Flyover Country

Chimp Software has released iRooster 2.2, the alarm clock for Mac OS X. To celebrate, they are offering an iPod Nano (PRODUCT)RED edition to one lucky customer. This update features full Intel compatibility as a Universal Binary, updates to its easy-to-use interface, improved wake-from-sleep and Snooze capabilities, and more. iRooster 2.2 requires Mac OS X [...]

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Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror has a truly spectacular example of bad UI design up on his website today. It’s so bad, in fact, that it has been dugg 1087 times. Wow. The piece of UI in question is a VB-based wrapper around the fantastically powerful Wget command line tool.

Part of being a [...]

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I just discovered that Colin Meloy of the Decemberists is a frequent contributor to his band’s Wikipedia page (or perhaps it’s just someone claiming to be Colin…). Very funny.

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Bithaus has a handy little chunk of Objective C source code up that provides programmatic capabilities to styling NSWindows. It’s modeled on Matt Gemmell’s snazzy TunesWindow class (which I use in iRooster, by the by), but appears to handle all of its window style in code instead of by loading and stretching PNGs, as TunesWindow [...]

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Much has been written about the imminent decline of Western civilization due to the twin threats of text and instant messages. I’ve always prided myself on my ability to write complete sentences, but I occasionally worry about whether today’s adolescents care or (even worse) recognize that they seem incapable of forming complete sentences with decent [...]

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This has been one of those months where I wonder to myself whether becoming a goat herder would represent, net-net, an overall improvement in my life. Hmm.

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No respectable Windows developer would try debugging their application with printf()’s or Console.WriteLine()’s, so why would you try doing the same thing with Javascript? Yeesh. I’ve been hacking a fair amount of Javascript and Ajaxy things lately, and I’ve put together a respectably little toolkit with which I can work it over. If you’re doing [...]

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Joel Spolsky has an interesting essay up on his site entitled Choices = Headaches, which explores the myriad options available in Windows Vista for…leaving your computer:
Every time you want to leave your computer, you have to choose between nine, count them, nine options: two icons and seven menu items. The two icons, I think, are [...]

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Anna Bradley, the CEO of Criterion 508 Solutions, will be giving a talk at the Access Board, a Federal agency for accessibility, on December 13th. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any clear sense of what Anna will actually be talking about. I assume she will be talking about accessibility (especially since that’s what Criterion [...]

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One of my least-favorite pieces of software ever is Mail 2.x, included in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. What was a stable, reasonably performant, sensible, and usable mail client in previous iterations has become "hideously ugly," and "inflexible, inconsistent, and again, a little strange." You can find a ton of usability nitpicks of Mail scattered [...]

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