Midnight Cheese

Enough to blatantly highlight the iPad’s lack of Flash support at least four times during the New York Times/Safari demo. It begins to become obvious considering how carefully planned out those presentations are.

I was reading the Ars review of the Magic Mouse and came across a screenshot of the new mouse’s control panel. This is one of the few interface layouts from Apple that seemed to have almost zero thought put behind the design. Here’s a little before and after of what I thought it should look like. Lots of simplification can happen here. Removing the separate checkmarks and drop-downs and replacing them with just drop-down menus really takes the business away from this panel. It’s also more in line with the design of the Mighty Mouse and Spaces panels.

It happened. I waited in line for about 45 minutes at the Apple Store in Green Hills on Saturday. (Three weeks after launch.) So far, the only thing I miss about my old A900 was hacking it to tether to my laptop through Bluetooth. Sprint’s EVDO network is rather speedy.

I feel weary giving my money to AT&T, but we’ll see how it goes.

At noon on Saturday, the day after the iPhone 3G release, the Apple store at Lenox Square in Atlanta still had a line of what looked to be somewhere between 50-100 people waiting to get in.

The AT&T store across the street had no iPhones in stock.

Oh noes! I was greeted with a screen of rainbow colors upon boot-up this morning. Many reboots later the problem still persisted. This guy suggested resetting the PRAM (Hold command + alt + p + r at startup, wait for two chimes) which worked perfectly.

Likes
1. File Renaming. Finder no longer selects the file extension when renaming files. A seemingly tiny change, but immensely helpful.

2. Tabs and themes in Terminal. What else can you say about tabs?

Dislikes

1. Mail. This is likely partly due to our ailing Exchange server, but trying to delete or cut messages results in a lock-up of Mail app nearly every time. Cutting more than one message? Guaranteed lock-up. Been having weird UI artifacts as of late as well.

2. The menu bar’s translucency. The biggest downer is the fact that there’s no justification for it. I keep wanting to push my apps up to the top of the screen because the menu bar appears to not be there in my peripheral vision. The bar and the menus are inconsistent in transparency. Why is the bar more transparent than the menu? I’d really like a good design/UI/user experience rational for this one.

Overall Leopard has been seamless. Upgrading went smooth, existing apps work, Safari is super snappy. There’s not much to really complain about and that’s certainly a good thing. Now I’m just waiting on Adobe to release a CS3 update to get the PDF printer functioning again.

I’m selling a couple old Apple devices on Ebay:

• Apple Macintosh SE/30 Analog Board/Power Supply
• AppleCD 600e External SCSI CD-ROM Drive