Doing a Bit Better

On Saturday I had been feeling guilty about not having made much progress on my work during the week, so I went into work (which I almost never do outside of regular working hours) to make a little progress, and ended up getting side-tracked on a different problem that reared its head. Very discouraging!

But, things have improved this week: I cleared the rest of that stuff off my plate yesterday, and made a lot of good progress today, finishing the first chunk of work on a major project and getting maybe halfway through the second chunk. I was psyched! It's always cool to get stuff working and see it actually doing what you intend. Makes me feel again like I'm a good programmer. (Which, really, I am.)

I talked to Karen on Saturday when she called. And tonight I talked to Rebekah, who is going to Mozambique with the Peace Corps in a week. She'll be gone for two years, and I probably won't hear from her except for letters during that time since she won't have a computer over there! (Waahhh!) It's possible I might actually consider going over there to visit, though. A cow-orker of mine went to Africa a year ago and brought back some great photos, and this way I'd at least know someone over there (even if we haven't yet actually met!).

Anyway, it sounds like a great adventure for her. We spent a lot of tonight's phone call talking about recent events in our lives, and she spent a lot of time telling me that I'm too hard on myself, and that I ought to just enjoy life and not worry so much.

I also met Lucy and John at Borrone on Saturday. Lucy has since cut her hair even shorter, and is dancing around merrily with joy over having bought a sofa. (Well, okay, I didn't see any actual dancing, but I imagine that's what she did when it arrived!)

I'm not sure of all of this indicates that I'm coming out of hermit mode or not. I did spent most of last night watching television...

Astonishingly, it will be an all-Noo Yawk World Series in the baseball world as the New Yank Yorkies will meet the Mets next week. Will anyone else in the country care? I certainly won't; I won't even bother to watch, as I hate both teams.

I secretly hope that the Yorkies will win, since a relentless stream of Yorkie World Series victories (they've won three of the last four) might force the owners to finally implement real revenue sharing among the teams.

I doubt it, though.

I was not fazed by the strike in 1994 as far as my baseball fandom goes. But this travesty makes me seriously wonder whether I want to continue following a sport where the deck is so severely stacked against everyone outside the Hated City.

CJ has some unflattering things to say about Mac OS X's user interface.

Some of her criticisms are well-taken. For instance, that Command-N opens a new file browser rather than creating a new folder in the Finder. Also the transparency of icons making it difficult to click on them in the Dock (although to be fair, Mac OS 9 and its predecessors have had this problem for a long time as well).

I don't entirely agree with her other criticisms. In particular I'm willing to cut the Dock a lot of slack, because it's the first revision of an idea which has some merit. It's essentially a mix of the Mac OS Apple Menu (allowing you to easily store applications which you want to start up) and the Windows taskbar (allowing easy access to individual documents without being forced to bring every document in a single application to the foreground - a notable problems in Mac OS 9). It does have problems, though: The "too many damned icons" problem is annoying, although the Windows taskbar's text-oriented approach is no better. (Winder perhaps does a bad job of a text interface in this way.) It also doesn't provide a hierarchical organization like the Apple Menu does (it tries to obviate this need through it's shrinking-icons-and-magnification approach, which is only partly successful).

Still, it's not like Mac OS got it right the first time either (Mac OS wasn't really a mature user interface until at least Mac OS 4, and was still adding critical features - like multi-tasking and task-switching - through Mac OS 6). So I'm willing to wait and see.

I'm largely inclined to disagree with CJ's analysis of how "four out of five of the fastest access points on the screen [are] utterly wasted." It's an intellectually rewarding examination, but it doesn't resemble how I use a graphical user interface in the least. I don't go to corners because corners are easy to get to (they're often annoying to get to if my mouse cursor is presently on the other side of the screen; the easiest point to get to is usually in the center of the screen!), but because I know that things are there that I want to go to. The problem with the Trash being in the Mac OS X Dock isn't that it's not in a corner, but that it's not in a fixed location, so my muscle memory not only isn't trained to go there, but can't be trained to go there if I use the Dock to it's full potential.

The Finder has its problems. It turns out that writing a good Finder is fundamentally hard. Mac OS 9 has a good Finder. Windows has a completely lousy Finder. Mac OS X is somewhere in-between. None of them are great Finders (Mac OS 9's consumes vast quantities of screen space). I do like OS X's Column View (which came from NeXTStep), although it needs polish.

That's really the bottom line about Mac OS X: It needs polish. And polish only comes with time and hard work. Polishing a user interface is hard, and small-but-critical elements can be the difference between usability and cruftiness. The multi-billion-dollar question, though, is how much polish is necessary and how long loyal Apple customers will wait.

I don't know the answer any more than you do.