WWDC midweek report
Typing this up between sessions so please excuse the sloppy writing.
Stacks
When Steve started talking about cleaning the Desktop, my heart stopped for a split second. I thought I was going to be Sherlocked (I was also sitting with the Karelia guys at the time). As it turns out, Stacks is just doing what I’ve been suggesting for a while on my tips and tricks page: download everything to a separate downloads folder. Hazel stores the file’s date added and ships with a sample rule to color newly added files; Finder (or maybe the filesystem, I need to check) now keeps track of the date added as well and uses it to keep your most recently added files at the top of the stack. Nonetheless, those Stacks don’t clean themselves so, I think the main adjustment I need to make is to change the marketing message from “Clean Your Desktop” to “Clean Your Stacks”.
Miscellaneous KeyNote comments
I feel like I’m missing the point of the transparent menubar. You can’t drag windows up underneath the menubar. Are the top 20 or so pixels of your wallpaper that important? What do you need to see under there? While I appreciate the tricks they pulled to maintain legibility, it’s still not as clear as an opaque menubar. So yes, add me to the list of grumpy transparent menubar haters.
Did anyone find it odd that when showing the pie charts of Safari’s current market share and their target marketshare, that they had Safari eat up Firefox’s slice of the pie while IE’s market share remained unchanged? Not sure if one should read too much into it as it probably was inadvertent, but it does give the impression that Apple is gunning for Firefox.
Parties
A big thanks for Chuck Soper and Buzz Anderson for organizing their respective parties. The edge has to go to Buzz though since he arranged for a taco truck to be parked outside. Nothing like eating a taco with meat scraped off the face of a cow to start the evening off right.
I’ll probably drop by the OmniFocus get-together later today but won’t be able to make any of the other extracurricular events because of dinner plans.
Category: Hazel, WWDC 3 comments »
June 13th, 2007 at 6:37 pm
re: piechart
I think they were making the point that until they released Safari for Windows, they couldn’t gobble up the part of the pie chart which represented IE, so the only thing they could do was compete against Firefox. (Although given that most FF users are on Windows, that still couldn’t compete until they put Safari on Windows…)
btw, your email validation thing doesn’t seem to know about the “.name” top-level domain. I had to enter a different email address than normal…
June 13th, 2007 at 9:07 pm
I’m also not crazy about the menubar. Seems like it’d be hard to read. Also, it seems to be aping an aspect of the Vista UI which was criticized for that very reason.
What annoys me about the current menubar, is that when you have monitors arranged side by side, the menubar gets in the way when dragging a window from the secondary to the primary. And it’s hard to arrange the monitors in the preferences so that the top of the secondary monitor is level with the bottom of the menubar on the primary.
What I’d really like is if each monitor could have its own menubar, and its own active application. So if you have Mail on the secondary monitor, you wouldn’t have to mouse all the way back to the primary monitor every time you need to click on a menu. On two 30″ monitors, that could be a very long way.
June 19th, 2007 at 6:17 pm
Tim: Re: validation: AFAIK, it’s some WordPress thing. Not sure if where to fix that but I’ll poke around.
Jon: I don’t have a two screen setup (yet) but I always imagined that mousing around would be a pain in the ass. I always thought that making the menubar appear on the window where your mouse is would be an interesting hack for someone to do. Basically, a “focus follows mouse” for the menubar.