controls are pretty simple. You can use the arrow keys on your keyboard or the scroll wheel of your mouse (or in my case, two-finger scrolling with TouchPad). The mouse/touchpad feature is nice, however it is entirely too sensitive to be used carelessly—you’ll turn five pages before you realize it.
All in all, good job Amazon. There are a few little bugs such as the scrolling problem, but this is Beta software after all. It could be argued that the interface could be nicer, but for what the app is designed for it performs its function well—especially for being beta.
When the Kindle app for iPod/iPhone came out, it opened up the world of Kindle to me. I already owned an iPod which serves so many functions for me—spending hundreds of dollars on a dedicated book reader didn’t make financial sense (or cents) for me. However, when the Kindle app was released it was perfect because I was able to enter the Kindle world without any further investment.
And that’s exactly what Kindle for Mac is doing for many more users: opening the world of Kindle up, free of charge, to anyone with an Apple computer.
When I first started developing for Palm I was a bit skeptical of the framework because it seemed thrown together and needed a lot of polish. The most annoying part was (and is) the lack of accurate documentation. Yes, I said accurate. Palm’s Developer website doesn’t offer complete documentation on everything, and even less of it is actually accurate. Often times if you copy-and-paste the sample code into your project it will not work due to either a typo in their code or the fact that the code is from a previous version of the framework and no longer works.
Palm’s own developer forums often are a frustration. If you take a look around you’ll notice a trend: most people’s posts have many more views than replies—which tells me nobody else can help them either. This isn’t to discount the webOS/Mojo ninjas out there—it just grows both aggravating and disappointing. I am currently trudging through writing a follow-up app for my last one, with progress alternating between very quick and very aggravatingly slow (as in, spending an entire day trying to figure out a problem no one has the answer to, and eventually deciding on another path that actually works).
Although this post sounds like a rant, I wouldn’t classify it as one. I haven’t lost faith in Palm. I understand it’s very early in webOS’s lifespan (indeed, the App Catalog itself is still in Beta), and being a developer I can accept that 1.x software is seldom perfect. Although being in the Palm camp this early on is a bit frustrating, seeing the ratings and feedback from your users after your app has finally shipped makes it all worth it.
I wrote a small tester webOS app for Palm Pre a while back and submitted it to Palm to be in the App Catalog. I didn’t even notice until today, but evidently my app, gChords Free, was published in the app catalog a few days ago. So far it’s managing pretty good reviews.
Several weeks ago Apple seeded out the iPhone OS 3.0 Beta 4 and iTunes 8.2 Pre-release to the developers enrolled in their iPhone developer program. The release had varying minor to major changes to both the iPhone and iTunes but one poster on the MacRumors forum found something pretty interesting in the About iTunes window.
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I’ve mentioned on this blog before that I’ve experimented with using Guitar Rig to produce guitar tones through my MacBook. Setting up such a rig is pretty straightforward but I ran into an interesting problem when it came to routing sound from the input jack on my laptop to the Guitar Rig application. With some research and tinkering, I found a solution that works perfectly. If you can’t figure out how to get your guitar input into Guitar Rig, this tutorial is for you. » Read the rest of this entry «