What is up with that giant mess of arrows in the upper right hand corner? Do we really need a T9 slider next to the spacebar? What are those tabs attached to, and why do they look like buttons? Why is there a giant radio button next to “home”? I think the copy of GEOS that shipped with my C64 looked nicer than this.

In any case, Leopard Day arrived and I happily set about installing it on my Macbook Pro after making a full system backup on my new Seagate FreeAgent Go external drive. I’d be interested to see a correlation between external hard drive sales and the release of Leopard, as I’m fairly certain you’d see a fairly hefty spike. As an aside, the FreeAgent is a nice little drive that satisfies my major requirements: lightweight, and bus powered (meaning it doesn’t need an external power supply). It’s not overwhelmingly fast (it took about 3 hours for SuperDuper! to archive my 70gigs of data), but once Time Machine gets running I don’t notice it at all.

It’s taken a few days to get fully comfortable with Leopard. I have run across a few annoyances (and bugs) but the good definitely outweighs the bad.

Without further padding the content of this post, here’s a collection of thoughts and tweaks related to Leopard that you might find interesting:

• The Address Book no longer has support for Bluetooth devices. This is disappointing, but Blue Phone Elite looks like a good replacement for that functionality, as well as what Proximity provides.
• On a related note, Proximity seems to work just fine, as does everything else in my Calendar Synchronization post (excepting, of course, the Address Book SMS stuff).
• Quicksilver was picking up the backup copies of my applications from the Time Machine drive. To disable this, in Quicksilver select Catalog / Applications and de-select “Find All Applications”
• Spotlight was finding stuff on my Time Machine drive as well. I’m not sure if this happens to everyone, as the drive wasn’t empty when I initially plugged it in, and various posts in the Apple discussion groups seem to indicate it’s not a common problem. Solved by adding the Time Machine backup directory to Spotlight’s Privacy page.
• Spaces is great, but I wish it were a little more configurable. I run a multi-monitor setup most of the time (laptop sits open to one side of an external monitor). What I would really like is to have separate “spaces” for each monitor. Unfortunately, Spaces sees the two monitors as one large workspace, and switching to a new space swaps both. I would prefer to have Mail, iCal and iTunes open on the laptop monitor at all times, but setting those apps to “All Spaces” makes a big mess when I disconnect the laptop and run as a single screen.
• Spaces seems to have several bugs related to switching applications. In truth, I don’t know if these are bugs in the apps or in Spaces, but certain apps don’t behave themselves very well. For example, Cmd-Tabbing to Firefox will send me back to the correct Space but not activate Firefox. Adium doesn’t seem to respect the “All Spaces” command very well. And Photoshop CS3 has trouble with it’s fading UI elements when you activate it from another Space. None of these are show-stoppers, but hopefully they will get resolved fairly soon.
• The FreeAgent Go comes with a double-headed USB connector – one for data, and one for power. Turns out, you only need the data plug connected on the Macbook Pro. This is nice, as the MBP only has 2 USB ports and they are on opposite sides of the machine. The additional power connector is, allegedly, only required for certain laptops that don’t provide enough power over a single port. Fair enough, but the MBP does so you can forgo plugging them both in.
• I’ve had a few power-related issues since the update. Once, the system crashed when waking from sleep. On another occasion, the system refused to power down. Finder stopped, but the OS hung showing nothing but desktop. I have a suspicion this is related to Bluetooth devices (doh!). I’ve also had a few occasions where, when reconnecting the external monitor, I log in and the system immediately goes to sleep. I can wake it and log in immediately with no harm, but it’s still odd. I’m considering resetting the system manager to see if that clears things up.

I’ve always been a PC user, at least since our first 386SX-16 that my Dad bought for us when I was in high school. Before that, I used Apple IIs at school and spend many a day playing Pools of Radiance and coding text adventures on my Commodore 64. I had certainly played with Macs, but they always seemed foreign and inaccessible to me. I can vividly remember commenting to a friend (in the days of Windows 3.1) that using a Mac made me feel like I was trapped in Windows and couldn’t get out of it. Keep in mind, I also had about 4 different versions of my autoexec.bat and config.sys files that could be swapped in depending on the memory requirements of the program (or, more likely) game I wanted to run.

In any case, I pretty much lived and breathed PCs from DOS 4.2 through to Windows XP, and made my living developing web and Flash applications on a variety of PC hardware. In the meantime, I also ran Red Hat Linux on an old Pentium 100 (complete with F00F bug) that served as my router in the pre-LinkSys NAT box days, and even dabbled with a Debian (unstable) KDE desktop for about 9 months — although frequent reboots to Windows (or sluggish sessions in VMWare) to use Photoshop made it impossible to give up on Windows completely. All the while, I followed the progress of OS X from a distance, happily digesting Ars Technica’s in-depth reviews of the OS on every release from pre-beta through to Tiger. I’m a curious fellow that way.

For me, using a computer has only partially been about the tools that it provides. It’s also about playing. I love to install things, mess around with servers and settings, just to see if I can get it to work. It’s the same reason I bought a PSP — because it was hackable. I could make it do fun and interesting things. I could play with it, not just on it.

Right now, it’s the Mac that embodies this sense of play the best for me in the computer world. Linux was fun for a while, but it lacked the professional tools I needed to do my job. And it lacks the completeness that Apple provides, each service integrated with the other in a way that makes you want to connect the widgets to the doodads, and watch them play together.

This sense of play extends beyond the OS services and bundled applications. A system like Quicksilver could never exist on Windows or Linux, as much because of the APIs exposed through AppleScript as because of the giddy sense of discoverability built into the application by someone that clearly cares dearly for the Apple ecosystem. (It’s funny to write that about Quicksilver, an app I once described to a fellow Unix-head as “like a pipe for GUIs”).

The Mac opened up a whole new world for me to play in, and the rabbit hole runs pretty deep. For me, Vista was the final straw — not only did it not provide anything new and fun to play with, it made everything my PC used to do seems horrifically slow. It lasted a few months, and then I switched.

Because if it’s not play, it’s just work.

It was during a lazy Friday afternoon of Revolving DJ and beer than an idea was sparked in my head, regarding the iPhone and the lack of 3rd party native applications. It doesn’t take too many songs before you long for a method to effortlessly transfer tracks directly from one iPod to the next. A few moments later, someone will inevitably realize “hmmm, the Zune could actually do that“. Unfortunately, it’s implementation was so hopelessly crippled by the marketdroids and RIAA-fearing managers at Microsoft that the device was essentially stillborn.

Apple has also built an iPod with WiFi — it’s called the iPhone, and while most people are rightfully focusing on the new features of the device (phone, web browser, email client), it’s also considered one of the best iPods ever built (ignoring the anemic storage for now). The device runs a version of OS X, meaning the only preventing a mobile p2p application that can share music with friends or strangers is a smart programmer and a way to load the application onto the iPhone — conveniently left out. The Zune crippled it’s WiFi in firmware, but an open SDK on the iPhone would mean anyone could easily install such an app on their phone. Even better, if you didn’t already have the p2p app, you could easily jump on the web and download it the moment you needed it. It’s the viral-social, the dream application for music-heads everywhere, and Apple can’t stop it without throwing the baby out with the bathwater, which is pretty much what they did by not shipping an SDK for the phone.

Eventually, I found it. If you’re suffering this problem, change the frequency of index updates and it should settle down:

• Open “Power Options”
• Click “Change plan settings” for your currently selected power plan (if I try really hard, I can almost imagine why this is under Power Settings. Almost.)
• Click “Change advanced power settings”
• Find “Searching and Indexing”, then “Power Savings Mode” in the tree
• Change the setting to “Balanced”

Windows Explorer keeps frustrating me as well. Switching directories takes 10-12 seconds while it refreshes it’s thumbnail cache, and the “smart” columns wants to treat every directory as if it were full of MP3s (thanks, but I really don’t need to see the Artist and Rating associated with my ZIP files).

The change, for me, is actually much bigger than that: I’ve quit my job, and joined a startup in the online money transfer arena. This is the project I’ve always wanted. A small, focused team of great people, and the chance to work on something I can truly call my own. Live by the sword, die by the sword, and all that good stuff. I’ll be the sole UI dude, designer and implementer of wondrous interfaces for the website and administration tool. To accomplish this, I’ve made the big switch — I bought a Mac. MacBook Pro, to be precise.

I’ll post more in the future about my experience with the Mac, but if my initial impressions hold, it’s everything I dreamed it could be, and certainly everything Vista is not.

Some shorties:

• Expose: Wow. Completely changed my workflow. I love it
• Font Rendering: I never had a problem with Windows’ font rendering. Now I do.
• It Just Works: for the most part, it actually does just work
• Home/End keys: come on, Apple… really. I hit the Home key probably 300 times a day, and I’ve never, ever wanted the behaviour Mac’s use by default. Thankfully, there are workarounds for this
• Uptime: I’ve had it for a week, and I still haven’t rebooted it. Ever.

In the process of installing my iPod software, I also decided to give iTunes a whirl. I have never actually used iTunes — it’s always been completely at odd with my expectations from music management software. The few times I played with it, it was baffling. I didn’t quite understand it’s legendary status as the most usable media player available. It was also huge. Before I get too far into this, I should take a step back and explain the foundation of my position. I am a music fiend (hence, the musical focus of this website). I have over 65GB of mp3s. And — other than DJ livesets — it’s all in complete albums. I love albums. I never listen to singles, and I never use shuffle. I listen to complete albums, start to finish, and then select another one. If I like a song by a new artist, I’ll grab their latest album. Even when I love the song, if the artist can’t put together a complete album, into the trash bin it goes.

To facilitate this particular album fetish, everything is stored in my “Music” directory in a fairly flat hierarchy. Album directories are named [Artist] – [Album], and I usually stick a playlist in each directory to facilitate easy launching. Now I can sort the Music directory by date, and get an ordered list of albums by date purchased. Or I can sort by Filename and easily find something specific. If you’re following along, you’ll see where iTunes, and other media “libraries”, start to fall short.

iTunes seems to assume you want to listen to singles. This makes sense, since Apple really wants to sell you singles. If I have an entire album, iTunes still sees it as a collection of tracks. iTunes 7 gives me some visual separation of albums if I have cover art, you can’t sort albums by date added. Instead, you get the individual tracks in whatever order iTunes detected them.

Most catalog-style media players have the same problem. They introduce a layer between you and your filesystem that may make things worse. While playing with iTunes, I had to maintain two versions of my catalog: one on the filesystem, and another in iTunes. Adding a new album meant maintaining the directory structure, and then importing it. I know you can set iTunes to automatically manage your Music directory, but then you’re forced to use Apple’s preferred structure. And scanning 65GB for updates takes quite a long time.

When you want full, simple control of your music collection, nothing beats the File Manager.

To give Vista a fair chance, I’ve tried to leave it as uncustomized as possible, usually the default Microsoft solution when one was available instead of installing my preferred app. On XP, it takes me 4-5 hours of tweaking and installing to get my desktop to where I want it. For Vista, I’m only go to seek out alternatives after I’ve tried the built-in solution for a while.

It’s probably best to start with Flip 3D, the feature that took the most heat in my previous post. After about ten days of heavy use, I can report that Flip 3D is essentially useless. It solves no practical problem that I’ve ever had while switching applications. I generally have applications open that display a lot of text — Firefox, Outlook, a text editor (usually JEdit), a File Browser, and some instant message windows. At a resolution of 1600×1200, a screenshot of those applications will contain very few distinguishing features. In all previous versions of Windows since ‘95, the Alt-Tab dialog showed the application’s icon, which are generally quite different and simple to distinguish. In Vista, the Flip 3D, Alt-Tab and taskbar hover state all show a thumbnail of the application itself. This actually takes more mental effort on my part to distinguish the running applications, since the windows themselves contain mostly text and whitespace. I’ve tried to force myself to use Flip 3D instead of Alt-Tab, but so far I haven’t seen any advantages to this system.

The assumption is that Flip 3D is a poor-man’s Exposé. The beauty of Exposé is that it flattens the active task list so that all windows are represented onscreen at the same time, with roughly equal weight. It also provides cues through animation, showing the user where each window has been placed by sliding and shrinking them. Flip 3D doesn’t do any of these things — it’s essentially a fancy Alt-Tab. Technically, you can click on the window you want to activate, but since the skewed angle of the windows blocks full view of each application, it’s an exercise in hunt-and-click. Alt-Tab works because it’s so simple, your brain doesn’t have to switch contexts and parse the list. When moving content between applications (cut/paste, etc) I can Alt-Tab without thinking about it. Technically, Flip 3D could be used this way (although it would require an extra tap of the Tab key because the initial selection is your current window, instead of the next window), but why? At this point, it becomes eye candy and nothing more. The only good thing I can say about Flip 3D is that it’s very responsive. Aero Glass is quite snappy, with none of the processing lag I would see using XP’s GUI rendering system.

This thumbnail approach to task switching is now prevalent on the taskbar and in Vista’s Alt-Tab. Once again, the value of the thumbnail is negated when the window itself is so large that it’s mostly whitespace and text. An icon, plus a title, is really all I need.

Speaking of Aero Glass, I can happily report that the GUI looks fantastic, and it’s very slick and responsive. Watching dialogs and applications fade in and out does give me a little thrill, although once again it doesn’t seem to be backed up by and practical use. I can excuse Microsoft on this one, as it’s not touted as something revolutionary, aside from the fact that it’s nice to look at. If you only ever run the included applications, you’ll find a fairly harmonious visual experience. However, as soon as you install a third-party application, your whole desktop devolves into a dog’s breakfast of windows toolkits, button styles and gradients. As bland as the old Windows environment looked, it at least didn’t call attention to the massive disparity between application design styles. Firefox 2.0, with it’s nice grey gradient tab bar and soft beveled buttons looks strangely out of place when surrounded by a 10 pixel translucent border. In this case, again, I’ll give Microsoft a bit of a pass… for now. In a year or two, once application developers have had more time to update their applications, the desktop should look a little more uniform. Hopefully.

Microsoft’s new “realistic” style icons also look sharp and professional — at 64×64. Shrunken down to the quick-launch bar, though, you’ll have a hard time distinguishing the Explorer icon from the Switch Tasks or the Show Desktop icons. Everything just kinda looks like a blue computer with a square next to it.

The absolute best feature of Vista is the built-in search, especially it’s interaction with the new Start menu. In XP, I use Launchy and Google Desktop to accomplish something similar, but the integration is very nice. As well, they’ve tweaked the “home” directory concept into something that’s much more usable. Vista drops the “My” from “My Computer” and establishes Videos, Pictures and Downloads as top-level directories alongside Documents. The “Documents and Settings” directory gets a much-needed cleanup and is now found in “Users”. All in all, the treatment of disks and directories in Vista is very refreshing, and once I made the mental adjustment I found it complemented my natural filing system quite nicely. The revision of Windows Explorer is also fantastic, making navigation much simpler and moving common tasks into toolbar-style menus instead of the traditional “File, Edit” menu structure from Windows past (in fact, those menus can be enabled but I haven’t found a need for that yet). The UI is so good, in fact, that I wonder what crack the IE7 team was smoking when they randomly shoved buttons and toolbar menus into every corner of the screen. IE7’s UI is stunningly bad, especially compared to the rest of Vista’s built-in tools, although it looks marginally less out-of-place in Vista than it does in XP.

Compatibility-wise, Vista is quite good, with a few unpleasant surprises. Updates to the Samba filesharing system have left me without access to shared folders from my Ubuntu laptop, although I suspect there will be a fix for that on the Linux side fairly shortly (if not already). My external firewire harddrive simply didn’t work, but fortunately it also has a USB2.0 interface — although I’d much prefer to use the firewire port. Hopefully a driver will be available soon. I also have a NAS drive on my network, bridged wirelessly across my living room to feed video to my XMBC-enabled Xbox. The NAS drive supports Samba and FTP, and although I can connect to it from my Vista box, trying to open any directories crashes explorer.exe. This is very frustrating… although I can use FTP to move files around, I haven’t found any explanation for the Vista crash when using Samba. With any luck, a firmware update on the drive will fix the problem.

One final usability nightmare in Vista is User Account Control — basically, a dialog that prompts you to “accept” any change to the system’s configuration, or to files in the Program Files directory. When the dialog pops up, the entire screen is blanked and the transition is quite shocking. In practice, I would see this popup every few minutes while initially configuring the machine. I understand the security principles behind the popup, but the transition is so horrendous, and so frequent, it literally sent me scrambling for a way to turn it off. Fortunately one is included, although Microsoft is practically begging you not to do it. At least in Ubuntu, once you’ve approved an administrator-level change, you have a grace period in which to make additional changes without being prompted. Vista prompts you so frequently I would expect muscle-memory to become a major security issue in itself. If the user is trained to hit “accept” every time they see the dialog, then what is it actually preventing? Overall, Vista has been fun to play with. The built-in search, the cleanup of the user directories, Windows Explorer and Aero Glass are all nice features. Ultimately, though, Vista doesn’t let me do a single thing I couldn’t already do in XP. I suspect people who get Vista on a new machine will be quite happy with it. For me, though, it’s ignited a desire to go out a buy a Mac, just to try something truly different. It will be worth revisiting Vista again in a year, when some of the incompatibilities have been ironed out and application developers have caught up to the new visual style.

Thursday night found us at a presentation by Microsoft’s Tjeerd Hoek, Director of User Experience Design for Windows. Now, Tjeerd is an extremely smart guy, and given the short time period of the presentation, managed to show off some impressive development efforts going into Vista.

On reflection, though, I noticed a worrying trend with what he was demoing. Slide after slide seemed to focus on measuring the happiness impact of new features. An entire series of raw user test footage was devoted to testimonials — in part, a girl squealing with pleasure — when first shown the new 3D Windows Flip replacement for Alt-Tab. Is impressing your user a good thing? Absolutely. Apple does it with every single release. But underneath that is an impressive track record for putting an impressive face on a usable feature. At Apple, the eye-pleasing effects also give strong visual cues about the state of the user’s environment. My concern is: what if Microsoft is just measuring the visual impact? Is Vista’s UI just a collection of effects meant to increase user happiness?

Perhaps the reason I cued into the Windows Flip 3D effect so keenly is that I’m a furious Alt-Tabber. Since I’m left handed, yet mouse with my right hand, Alt-Tab is an effortless flip through a list of active programs. If there’s even a millisecond of lag, I’m less efficient. How does rotating the open windows benefit me, the power user? It probably doesn’t. But how does it benefit the average user?

Microsoft claims that Flip 3D “make[s] it easier to quickly identify the window you want”, but if you look at the screenshot, it would appear that, because of the chosen angle, it’s actually more difficult to determine what application you’re selecting.

It’s similar to the taskbar grouping feature introduced in XP. It looks decent, but it obfuscates your current program list, and turns a single click into “click, scan, click”. It’s the first thing I turn off in a fresh install of Windows, and watching people try to navigate with it is very frustrating for me. I want to leap over their shoulder and Alt-Tab for them. But maybe that’s just me.

Flip 3D was just a glaring example of this UI testing that was apparent in the presentation. Slide after slide showed internal reporting tools that tagged that bugs and features with either a “smiley” or a “frowney” face. In their effort to out-glitz Apple, did Microsoft forget about building an efficient, usable product?