your favorite little computer program hoonja-doonja (mac version)

hmmm. didn't know that. i would consider paying for the premium service just so you can export the old mail to someone that does then, e.g. gmail. (tbh, i wouldn't trust yahoo to be the sole keeper of some of my email archive. i'd be surprised if they were still around in 5-10 years.)

the import process is all built into gmail, and once you've moved the archive over you can delete the yahoo account (or set it to forward new mail), and then use whatever imap client you like, or the gmail or whatevs.

it is 2009 why can I still not move more than one playlist at a time in itunes?!!?!??!?!

seriously.

http://www.asktog.com/columns/075AppleFlatlandPart1.html

it's the only feature I want for itunes. do you still have to do a workaround in itunes to make cmd+F the shortcut for the search box o_O

cmd-opt-f is the shortcut for searchboxes to filter in pretty much every os x application.

cmd-f to cycle through the occurrences of text in a document.

not that it makes sense, but it is consistent.

That asktog article is kind of weird... It's obvious the guy is someone important in UI design, but is he seriously holding up Photoshop as the ideal for Apple to emulate? No wonder he doesn't work for them anymore. I was under the impression that Photoshop is most designers' prime example of a mess of a UI.

Furthermore, his examples all seem more clearly related to being a fossil of a computer user that actual interface shortcomings on Apple's part. I can open applications and find documents in an instant using dead simple key commands, without add-ons like quicksliver or dragthings. The combination of OSX's search features and key commands are much faster for me than some 3rd-party add on.

The Safari criticism is a valid one, but not really a "flatland" problem as he defines it. I use the Saft add-on for Safari which makes the bookmark function work exactly as he suggests.

The iPhoto "clicking" issue is a non-issue considering the advanced scrolling and multi-touch gestures that work in iPhoto, but maybe he can't figure that out if he's still inanely clicking on the scrollbar to move up a down in a window. If you're fast scrolling through events in iPhoto, you get a nice date display super-imposed over the photos, which works great unless you are the type who doesn't set the date on yr digital camera.

I don't use keywords in iPhoto, so I'm not going to comment on that. I think things like facial recognition in the newer versions of iPhoto are probably going to reduce the need for keywords in the near future.

His comments on the iPhone I don't completely disagree with, but they also don't resonate with my usage patterns. Wanting to use folders for applications seems sort of counter to the need to quickly access apps while half-looking at the phone in a normal mobile setting. I guess Apple could implement something like this easily, but I don't think it's that useful. Why have a bunch of apps on your iphone that you never use?

Finally, Apple has pro-apps which also maintain a consistent UI and look pretty simple on the surface while packing in some pretty powerful features. There doesn't seem to be a lot of complaints from pro-users about the layout of Logic or (less familiar to me) Final Cut.

Of course there are always some problems with the way certain things work (I just deleted a few playlists by accident in iTunes the other day and was like "no undo?" when I realized they were lost for good). Still, most of these seem more like small oversights that some grand flaw in Apple's design philsophy

that dude needs to have fewer bookmarks, applications, fewer everything,

i bet his texts are too long too

seems likely

he should be friends with tracer

Of course there are always some problems with the way certain things work (I just deleted a few playlists by accident in iTunes the other day and was like "no undo?" when I realized they were lost for good). Still, most of these seem more like small oversights that some grand flaw in Apple's design philsophy

I basically agree with this, bar a couple of points. iPhoto was of absolutely no use to me when it was first released on OS X (because i took more than two photos per year) and I filed things manually with Finder until Lightroom came out, which has been a smash hit among UI nerds and is not just iPhoto + Unix/Windows-like folders, which is the straw man I think a lot of people imagine when they read people like Tog.

I will say that playlist organization on iTunes has not changed in four years, and it's beginning to look less and less like an oversight.

The lack of UI complaints about the pro apps is unrelated to this issue, imo. The UI of Logic was established before it was bought by Apple and is nothing like iPhoto or Safari. I'm not holding it up as an example of good UI design, but it clearly doesn't suffer from oversimplification. The same goes for FCP.

This was an interesting response to the Tog article: http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/10/11/flatland/

is tog really using Adobe stuff? It's a total nightmare. I recently upgraded to CS4 and it's taken me an hour in each app to customize the workspaces to my liking, and even then it's still a mess, not to mention that there isn't even design consistency between CS4 apps.

i think he's restricting his comments to photoshop (and yeah, he probably hasn't upgraded since PS 7)

cmd+f for searching itunes is classic. cmd+opt+f shrinks ur balls/ovaries

gutted

I hate that VLC can't make macbook's region free too ;_;

which macbook do you have?

2GHz core 2 duo

same as me. i unlocked mine. i have to give a talk tomorrow, but bump this thread later in the week and i'll go through my notes and email you the files i used to do it. it's not hard, but i think the info has disappeared from the public internet.

p.s. under About This Mac > More Info > Disc Burning, do you have a "MATSHITA DVD-R UJ-857D"

no :( I have HL-DT-ST DVDRW GWA4080MA

nerds

no u

(wd appreciate a look at those notes when u have a chance tho :)

upholding adobe UI as a positive example of ANYTHING is pure insanity

http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/

xxp, it looks like there is a firmware hack for this (e.g. googling "GWA4080MA region"), but (i) you need to boot into windows to apply it and (ii) the site you get them from (rpc1.org) seems to have disappeared off the internet.

i have everything you need for the UJ-857D if that's any use to anyone (i think that drive went into some 2006/7 MacBooks and iMacs)

xxp, i agree, but that tog post refers specifically to photoshop (the least bad of the CS applications), and not any of the mess they bought from macromedia.

that post should have referred to lightroom, by the way, which is a sui generis amazing ui for power users. not without problems, but just light years ahead of any app of comparable complexity.

Otm. I'm not big on modality, but it works incredibly well there.

i am a vi user, so modality is my jam : )

oh wait lightroom has modality like vi??? that is dope, vi is def the jam

lolz

finally have a vimrc i'm happy with now

you are a vim dude?

y

do you use caek.vim colorscheme y/n?

no iirc

http://www.figuiere.net/hub/blog/200407/vim.jpg

i use this too, wasnt aware it had modality

I found one solution to my above email problems, btw, but it's at least 10 dollars a month and without being sure it's really ideal I don't know about even trying it out. It's the host Rackspace which has been doing lots of "cloud" solutions including an email one. They have a webmail app that works like gmail apps, uses your url, has imap etc, but has a more traditional "folder" style interface. Hook that up to thunderbird or mail.app and I'd be pretty good to go.

Launchbar is stamping all over Spotlight and Quicksilver for me. instant send of any selected text, quick google searching etc.

launchbar is still around? wow! I think I stopped using it like six years ago

Yeah, it's way better than it used to be. Does pretty much everything quicksilver does as well

10000x faster than QS and much stabler too, ime. i actually run both. use lb for the launcher type stuff, and qs for a few weird things (clipboard history, triggers for script launching, etc.)

LB has clipboard and script triggers now too, btw.

I gave up on quicksilver because it kept crashing silently, and it needs to be there when you hit the keys or what's the point?

They've put up a FAQ for Quicksilver users: http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/switch.html

thanks

I tried both but decided I didn't like it.

And for those following my email troubles....

I set up a Google Apps account for the acuterecords domain. Then I started the fun process of consolidating 10 years of emails from yahoo, a prior gmail account and the acuterecords stuff that had been sent directly to mail.app before I had gmail picking it up. It took days and due to some stupid changes of methods in the middle I have a lot of duplicate emails, but gmail basically hides those anyway.

Here's the thing...you can migrate from yahoo to gmail and gmail will see each folder as a label, but it doesn't work perfectly. However, with the google apps account, you can use a different version of google's fetch that basically grabs anything out of the yahoo inbox. So what I'd do is empty the inbox, then take an entire yahoo folder, anywhere from 200 to 1500 emails, and move it into the inbox. I'd then set my google apps account to label all mail picked up from yahoo with a label appropriate to that particular folder. If I got any email in the meantime, it would get caught up but it would be the most recent.

Anyway, there were a few more issues, but I'm good now. All my email accounts consolidated to one email address on my own URL which is IMAP'd to mail.app and my ipod touch and I created an alias to access my google apps webmail by typing my own domain name.

I went back and forth but have now decided I love Size Up:

http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/

simple window tiling management. I'm working on a poster now on my primary monitor and wanted to access artwork from 4 different folders, so I put them on the secondary monitor and with some quick key commands, have tiled the 4 windows.

Snippets for code fragment management is ROXOR - http://www.snippetsapp.com/