This is a series of screenshots chronicling the install of iTunes on Windows. Behold:
At this point, I’d like to remind viewers that in step 4, I unchecked the “Use iTunes as the default player for audio files” and “Automatically update iTunes and other Apple software” options, so you’d think you wouldn’t get all sorts of services and update apps installed. Not so:
Here are a few screenshots of Firefox 4 on Windows.
Click to embiggen.
Some observations:
It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Googles Chrome browser. Which is why I followed Google’s instructions on enabling web-apps in the newest dev builds of Chrome. Here’s what I found out:
For those worrying about Chrome web-apps not being “open”, it’s worth noting that as of this version of Chrome, all a web-app consists of is a URL. Just look at this code sample:
{
"name": "Gmail",
"version": "3",
"icons": { "24": "24.png", "128": "128.png" },
"launch": {
"web_url": "https://mail.google.com/"
},
"permissions": ["notifications"],
"web_content": {
"enabled": true,
"origin": "https://mail.google.com/"
}
}
This is still a very early look at Chrome web-apps, but I can see it working, if nothing else then for the fact that it’s so easy to create a Chrome web-app. So yeah, it may just be a super-bookmark, but it’s so convenient. Imagine a Twitter for Chrome web-app. You click “Install”, and it’s there on your browsers new tab page, synced to your Google account, and it’s got geolocation and notification permissions without any extra clicks.
Browsershots has been around for a while, but I’ve always found it a hassle to work with. And so, Geotek Datentechnik’s NetRenderer is a welcome product. It’ll screenshot your website almost instantly. Works remarkably well.
WordPress has image management features which makes uploading and inserting images easy. When it comes to resizing and cache management, however, WordPress falls short. WordPress works like this: you configure your media sizes in the “Media” section of WordPress. Once this is done, every image you upload to WordPress is resized into these predefined sizes and saved in the same folder as the uploaded image.
The shortcoming? If you decide you want to change the media settings down the road, the new sizes won’t affect previously uploaded images. If you want the new sizes reflected on your old posts and galleries, you have to delete each old image, one by one, post by post, and upload the source image anew. Because caching and resizing is done during the upload of each source image.
This is where Zenphoto comes in. Cached images are stored seperately in a cache folder, and images aren’t “inserted” anywhere, they’re simply linked. Meaning: if you change media settings, linked images will request a new image with the new sizes.
I built the Zenphoto Short-tags plugin to try and take these superior image management features with me to WordPress. To use the plugin, you have to have Zenphoto deployed to your webserver and instead of uploading images to WordPress, you have to upload images to Zenphoto. Using short-tags you then insert highly customizable image links in WordPress. With recent features of the plugin (just yesterday, I added a WordPress Media button) you can now do all the management you want to, directly in WordPress.
Notice the new ZP Media button.
By the way, the above image was inserted using this code: [zp src=”Shorttags_01.png” crop=”tl” height=”300″]. The crop parameter ensures the image isn’t scaled, and cropped to the top left corner. It takes its width from a media setting in the backend. The album folder is normally a required parameter, but it’s not filled in because the image happens to be in the default folder.
Once clicked, the new media button shows your most recent images from your Zenphoto gallery. If you simply click one of these images, the shorttag for showing the image is inserted.
You can also click the “Upload image to ZenPhoto” tab to get an at the moment rather inelegant view of the Zenphoto backend, which lets you upload right then and there.
The bottomline is, Zenphoto Short-tags and Zenphoto offers you a different way of posting images to your WordPress blog. It requires a different way of thinking, and there aren’t any previews of your images in your visual editor. On the flipside, tweaking the width, height and crop of your images can be done by simply changing the parameters and without uploading anew. Worth a shot?
Despite what I’ve said in the past, I do not despise the Mac. I like many things about the Mac—the look of the hardware, the cleanliness and crispness of the operating system, the modern feel it exudes.
But it’s not all strawberries and sunshine. Criticizing means caring.
Apples main app-launching mechanism is called the dock.
The dock, usually located at the bottom of the screen, is that fancy thing that scales up icons when your mouse moves near it. This is great looking, makes it easy to launch applications, see if they’re running or trying to tell you something.
It’s also spending quite a bit of real-estate and the scale-up effect is quite annoying if you’re clicking near something near the dock. As shown in the picture to the right, to resize Safari you need to grab the bottom right corner and drag. But be careful and make sure you hit only the handle. If you get too close to the dock, whooop, up comes the dock ready to let you launch apps! If you move the mouse quickly or at times imprecisely like me, you’ll be annoyed plenty by this.
There has to be a better way. Officially, there isn’t1.
I can imagine a two ways that I think are better: 1) bury the icons in a menu, 2) allow windows to overlap the dock.
Or, Apple could just add some options for users like me, official options to remove the dock altogether or simply options to only have it appear on a specific keypress or corner bump.
What do you think? Is the dock the best thing to happen to computers? Or could it be rethought into something smarter?
So, being an interface designer, interface developments in the operating systems interest me; differences between the operating systems especially. One such difference is the maximize window behaviour.
On Windows, clicking the maximize button expands the current window to fill the entire screen (see above screenshots) and more importantly, locks the window so it’s immobile until un-maximized again.
On the Mac, on the other hand, there’s no real maximize window feature. Instead, clicking the “expand” button (the plus button) either expands the current window to fit the contents of the document, or expands to fill the entire screen (though not locking the window in place), depending on the application. Clicking the expand button again, makes the window jump back to the size it had prior to being expanded.
A feisty discussion made it clear just how much this difference in behaviour can divide the waters. On one side, you have the pro-choice people who like to be able to maximize a window and focus on that window alone. On the other side, you have those who either do not see a use for the maximize feature at all, or simply prefer the inability to be able to maximize citing improved “multi-tasking” as the primary benefit.
Personally I’m a fierce proponent of the maximize window feature. It allows me to hide my cluttered desktop, it allows maximum use of screen real-estate; it essentially allows me to choose when I want to focus on one thing and one thing only. I can still have multiple windows on one screen if I want to, but I have the extra ability to choose to focus on one app when I want to.
The recent beta of Windows Vista makes this maximize feature even more pronounced. The transparent “glass” interface that Windows Vista sports allows one to see through the chrome of individual windows, thus “lightening” the overall weight of windows (what a load of crap). When maximized, however, the transparent glass becomes opaque (as seen in the screenshots above), tinted in the system color of your choice.
While I think a glass interface in Vista is a big mistake, the “letterbox” feel of maximized windows will make the fullscreen difference between MacOSX and Windows even more pronounced. So, which side are you on, and why? To fullscreen, or not to fullscreen?