January 9, 2013
I made this from a desktop-sized version a while back, and I thought I would post them up here. There is a retina size for the iPhone 4 and 4S, a lengthened version for iPhone 5, and a reduced size for the iPhone 3G and 3GS. They’re all available in the gallery above.
November 29, 2012
iTunes 11 was released today, and seems to have made at least one major feature change: iTunes DJ is gone, replaced by a new feature called Up Next (the small dialog box open in the screenshot above).
How it works:
When I realized that iTunes DJ had disappeared, my first thought wasn’t good. But after using the Up Next feature for a while, it has grown on me a lot. I actually think it’s a much more streamlined implementation of the feature than iTunes DJ ever was.
The only problem is that dialog box. It’s so small, and when you start queuing whole albums back to back, that’s only going to compound this limitation.
My suggestion: Make the Up Next feature a whole sidebar to the right on its own. This may cut into the screen real estate for the item listing, but it’s a lot better than exiling such a main feature to a small dialog box.
Apple definitely seems to be limited with screen real estate with iTunes 11, though.
Update: Just discovered something new. In the Mini Player (Command + Option + M) mode, opening the Next Up list makes it a windowed view. Pretty cool, check it out in the screenshot to the right.
September 14, 2012
I recently had to swap from an Apple keyboard to a Dell keyboard here at work on my iMac, and I had a problem with where the Windows and Alt keys are located on the Dell keyboard. By default, Mac OS X treats the Windows key as the Command key, and the Alt key as the Alt key. However, this is backwards from where the keys are located on the Apple keyboard, as shown in the picture above.
Luckily, there’s an easy way to fix this.
August 10, 2012
Imagine my surprise when my system couldn’t find svn anymore… it seems Apple left it out of OS X 10.8 for whatever reason.
Luckily, you can just download the “Command Line Tools for Mountain Lion” package from the Apple developer site.
Edit: Make sure you download the package for Mountain Lion, not just Lion. Re-downloading now…
February 9, 2011
Today I made my first purchase (ever) from the Mac App Store. I can’t say I’ll be purchasing anything from there again, but seeing as Sparrow was only available on the App Store, I didn’t really have any choice.
Which brings me to the app itself. I first heard about Sparrow back when it was in beta, and at that point it wasn’t developed far enough for me to be interested. But today I read on Daring Fireball that it had hit 1.0. The screenshots looked cool, the video looked cool, and I guess $10 isn’t that much.
This is where a demo would have been nice. I’ve used Gmail from the web since the beginning, so switching to a desktop client was iffy for me. Luckily it worked out, and I love Sparrow so far, but this almost made me didn’t want to purchase the app — videos and screenshots are one thing, but actually demoing a product is another experience entirely.
The lack of demo versions of the software on the App Store has been one of its main criticisms; that being said, I can’t say I really see a solution that not only offers a demo version, but is a clean and efficient way of handling the demo period and prevents piracy.
The problem I’ve had with desktop clients of originally web-based apps is that the UI’s didn’t really transfer over well, and I had yet to use a desktop app that made it worth moving away from the web-based interface.
An example of this is Reeder, which is intended to replace Google Reader. While it’s a nice-looking app and does everything it advertises, I still couldn’t see why I should be running an extra app to do what already works so well in the browser.
I can now say that Sparrow is the first desktop client of a web-based app that actually improves on the experience. The UI is arguably less cluttered, as well as improved:
I think that Sparrow’s design is something that I can use for a long time, and it will certainly help speed up the minimal amount of time I spend on email on a daily basis.
From first glance, it had a similar UI as the Twitter app. Thankfully, it actually works well, doesn’t sacrifice usability for the sake of an attractive UI, and doesn’t involve Twitter.
Overall, I’m very satisfied with my purchase. Assumably I’ll be getting free upgrades for the lifetime of this app, which makes my $10 go very, very far. Thankfully the lack of a demo didn’t affect my decision, but if the app was, say, $50 or so, I’d have my doubts.
That being said, I’m hardly an email power user, so my observations are largely from the perspective of a casual emailer; people who spend hours on their email every day may have a different experience with Sparrow. So far, though, Sparrow is awesome.