Unfortunately, as someone with the "why your email proposal won't work" form will come along eventually and point out, any solution that requires everyone to change over at once is doomed to fail.
If they didn't deliver advertisements, they would only need to deliver mail once or twice a week. nobody uses regular mail for quick correspondences anymore. There is no need to deliver 6 days a week.
Tell that to my auto insurance company, who waits until the last moment to mail me bills. Usually, if I don't have it in the outgoing mail within 5 days of the day I receive it, it will be late.
It's still a bad UI design choice. It even goes out of its way to break the back button when opening the Bookmarks page via the Show All History link. Back works fine if I open it via Bookmarks, Show All Bookmarks.
If you are showing the Bookmarks toolbar then you'll see that the little book button is pressed in.
I don't because I never use bookmarks toolbars, thus to me they are a waste of screen real-estate. I have them disabled in Firefox and Opera as well. On the flip side, I always turn the Status Bar on because I like to know where links lead before I follow them.
Plus, why would I expect the History display to open the Bookmarks screen? They serve entirely different purposes.
Just FYI, I think that's deprecated now. You used to be able to double-click this icon to close a window, a habit I got into, but in a lot of recent Microsoft apps that doesn't work. For instance, if you double-click the icon in Windows Live Messenger, it maximizes the application... for some reason.
It's probably considering it as a double-click on the application's title bar, which will maximize the app. Double-clicking the icon to close a window has been somewhat redundant since the X button was added in Windown 95, so that being deprecated doesn't surprise me.
The icon menu also doubles as the taskbar's right-click menu for an application. I noticed this when I starting using an application that added other things to its window menu... those things also appear when I right-click it in the Taskbar.
Second. When Apple posts a direct link to one of its flagship applications on the main page of its website (http://www.apple.com), do you really expect people to understand what a beta is? It's called a beta, but it's not being treated as a beta. With normal betas, a small subset of the userbase will install, test, and use the app. Betas aren't supposed to be marketed with such fanfare. The entire point is to quietly release the beta to permit the beta testing to occur; it's not to push the app to the masses. Apple is advertising this "beta" to everyone and anyone: power user, casual user, grandma user, idiot user, manager user, etc (in order of decreasing acuity). You may know what "beta" means, but your uncle Vince who just completed a course at the public library titled "Learn the Internet 101" does not.
It doesn't help that the definition of beta has become muddles over the years.
When I learned the stages of software development, it went something like this:
alpha - Code that doesn't compile or runs incorrectly. Alpha testing is literally checking to see if the code compiles and runs as expected, done by the developers themselves.
beta - The code works now, but there may still be major bugs. A small group of internal testers try it and report any bugs they find. This is now called "closed beta" by MMO developers or "alpha" by the Mozilla team.
gamma - The code works and most major bugs are fixed. The code is released to a large group of testers to find any remaining issues. This is now called "open beta" by MMO developers and "beta" by everyone else.
delta - The finished product. Only maintenance releases are done at this point. New features and major bugfixes are done on the next release. This is called "beta" by Google.
So... it sounds like Apple really does have a beta in the old meaning here, but released it to a large group of people.
QuickTime player is simply a front-end application that makes use of the framework. Its Windows counterpart is a mere shadow of its former self.
Based on the wording you used, when you said "Its Windows counterpart," I thought you were referring to Windows Media Player, which, as I understand it, is just a(n ugly) GUI over top of DirectX Media. Fortunately, there are alternate players, such as Media Player Classic (an open source player that resembles Windows Media Player 6.4 with some extra features) and additional codecs, including one to play Quicktime files.
I wouldn't completely knock Safari without giving it a chance. Safari itself was based off of KHTML (and the Apple devs still contribute back regularly to the KDE/Konqueror folks). If they ported it once, porting it twice shouldn't be a terribly huge issue once the initial kinks are worked out.
I'd consider using it if it didn't completely ignore some of Windows' GUI conventions. I hate skinned apps, with a passion. I tolerate Opera and Firefox simply because they have skins that resemble my OS... thanks to a "feature" of Windows dealing with Window Handles, even Internet Explorer has to recreate all the Windows controls that it wants to use (except <select> up through IE6) rather than using OS native widgets.
Other than the obvious non-standard widgets, you have
Missing application menu in the upper-left corner. This menu contains menu items for Minimize, Maximize, Restore, Move, and Size. This menu is still accessible via its keyboard shortcut (Alt-Space). Present since: At least Windows 3.0, 1991
Missing minimize animation. Present since: At least Windows XP, 2001
Maximize/Restore animation is odd, it resizes one dimension at a time. Windows itself resizes both dimensions at a time. Present since: At least Windows XP, 2001
Resizing can only be done from the lower-right corner. Windows allows resizing from all four sides and corners. Also, the cursor does not change when moved over the resize area. Present since: At least Windows 3.0, 1991
Clicking on the Safari icon in the taskbar when it is minimized performs the restore operation, even if the Window was maximized before... in other words, it shows the window maximized for a split second, then resizes it.
You can resize a maximized window. Windows programs normally don't let you do this.
Clicking on a taskbar icon for a window that is currently in front should minimize that window. Present since: Most likely Windows 95, 1995.
Some dialogs are missing close buttons. History, Show All History and Help, About Safari off the top of my head. In fact, the only way I found to close the History window was counterintuitively through Bookmarks, Hide All Bookmarks.
Pidgin does. I use it to let me know when I have mail on my GMail account through Google Talk.
Unfortunately, there IS a drawback. It only lets you know about GMail when you first log on. I'm not sure if it treats other email services the same way or not.
Phantasmagoria is actually pretty disturbing, with 6 (or was it 7?) depicted murders and a rape scene (oddly enough, while both parties are fully clothed... I guess Sierra isn't that risque).
I don't know about Heretic 2 - but in the original Heretic if you typed "IDDQD" (invincibility in Doom) then it would kill you instantly. I don't remember what the message was, but it did say something just before it killed you.
Although it doesn't run too well under XP and I'm too lazy to start Dosbox, I ran the game. It says "trying to cheat, eh? now you die!"
I was going to point that out, but you beat me to it.
If anything, by the rules of supply and demand, Nintendo should have priced the Wii higher. The catch is that the market doesn't like it when prices go up, so it's too late to change that now.
You know, I'm not a big fan of the GPL, but even I feel the need to point this out. It's only devoting manpower towards those projects if you actually give your modifications back to the project.
Extending it so that you can sell the new version it is not contributing to a project, it's supplanting it.
Though, honestly, when he called NeoOffice an X11 app, I had to take away his credibility card...
You must have read a different article than I did, because I don't remember him saying that. I do remember spotting grammatical errors the first time OpenOffice is mentioned:
The other choice was NeoOffice, an OpenOffice.org fork for Macintosh, and running OpenOffice.org through an X11 environment.
The grammatical error being "choice was" instead of "choices were," as these are clearly two separate items.
Does Yahoo even look at GoLive for their new content?... Design tools give absolutely, utterly horrendous HTML as their output. Nearly any simple page you can imagine will end up as a bloated chunk of HTML with tons of cruft.
Have you ever actually looked at the HTML generated by Yahoo?
Yahoo's main page, served to my Opera 9.21 browser, is 105KiB including a 2025 line (44KiB) embedded stylesheet. Most of the rest of the content is javascript.
I hate to say it, but I'd be hard pressed to find a design tool that produces code worse that what Yahoo's already pushing out.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, as someone with the "why your email proposal won't work" form will come along eventually and point out, any solution that requires everyone to change over at once is doomed to fail.
Tell that to my auto insurance company, who waits until the last moment to mail me bills. Usually, if I don't have it in the outgoing mail within 5 days of the day I receive it, it will be late.
Ron Gilbert would be surprised to find out that Steve Purcell was the creator of the Monkey Island series.
I don't because I never use bookmarks toolbars, thus to me they are a waste of screen real-estate. I have them disabled in Firefox and Opera as well. On the flip side, I always turn the Status Bar on because I like to know where links lead before I follow them.
Plus, why would I expect the History display to open the Bookmarks screen? They serve entirely different purposes.
It's probably considering it as a double-click on the application's title bar, which will maximize the app. Double-clicking the icon to close a window has been somewhat redundant since the X button was added in Windown 95, so that being deprecated doesn't surprise me.
The icon menu also doubles as the taskbar's right-click menu for an application. I noticed this when I starting using an application that added other things to its window menu... those things also appear when I right-click it in the Taskbar.
It doesn't help that the definition of beta has become muddles over the years.
When I learned the stages of software development, it went something like this:
alpha - Code that doesn't compile or runs incorrectly. Alpha testing is literally checking to see if the code compiles and runs as expected, done by the developers themselves.
beta - The code works now, but there may still be major bugs. A small group of internal testers try it and report any bugs they find. This is now called "closed beta" by MMO developers or "alpha" by the Mozilla team.
gamma - The code works and most major bugs are fixed. The code is released to a large group of testers to find any remaining issues. This is now called "open beta" by MMO developers and "beta" by everyone else.
delta - The finished product. Only maintenance releases are done at this point. New features and major bugfixes are done on the next release. This is called "beta" by Google.
So... it sounds like Apple really does have a beta in the old meaning here, but released it to a large group of people.
Based on the wording you used, when you said "Its Windows counterpart," I thought you were referring to Windows Media Player, which, as I understand it, is just a(n ugly) GUI over top of DirectX Media. Fortunately, there are alternate players, such as Media Player Classic (an open source player that resembles Windows Media Player 6.4 with some extra features) and additional codecs, including one to play Quicktime files.
I'd consider using it if it didn't completely ignore some of Windows' GUI conventions. I hate skinned apps, with a passion. I tolerate Opera and Firefox simply because they have skins that resemble my OS... thanks to a "feature" of Windows dealing with Window Handles, even Internet Explorer has to recreate all the Windows controls that it wants to use (except <select> up through IE6) rather than using OS native widgets.
Other than the obvious non-standard widgets, you have
Fine... Which suggests the question...
Which begs the question... why not just use Opera? Some of us already do!
Pidgin does. I use it to let me know when I have mail on my GMail account through Google Talk.
Unfortunately, there IS a drawback. It only lets you know about GMail when you first log on. I'm not sure if it treats other email services the same way or not.
Figures, I posted a reply to someone else commenting on that before I saw your post.
That's OK, according to the table at the end of the article, Pidgin can't be installed on Windows, even though they tested using the Windows version.
Which I think tells a lot about this report's accuracy.
Personally, I think that a simple multiplayer Lego game (like Blockland) would make more sense than a Lego MMO.
Phantasmagoria is actually pretty disturbing, with 6 (or was it 7?) depicted murders and a rape scene (oddly enough, while both parties are fully clothed... I guess Sierra isn't that risque).
Although it doesn't run too well under XP and I'm too lazy to start Dosbox, I ran the game. It says "trying to cheat, eh? now you die!"
I was going to point that out, but you beat me to it.
If anything, by the rules of supply and demand, Nintendo should have priced the Wii higher. The catch is that the market doesn't like it when prices go up, so it's too late to change that now.
You know, I'm not a big fan of the GPL, but even I feel the need to point this out. It's only devoting manpower towards those projects if you actually give your modifications back to the project.
Extending it so that you can sell the new version it is not contributing to a project, it's supplanting it.
Forget you will, yes.
Maxed out on RAM? That might explain it.
I'm surprised you can still buy G5s... or was this a machine you already owned and just provisioned for this person?
Also... $9000? Is that in USD?
I'm having trouble coming up with materials that would add up to $9000.
The Apple 23" HD display is $899. Adobe CS3 Master Collection, the most expensive edition of CS3 (which hasn't yet shipped) is only $2,499.
So... the G5 plus misc software was another $5,500 or so?
You must have read a different article than I did, because I don't remember him saying that. I do remember spotting grammatical errors the first time OpenOffice is mentioned:
The grammatical error being "choice was" instead of "choices were," as these are clearly two separate items.
I find it interesting that Flash was omitted from this list. It isn't a coincidence that the most recent version of Flash is called Flash CS3.
Is Flash really ubiquitous enough that people no longer seek an open source replacement for it?
I don't think that word means what you think it does.
Have you ever actually looked at the HTML generated by Yahoo?
Yahoo's main page, served to my Opera 9.21 browser, is 105KiB including a 2025 line (44KiB) embedded stylesheet. Most of the rest of the content is javascript.
I hate to say it, but I'd be hard pressed to find a design tool that produces code worse that what Yahoo's already pushing out.
Your karma ran over my dogma!