Christopher Mackay’s Blog

bynkii.com: “This is, without doubt, the shittiest installer I have ever dealt with.”

…in which John C. Welch uses the word ‘fuck’ as punctuation.

From the Daring Fireball post on Wired’s story on 37signals:

Long profile by Andrew Park in the March issue. Pretty good overall, but there’s an awful lot of ginned-up conflict. E.g. the last paragraph contains the sentence: ‘Call it arrogance or idealism, but they would rather fail than adapt,’ and suggests they’re somehow losing customers due to their emphasis on simplicity above all else.”

Doesn’t seem so “ginned-up” from here. Count me among the lost customers.

37signals have earned their success. They get an awful lot right in their apps, from lack of data lock-in to an admirable overall level of intuitiveness.

So why have I given up on them after trying to use Basecamp for nearly 3 years?

A big reason would be that “vetoing customer requests” is standard operating procedure at 37signals. Don’t take my word for it: it says so on page 62 of Getting Real:

Don’t worry about tracking and saving each request that comes in. Let your customers be your memory. If it’s really worth remembering, they’ll remind you until you can’t forget.

Or until they go away because they have better things to do.

It’s fine with me that DHH would say “fuck you” to this, but he doesn’t get to do that and have my money.

For people looking for something, um, less simple than Basecamp (on Mac OS X) take a look at OmniPlan, recently upgraded to version 1.5.

TidBITS Macs & Mac OS X: Leopard Emerges from Beta as 10.5.2 Ships.

What is it with everyone’s obsession with Leopard’s transparent menubar?

If you’re using a desktop image that’s in any way useful — as in it’s easy to find icons on the desktop, you know, big blue sky, as opposed to some noisy, distracting pattern that camouflages everything you put on it — then it’s not a big deal.

I agree with Matt’s assessment that iCal’s new behaviour of requiring a double-click to show event details is still an annoying step backwards, though.

Apple’s calendar software, iCal, has taken unfortunate steps backwards in Leopar, Mac OS X 10.5, which were not remedied by the 10.5.1 update.

When users of iCal under Mac OS X 10.4.x invite users of 10.5.x to an event, the behaviour is quite different than it used to be. Regardless of the calendar the sender had assigned an event to (e.g. Home, Work, etc.), when inviting a Leopard iCal user, the event arrives as part of the Home calendar.

Worse, it’s impossible to edit the event or its notification/reminder. You can’t change the Calendar to which it belongs, it will have a 15 minute alert — even when the sender chose an hour — and there’s no way to confirm or decline the invite.

Here’s hoping 10.5.2 addresses some of these issues.

Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) is a fine update to Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4), which was already quite solid as a day-to-day operating system. I’m going to focus here on the most prominent changes to the user interface; these are my observations after a month of using Leopard (10.5.1) day-to-day in a production environment.

Read the rest of this entry »

Phill Ryu has posted a YouTube clip of his 2-year-old working an iPhone. That’s pretty cool. Let’s see that with a Blackberry.Maybe if the 2-year-old was running the video camera this clip wouldn’t make you feel so sea-sick…

Remember those wonderful web badges that obnoxious webmasters used to put on their home pages? You know, “Optimized for Netscape 3.0″? As if people would go to the trouble of downloading and installing a web browser just to see some idiot’s latest enhancement to their web site (usually something involving the “blink” tag).

Well, I had a flashback to those days today. I visited Bell.ca, and I had the audacity to do it with a Mac and ?

Someone at Adobe has been listening. The Adobe Reader 8.1 updater was really straightforward. Well done!

Not only do Adobe’s recent installers suck from a usability perspective (see John Welch’s piece on the Adobe Reader 8 installer), they’re now a security risk. This is completely unacceptable.

• Adobe Security bulletin

There seems to be a theme today…

What is it with Adobe.com? I tell it to remember me as a registered user, and it never does. It’s not as if cookies aren’t set — it shows “welcome, ” and then my account ID. It knows me. But if I click on “Your Account”, it asks me to sign in. How stupid is that? It wastes my time, every time. They’re important, and I’m not. Not a great way to treat customers.

Normally, the way these things work, is that once you log-in to a site, you can close the window and come back later without having to log in again — as long as you don’t quit the browser. Not with Adobe.com. It forgets every time.

And what’s up with those horrid drop-down menus? Are they trying to trigger an epileptic seizure?

Of course, this is how it works in Safari on Mac OS X. No doubt it works just fine in Firefox, or IE7, or IE6, or some other browser I don’t use (when not testing web sites). But Adobe ships their products for Mac OS X, and their web site should work in the default web browser for Mac OS X. Period. It’s not as if their site navigation is some minor feature on their site…

That’s enough ranting for today. Stay tuned for a look at my experience with Dreamweaver CS3 (aka DW9).