... what PC developers have been doing to them for years.

Safari for Windows is out. And so far, I’m not liking it. I am a PC user, but I own a Mac machine as well and I’ve used Safari on it a fair amount.

So what am I hating about it? First and foremost, Apple broke the golden rule that every PC software developer that ported to the Mac was shamed for doing: Apple has forced their OS’s s look/feel and UI conventions onto another OS. Take this screen shot of the Safari for Windows Preferences panel:

Read the rest of this entry

I’m trying hard to enjoy Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for the Wii, but I’m having a hard time. Here’s why:

The camera is annoying. Not being able to control the camera is a serious flaw of the single stick control (nunchuck) system that the Wii has. I am constantly fighting Link to get the proper view. I am pressing the C button constantly to re-center my view, but it simply is not enough. It makes jumping puzzles where you need to align Link with the platform needlessly difficult. For the mini-bosses they should have taken a tip from Psychonauts and had the camera lock on the boss, even when you’re not targeting.

The game is super-linear. So far, anyway. I do enjoy linear games, but Twilight Princess is frustratingly so. Several times it makes you retread old ground while at the same time arbitrarily locking you out of new locations, and special-case closed locations and cutscene triggers that interrupt gameplay and move you to a new location are heavily relied upon to tell us the story. For a world that is as big as it is, TP ends up feeling incredibly small and closed.

Rookie UI mistakes So they have this new pointing device that’s relatively new, and pretty sensitive. Why oh why, when you die, do they stick small “Yes” and “No” buttons up in the upper right corner of the screen, with perhaps a 5 pixel gap between them? I just ended up quitting instead of restarting because my Wii aim is not quite up to par.

No save-anywhere. Actually, you can save anywhere, you just actually won’t be there when you reload your game, and you’ll have to work your way back through a location re-solving the puzzles you already solved just to pick up from where you left off. Come on Nintendo, this is 2007! Why the $@! can I not save where I want to and be able to be there again when I return?!

I sure hope the Phantom Hourglass is better. It looking like it’s got ten times the charm and style of the Twilight Princess.

Have you noticed that some of the applications you use are rendering text with Cleartype, even though you have turned Cleartype off in Control Panel? So did I. So I tracked down why it was happening and I fixed it.

I hate Cleartype. Cleartype is the Windows OS setting that uses sub-pixel antialiasing to make the curves in letters to look smoother. I hate it because it sacrifices color accuracy in exchange for edge accuracy, and I guess my eye is extra sensitive to the color shift, because it bugs the hell out of me. It also screws up screenhots. Whenever I get a new PC, one of the first things I do is turn off Cleartype. Read the rest of this entry

I got up at the crack o’ 10:45 am on Thanksgiving morning to try and get a $100 xBox 360 from Amazon.com. They only had 1000 at that price, going on sale at 11:00am sharp, and virtually every video game blog in the Universe had reported on it. So it was going to be tough. Read the rest of this entry

I am a bad speller. And it’s frustrating to think that spell checkers have been around for 20 years but spellchecking is still not an OS-wide function. Instead, every app that spellchecks has it’s own UI and it’s own dictionary. This should all be built into the OS. Just like I can right-click any text field and select “copy” or “paste” there should be a “spell Check” option. It’s like the days where every app had it’s own set of printer drivers you needed to install.

I’ve been using Firefox 2’s spell checker, and while I’m happy they implemented it (especially with the red underlining) it seems pretty bad. One of my problem words that is difficult for me to spell even when concentrating is necessary. I always spell it nessicary. Let’s take a look at the complete list of Firefox’s suggestions for nessicary:

• carsickness
• lyricalness
• vicariousness
• carsickness’s
• caressingly

What. The. Fuck. Carsickness’s? Are you kidding me?

Of course, I am still blaming Microsoft for this, since spell-checking should be an OS-level function.

This is my second post in my Gmail UI rant series. I started this series to point out why I prefer Yahoo Mail over Gmail. I don’t think Yahoo Mail is perfect, but Gmail to me is just downright nutty, and has many-a-time left me feeling like a n00b, which is something that I really don’t think email should ever do to anyone except the elderly (that’s a joke, please no hate mail). This time I’m discussing the shortcomings in Google’s labels-instead-of-folders approach, and the difficulty in telling read messages from unread ones. Read the rest of this entry

Here’s a tip: A “progress bar” should go from left to right, and never go backwards.

Yours doesn’t. It goes from left to right, and when it just about reaches the end, it hops back to the beginning with a new “status” message, so it never really shows you how far along you are. That’s retarded. Literally.

AKA: I blame Google

I’ve been using LinkedIn recently. LinkedIn is like Myspace for career networking, but it’s got so many design problems that their various UI components battle each other gladiator-style for the honor of pissing me off.

I was using it the other night, looking in vain for the the list of contacts that is displayed with most profiles. I knew it was there because I had seen it before. I was simply missing it. Finally, after perhaps 10 minutes of searching on the page and looking for options that might hide/show them, I saw it: Read the rest of this entry

This bit of awkward wording on the Netflix website was pointed out to me by a friend. This is a headline on their recommendations page (you need to be logged in and have some movies rated for it to show up). It’s just too weird to not share:

I was in a mildly annoying meeting last week. When I’m talking in a meeting and someone is using a laptop, I can’t help but wonder if they’re listening to me and taking notes, or if they’re not paying attention and instead browsing Craigslist or playing Tetris. It can be difficult. And after this meeting, it hit me -- if I’m wondering about them, its likely that they are wondering the same thing about me when I’m using my laptop. This is a simply a perception issue, so I’m going to try and make my note-taking a bit more transparent. I’ve decided to take notes with pen and paper and avoid using my laptop during meetings whenever possible. I think it will improve communication. And it should be easy since I completed Tetris a few years ago.