ThinkMac Blog

On the iPhone SDK

2008-03-07T19:28:00.003Z

I'm very excited by the iPhone SDK, it's exactly what I'd hoped for - a relatively open and Cocoa based development platform. Hopefully Apple won't take too long to approve people outside the US to get in on the program. To begin with at least, it's all about iKana - loads of people have asked for an iPhone version of iKana and I'm looking forward to getting it to you! There is the potential to do so much awesome stuff like practising writing kana with your finger on the touch screen.

Here's a little teaser until then...

iKana 1.6 is here!

2008-02-28T19:43:00.002Z

It's time for a little update to iKana! Everything has been polished up for Leopard and you can once again use your Apple remote control to change flash cards etc. I've also added a full screen mode to the kana flash cards, something I was originally going to hold back until a bigger update. As in InstantGallery 2 I'm trying some more iPhone inspired interfaces to liven things up, I hope you like :)

Now back to InstantGallery...

Evolving InstantGallery

2008-02-07T00:33:00.000Z

I want to talk about InstantGallery 2 a little bit today in case you might be thinking it's been forgotten. I'm sorry to say I'm still hard at work on it as I really wanted it to be in your hands by now. It's just proving a much larger endeavour than I ever expected it to be. Getting FTP publishing implemented is proving particularly troublesome due to a lack of documentation and limited framework choices*. InstantGallery 2 has a pretty advanced CSS editor built in, the aforementioned FTP and a radically overhauled gallery creation mechanism, it's practically three products in one. Aside from the technical challenge of engineering all these components there is also the challenge of integrating them in a seamless way that remains true to the original goals of InstantGallery. That is to allow you to just dump some pictures into it and immediately have something presentable and ready to upload. Balancing that ideal and ease of use while growing the application massively is obviously tricky. The extended time period it's taking to get IG2 ready is evidence of that. It is going pretty well though and I think IG 1.x customers will be happy with the end result. Most of the complexity offered by the new features is tucked away so you only need to deal with it if you need it.

A good example of hidden complexity is the new appearance panel which lets you choose from either a pre-created appearance template (aka theme), do basic tweaking to create a more personalised look or delve in at the deep end and configure the individual CSS element properties of your gallery. The advanced tab basically hides a full on graphical CSS editor. It's certainly not hard to use, but if ever you've played with CSS design you'll know the sheer amount of customisability you have can be a bit overwhelming and there isn't much getting around that. I've tried to limit things a bit where it's sensible to do so, but I don't want to limit the creativity of advanced users either.

For non CSS gurus it's designed so you can pick any of the supplied templates and customise them how ever you want. The original templates are never modified so you can always go back if you don't like the changes. If you create something beautiful and want to use it in other galleries (or indeed share it with other people) you can easily add your template into the list, import or export it.

IG2 does away with the concept of needing to manually save your work, your gallery is automatically saved continually as you change it. You can access any gallery you have worked on quickly in the My Galleries panel. There are some convenience functions for importing and exporting galleries, duplicating them, previewing and doing quick uploads.

I originally tried to implement things around a traditional save model but the performance was pretty ugly. It was necessary to make a copy of your entire gallery each time you opened it in case you chose not to save changes (either that or it would have to regenerate your gallery from scratch each time you opened it or do a complicated check to see where the files on disk and the description of your gallery differed) and it involved shuffling back and forth between temporary copies and saved copies. I'd have to rename the product to something other than 'Instant' using this method so I think doing away with manual saving was the right route. You can easily duplicate your gallery if you want to be experimental in the My Galleries panel, but I think generally the undo function will suffice for most users. On the upside too it's one less thing to worry about, your galleries' will always be as you left them.

InstantGallery 2 puts a lot of its functionality into inspectors, again so it's out of the way if you don't want/need to deal with it. The range of effects and customisations you can make to images has increased dramatically. The new decorations, which I'll release the specifications for nearer the release of IG2, allow for infinite customisation of your thumbnails. The standard way of working with images now is that changes only apply to the selected image - but you can quickly apply the effect to all images on a given page, or to an entire gallery using the action buttons at the bottom of each pane. This gives you a huge degree of flexibility - want thumbnails of different shapes and sizes on the same page? No problem. Different watermarks on some images? No Problem. This is also handy for trying out different effects and seeing how they look on a small selection of images without having to go through the process of updating everything which can be a big time saver if you have a particularly large gallery.

Finally I'll talk briefly about page styles. Previously in IG you basically had the option of making a page with a grid of images on it. IG2 adds a bunch more layout possibilities which you can mix and match within a single gallery. IG2 no longer spreads your images over a bunch of pages based purely on a hard limit of images per page. It's totally up to you now how and where you distribute your images so you can get much more creative. Want one images on your first page, fifty on the second, ten on the third? It's easy to do that now, just drag your pictures around in the source list and choose the page styles you want. Whether you want to highlight a particular graphic, create something more like a photo blog or an image catalogue, IG2 now caters to your needs. All of the layouts are further tweakable using the CSS editor too of course. I'm still perfecting the layouts and default CSS for them, but I hope to show you some example galleries in the not too distant future.

So that's it for this little recap of InstantGallery 2, I hope you are as excited about this product as I am and will please forgive its slow arrival. I still can't offer a firm date for release, but it's getting sooner by the day. I think it will be worth the wait!

* I'd like to make an appeal to my fellow Mac devs, if you have experience with ConnectionKit and have any decent, commented and straightforward example code or know of a better FTP type framework which supports FTP, SFTP etc. you'd be will willing to share please drop me an email.

Scorched earth

2008-01-09T20:07:00.000Z

NewsGator, owners of Brent Simmons' NetNewsWire (NNW) today announced that they would no longer be charging for the RSS reader. The full app which would have cost you $30 yesterday now costs you nothing. Of course NewsGator would like you to sign up for their subscription service, but that doesn’t appear to be a mandatory condition of using the application. This decision effectively sounds the death knell for the commercial Mac RSS market. NNW has had an insurmountable lead in the market for as long as I’ve been developing RSS products for the Mac (since 2002 no less), but at least before it was possible to compete on some terms with this juggernaut by providing specialized features, a simplified interface or different metaphor. However between the free basic RSS readers such as Vienna and the full fledged NNW there really is no oxygen left in this already ridiculously crowded market.

Honestly I am a little bitter about this, what NewsGator has done is effectively anti-competitive, NNW has somewhere between 10 to 17% of the entire RSS market (that’s across all platforms) and probably 70% or more of the Mac share (I’ve not been able to dig up any conclusive figures on this however). To suddenly make that product free is obviously going to decimate the competition. It’s hard to compete with a product that’s as well known and frankly as good as NNW, it’s damn near impossible to compete with it when it’s free. I’d love to be proven wrong, but as we’ve seen before, when a product in a near monopoly position and gets an unfair advantage over its competitors it tends to lay waste to all around it.

You might say Safari RSS is free, or Vienna is free, those products haven’t killed the Mac RSS market. It’s true they haven’t, though of course they’ve taken their share of customers away from the commercial RSS developers’. Still neither of those products is even remotely as mature, polished or comprehensive as NNW. To give you an example in a more widely understood market, making Nisus Writer or Pages free tomorrow wouldn’t do much to dent Microsoft’s dominance of the word processor market. Microsoft making Word free on the other hand would have a very big impact on all the developers producing 3rd-party word processors.

How this impacts NewsLife

I’m not discontinuing NewsLife, I’ll say that right off the bat - I designed NewsLife to be my ideal news reader and obviously that isn’t NNW or I’d have given up long ago and switched to that. From a business perspective I would like it to pay for its development however, so I’ll be watching sales closely to see what happens. The market NewsLife is aimed at differs from NNW’s, but even so I’m expecting a negative impact. I hope you’ll continue to support independent Mac developers and look at all the alternatives available and not let ‘free’ be the deciding factor in your software choices, as hard as that can be.

NewsLife 1.1 & MacSanta!

2007-12-06T19:58:00.000Z

It's been a busy few days and I'm happy to announce that NewsLife 1.1 has just been released with a lot of significant improvements. In particular it's much snappier and has some important usability enhancements. You can learn more about NewsLife and see it in action on its redesigned webpage.

If that wasn't enough for one day, ThinkMac is also featured on MacSanta right now so you can save 20% on all our products using the coupon code MACSANTA07. After today and for the rest of the month you'll still be able to save 10%, so don't feel too bad if you've missed this announcement.

Designing toolbar icons for Leopard

2007-12-03T21:22:00.000Z

With its new dark window theme Leopard requires a shift in icon design for things to look right. In particular older icons designed in the 10.0 - 10.4 era often look blurry and indistinct. Why is this? Well often it's due to drop shadows, vague outlines and colours not being strong enough to stand out well against the darker grey background. Luckily the fix is fairly simple but it may require reworking your icon artwork quite a bit in some cases. To get the best results in Leopard use bold colours with subtle gradients, dark, sharp borders and avoid Aqua gloss as it's starting to look dated now. Excessive anti-aliasing and drop shadows are best avoided too as they make the edges of icons indistinct.

I've made my feelings about capsule buttons pretty clear by now, but it's worth saying again to avoid using them. There are a number of reasons for this, both aesthetic and from a usability stand point. Using capsules somewhat necessitates grouping icons which limits the user's ability to customise their toolbar, this may have a negative impact on their workflow. In cases where you do need to group controls it's better to use a segmented control using the unified button theme as seen in the Finder's View control.

In capsule buttons icons are reduced significantly in size from the glorious, large 32x32 pixels OS X pioneered back down to the miserable 16x16 size commonly used in Windows. Obviously you can't convey as much detail in 16x16 pixels and you're working on top of a two tone background which also has design implications. You're also not gaining any additional space by using capsules either as the buttons themselves consume the same amount of space as a regular 32x32 icon would while providing less useful visual information to the user. Small icons are often much better conveyed with simple monochrome glyphs as Safari nicely demonstrates. With capsule buttons you'll feel compelled to use colour and drop shadows and other visual flare to stand out from capsule itself and it all becomes a mess like in Mail app.

When is it appropriate to use small monochrome icons like in the Finder or Safari then? Well I'd say when you're trying to convey simple ideas. It's easy to just use arrows to convey back and forward actions like in a web browser, but for more complex actions, say 'post to weblog', you really need to use colour and all those extra pixels will make life considerably easier for your icon designer and users alike. It's important to think carefully about the items that will appear in your toolbar before you start down either path as the two styles don't really co-exist very well.

All Together Now

2007-11-16T16:37:00.000Z

My friend and fellow British Mac developer Steve Harris has just released version 2.0 of Together, a classy digital scrap book of sorts that lets you store and organise just about anything. Version 2.0 require Leopard and looks gorgeous for it - check out the shelf!

Delays, delays, delays...

Yeah InstantGallery 2 has hit further delays pushing it into December now - sorry folks it just can't be helped. This is the down side of doing freelance web and icon work as well as software development, sometimes you just get hit with more than you can handle in a short period of time and it tends to put the squeeze on my software development efforts as that has the most flexible deadlines.

Cool effects in InstantGallery 2

2007-10-29T00:34:00.000Z

Ok so giving you total control over your gallery's stylesheet in a nice graphical editor wasn't quite enough so I've also added all kinds of ways to customise your thumbnails to create visually stunning galleries:

I'll publish the specification for creating decorations (basically a few pngs and a plist saying where they go in a bundle) so you can do all kinds of neat things.

Leopard stupidity

2007-10-28T01:10:00.000Z

Leopard is pretty nice, there's a lot to like. But there are some really stupid things too, mostly visual and since I'm a visual kinda person I feel compelled to complain about them! There I've warned you, so if you feel like posting nasty comments feel free to go to hell. Btw, Apple please fix this stuff ne?

Got folders?

Two stacks in the dock, two totally different folders. Both with custom folder icons. Sadly they both contain generic folders. Which is which? Who knows. I have to ~~smear~~ fan their contents across my screen before I can find out.

Stars in their eyes

Where do the stars end and the status lights begin? I suppose it could be worse, no one buy Steve Jobs one of those infinity mirrors OK?

Inconsistent!

Did you know some sad sap at Apple actually invented their own button style just for the 'Choose Backup Disk' button in Time Machine? None of the 10 or so standard button schemes were quite right apparently. Do Apple's designers get paid by the pixel filled or something?

Are you blind?

In the accessibility control panel Apple thoughtfully made all the text huge and bold to help people with visual disabilities. In the Time Machine preference pane they randomly decided your sight might be going a bit so they stuck in a giant on/off button. I'm kind of disappointed you don't have to flip up a little protective cover over the button and turn a key to activate it though. There should be flashing lights and sirens too, you know, just so you're sure it's on.

Disclose me not

A visual bug in a standard system control, in a shipping version of Leopard, after over 2 years of development? Say it ain't so. The disclosure triangle should be white for the selected row by the way, as it is it's barely visible.

Shady sheets

Sheets now bizarrely get a shadow cast on them by the window title bar or toolbar. The window below (thankfully) does not however so it all looks a bit odd. The old style was sort of like having something posted through a letter box to you, the new style is like getting a note slipped under your door. Perhaps a future version will be like a note taped to a brick lobbed through your screen.

Capsule overdose

Capsule buttons are hideously ugly, I would go so far as to say I despise them. Not only do they look awful they're a usability joke too. At a glance which buttons here are enabled and disabled?

Help I can't see what I'm doing!

The Help viewer window now floats on top of everything else, too bad if you want to see the application window below.

Independence day?

Back since the Tiger days Apple has been telling us to get ready for resolution independence, heck it was supposed to be a Leopard feature right? Ok lets overlook that it's still not ready, but why the hell are they still using bitmap resources for all their custom UI? Oi Apple, you guys have read your own documentation right, you've heard of NSBezierPath right? It ain't that hard to make a roundrect or draw a curved line!

Ordeal of gloss

The shelf dock is pretty awful, but I've talked about that already. You'd need to have incredibly bad taste to actually think it looks aesthetically pleasing and you know that it will age about as well as the hockey-puck mouse and pinstripes. Wouldn't you? Ok just checking...

Grey on grey is the new colour!

I'm sort of torn, I want to like the new Leopard folder icons because truthfully I've never liked the old OS X folder style. But I really don't get the whole dark embossed emblem deal, it's unnecessarily hard to differentiate the icons now. I actually have to stop and think before I click, before it was practically unconscious because I'd just have to see the necessary colour and not do any higher level of thinking than that. Read Jef Raskin's 'The Humane Interface' Apple design team!

Honourable mention

You can't have a Leopard UI rant without mentioning the translucent, blurry menu bar. It's not as bad as it was in the earlier seeds, but it's still iffy on certain desktops. Just make the transparency a check box on/off option! Heck give us a giant Time Machine slider button if it will make you feel better.

That's all for now.

Update: Welcome Daring Fireball readers! For those people who basically skimmed the article and want to rant at me for dissing Apple, please understand I do like Leopard and think it has some wonderful features, this article is a light hearted poke at some of the daft and plain weird design decisions in Leopard. Comments are moderated so don't keep reposting, it won't make them appear any faster.

InstantGallery 2 & Leopard Compatibility

2007-10-24T23:53:00.000+01:00

InstantGallery 2 is still slowly approaching with the end of November marked tentatively in my calendar as release time. Here's a big sneaky peak:

Here it is running on Leopard. It will be fully compatible with Tiger too of course, it even detects which OS version you're using and mods the UI slightly so it fits in better with the visual look of your system. The UI is evolving all the time so there will no doubt be a few more changes before release time.

Leopard compatibility

iKana, InstantGallery 1.7 and NewsLife should all run fine under Leopard. If you experience any problems after upgrading please send me your bug reports and I'll get any necessary fixes out as soon as possible. They run fine under the lastest developer seed of Leopard though so I'm hopeful there won't be any unforeseen issues.

Coming in iKana 1.5...

2007-09-14T19:54:00.000+01:00

iKana has been very popular lately and I'm glad to announce that it will soon be bumped all the way up to version 1.5. New in this version is a vocabulary practice module, tab delimited word list importing and some general UI improvements including a shiny new application icon. It's getting close to completion and will be out before the end of the September.

Hint: How to redesign the Leopard dock so it sucks less

2007-08-12T21:26:00.000+01:00

Disclaimer: Leopard is still under NDA so I can't discuss anything that Apple hasn't already made public knowledge on their website.

The dock has always been one of those sort of 'live with it', rather than 'love it' features of OS X. Right from the start it's had pointless special effects like the magnifying icons, but in Leopard it really takes the biscuit. From the demo given by Steve Jobs at WWDC and from the public screenshots on Apple's website you can see how. It screws with developer's expensive and painstakingly created icons by adding not one, but two awful fake shadows, a reflection and a weird shelf look which doesn't fit in with the the actual perspective of any of the icons (as others have discussed). If all these failings weren't bad enough it now reflects windows dragged near it as well incase the cacophony of visual noise wasn't enough already.

Less is more

From Apple's products you generally get the idea that they understand the concept of 'less is more', just look at the iPhone with its super elegant, simple interface or the iMac or any of their other minimalist designs. Yet the Leopard dock shows none of this design subtly or elegance, trading it in for crass visual effects. So perturbed was I, that I decided to have a go at redesigning the dock. I set myself the following design goals:

Create a clear separation between the app launcher and document shortcut features
Allow for easier and more intuitive resizing
More clearly identify active applications
Happily coexistence with existing icon styles
Improve the appearance of stack icons
Avoid superfluous visual effects

And here it is:

I'm pretty happy with it and other developers I've shown it to seem to prefer it over Apple's offering. My hope is that through this exercise someone at Apple who has some sway over these things might at least reconsider some of the junk they've thrown into the dock. Failing that I guess we'll have a new acronym come October - FTFD. Finder lovers will know what that means!

New keyboard

2007-08-10T11:55:00.000+01:00

My new Apple ultra thin aluminium keyboard arrived today (much earlier than I expected, woo!). I can't believe how small and how flat it is. The old gunk collector that I got with my iMac looks massive by comparison. Ever since my MacAlly icekey broke (I was slightly too enthusiastic cleaning it and snapped a couple of keys off permanently) I've been keeping my eye out for another nice flat scissor-key keyboard. From my first couple of minutes use my initial observations are that I can touch type just fine on it - it feels a little different to my MacBook's keyboard, perhaps a little harder.

In the box aside from the keyboard is the usual two page manual printed in every imaginable language, warranty card and proprietary USB extension cable which Apple insists on using with their keyboards (it has that little bump in it to make it very hard to insert a regular USB A male connector into). There is no driver CD however and the manual points you to check Software Update or Apple's download site to locate the driver to make the function keys work. I had to resort to Google in the end to find the driver, I guess they haven't gotten around to putting it in Software Update yet. C'mon lads get your asses in gear! The download is 30MB which seems kind of huge given how little it does and requires a reboot (sigh).

Once again this Apple keyboard seems very power hungry which seriously limits the usefulness of its built-in USB 2 hub. It won't work with my SD card reader and only works with one of my USB flash drives. It's a shame they can't do something clever like have it leech some power off of the FireWire bus to provide powered USB ports (it could use a passthrough connector so it didn't waste the FireWire port).

I'm not sure what I think about the rearranged function keys yet, it will probably annoy me for awhile then I'll get used to it and it will be a non-issue. I might try and find a way of mapping F13 through F19 to launch applications as they look like they'll never be used otherwise. The tiny triangles on the arrow keys annoy me a bit, they don't fit in with the style of the arrows on any of the other keys. Interestingly this English version of the keyboard has slightly different key labels and uses icons and abbreviations where the American one doesn't. The shift keys have up facing hollow arrows, Control, Option and Command are 'Ctrl' 'alt' and 'cmd', the home, end, backspace, page up and page down keys all use arrows instead of words. Perhaps this isn't a new change between the American and English keyboards but it's the first time I've noticed it. Also caps lock has a green LED in its top left corner unlike the pictures of the American keyboard on Apple's site which doesn't appear to have any caps lock indicator.

iKanji

2007-08-07T22:17:00.001+01:00

I've started work on this and it's already coming along well. I will talk about this loads more in the future, but for now let me say one thing - stroke animations. They're really useful for learning kanji and iKanji not only has them, it lets you create them really easily.

InstantGallery 2 is still coming along too - sorry it's taking way longer than I thought it would. It has to be of a really high standard though and it's no longer the little one shot gallery maker it used to be. Please be patient :)

NewsLife 1.0 is here!

2007-07-10T17:12:00.000+01:00

It's been awhile but NewsLife 1.0 is here after its lengthy public beta. I'd like to say a big thank you to everyone who helped test the beta and offered bug reports and thoughtful suggestions. NewsLife is a mere €12 ($16) so it's great value and you can trial it as long as you like to see if it works for you, unlike some of our competitor's products. I'm proud that I've managed to keep NewsLife true to its original design philosophy which I blogged about last year.

Be small and unintrusive.
Integrate rather than compete.
Avoid unnecessary complexity.

iTunes 7.3 ushers in welcome UI changes

2007-07-07T14:20:00.000+01:00

iTunes 7.3 has a number of subtle user interface enhancements that aid usability and in some cases improve the cosmetics. When iTunes 7 first shipped with its radically updated interface it sparked quite a bit of controversy. Indeed I wrote a piece titled Disecting 'Gloomy' Unified in iTunes 7.

iTunes 7	iTunes 7.3

The new look is much more consistent with the rest of the UI. It's a duller blue gradient than normal but at least it fits with the overall muted colour scheme of iTunes 7. The level of indentation seems to have increased too, not really sure what the reason was for that, but it doesn't seem to have noticeably impacted anything.

The improvement here is huge. The buttons are consistent with the unified gradient look and the contrast between them and their background makes them stand out much more. The blue highlights showing the active state of the shuffle and loop buttons are far clearer now.

In iTunes 7 the source list could only be resized by grabbing the 1 pixel wide black line that divides it from the rest of the window. This was an awful style over usability decision. Things look the same in iTunes 7.3 but it turns out there is now a virtual 5 or 6 pixel wide bar you can grab to resize the source list, you no longer have to hit that one pixel line. This is a massive improvement in terms of usability. I'm not entirely sure dragable areas that are larger than the visual representation of the control like this are a great idea though. When they're used inconsistently throughout the OS it puts the onus on the user to have to remember which applications require them to grab the divider bar on the line and which ones they can just grab in the vicinity of. I think grab handles placed either at the top or bottom of the source list (like in Mail) are a better solution. Of course the problem in the first place is an entirely artificial one created for the sake of cosmetics.

I can't spot any other obvious changes in the interface, but its nice to see things are gradually being fixed that were botched in iTunes 7. It sure is taking a long time though when you consider these things should never have been broken in the first place.

NewsLife 1.0 preview

2007-07-04T22:43:00.000+01:00

NewsLife is practically finished, I'm just tying up some loose ends now and improving performance where possible. 1.0 will be released early next week. In the mean time here's a quick preview of what's coming:

By the way those thumbnails are generated by NewsLife, they're not specified by the feed. A bit of InstantGallery know-how at work ;)

2007 App Roadmap

2007-07-02T18:27:00.000+01:00

There hasn't been a huge amount of noise from me lately regarding my various apps so I thought it was time to spell out what's going to be going on for the remainder of this year:

InstantGallery

Version 2.0 is slowly marching towards completion, there is still quite a lot to do though. Getting big updates like this finished is always a laborious task. There are so many changes in this release it's taking a lot longer than I initial projected. Still it will rock when it's done so please be patient! I'm still hoping to get it finished and at least in beta by the end of this month.

iKana

I finally got around to releasing 1.0.1 today which is a fairly small update with a few new features and some bug fixes. There will be a more significant update to iKana during the summer. High on the list of features I want to add is a full screen mode and a dashboard widget.

NewsLife

I've neglected this a bit lately and for that I apologise, I want to get 1.0 out before the end of July. There really isn't too much more to do so that shouldn't be too hard. I've got some ideas I really want to work into NewsLife but they're going to require Leopard so they may not show up until around 1.2 or later.

Future Apps

iKanji - a tool in the same vein as iKana geared towards learning kanji. This will be significantly more than a re-badged version of iKana however because learning kanji is a whole other ball game to learning kana. The hope is to have this at least semi-ready by the end of September.
InstantBook (provisional name) - a tool for quickly producing PDFs from sets of images formatted for use with eInk based eBook readers such as the Sony Reader and iRex Iliad. I've got a technology demo of this already up and running but it needs lots of spit and polish before I'm willing to release it.
iPhone apps - *if* Apple allows us to write dashboard widgets or Cocoa apps for the iPhone then look out for versions of iKana and NewsLife for that platform.

Keynote reflections

2007-06-11T19:35:00.000+01:00

The iPhone will let you run web apps? Seriously, that's new? I think we pretty much all expected to be able to run web apps on the thing, it is using WebKit after all. Totally lame, there better be a real SDK that lets you install and run apps without the need for an always-on Internet connection released eventually. I don't care if it's widgets or not, but please give us something that doesn't require Safari and a web server to run! I'm totally bummed out about the iPhone again *sigh*. Leopard is looking gorgeous, but after the first couple of announcements it was basically a recap of last years WWDC. No new hardware? No iLife? Damn what a dull keynote.

5 things I'd like to see from WWDC

2007-06-11T09:48:00.001+01:00

It's that magical time of year again when we get shiny new Apple goodies to drool over. We pretty much know that the Leopard beta is going to have the limelight this week, but I thought I'd outline a few hopes of mine for other stuff we'll see.

The new Aqua. When OS X was first announced, Steve spent quite awhile just showing the audience what controls would look like in their then new OS. Everything was lickable and decidedly stripy. Over the past few years we've seen a migration to a reflective, smooth and dare I say a more professional look. Leopard is generally seen as being a milestone in terms of Apple's UI progression and many of us are hoping today we'll see a unified and beautiful OS X theme. Probably not as radical as the migration from Platinum to Aqua, but still a strong stride forward in terms of aesthetics.
A HIG for Core Animation. As amazing as Core Animation can potentially make many of our interfaces, it's also ripe for abuse in the same way technologies like Flash have made swarths of websites practically unusable. With great power comes great responsibility and all that.
iPhone SDK. I want an iPhone, you want an iPhone, everyone wants an iPhone. The iPhone is to the mobile phone industry what the first Mac was to the computer industry. Most phones have awful user interfaces, horrible menus, horrible fonts, horrible icons. Even those that are generally considered as being 'good' are far from the kind of the UI nirvana that we take for granted in OS X. The iPhone changes all that, and a lot of Mac developers (including me!) are just itching to be able to write apps for it, to expand it from a cool device into a platform in its own right.
iPhone HIG. For the same reasons as the Core Animation HIG.
A mid-range tower/seriously bumped Mac mini. While I'm happy with my iMac, MacBook and Mac mini, my ideal development machine would still be some kind of headless iMac. The Mac Pro is simply too big, too noisy, too power-hungry and too expensive - we need a mid-range Mac tower. Why Apple continues to neglect this part of the market baffles and frustrates me.

InstantGallery 2 update

2007-06-06T13:21:00.000+01:00

I really should stop promising software in 'x' amount of time because I'm a bit hopeless with deadlines when it comes to software. Needless to say InstantGallery 2 will be fashionably late. It will however seriously rock your world if you want to make amazing photo gallery based websites. I've put together a quick videocast to demo how I've incorporated lots and lots of new functionality into IG 2 without cluttering the interface or creating a bazillion palettes and dialogs.

Sneak preview: InstantGallery 2.0

2007-05-02T09:58:00.000+01:00

I've been hard at work on InstantGallery 2.0 for awhile now and I've decided it's time to start revealing a few bits and pieces. I'm hoping to have IG 2.0 ready for beta testing by the end of this month. InstantGallery 2.0 will be a free upgrade for existing customers - 2.0 will be slightly more expensive though to reflect its growing feature set so if you want it at the current price then now is the time to buy.

First up - new icon:

InstantGallery 2.0 offers much more flexible theming and I wanted to get that idea across in the icon, so here the gallery has a wooden framed border. The icon is still a little rough around the edges and will see a bit more refinement before 2.0 is released. It was entirely drawn in Lineform by the way. All of the icons in InstantGallery are being refreshed for 2.0 so it will look like an entirely new beast.

Speaking of themes in IG, 2.0 ushers in the Theme Designer. This basically lets you take all the pain out of creating your own CSS theme by using an entirely visual interface for tweaking all the properties and you can see in real time how your changes effect the design.

So there we are for now, more details a bit later this month!

Say hello to €

2007-04-17T19:49:00.000+01:00

As anyone who keeps an eye on world currencies will tell you, the US dollar has hit a 15 26 year low against the British Pound - £1 now buys you over $2. That's past the cut off point at which I decided I'd have to switch to selling in Euros. So until such time as the dollar regains a respectable level of value, international customers will only be able to buy ThinkMac products and services in Euros (or Sterling if you prefer). Read on for some FAQs...

Why does it matter what you sell your stuff in?

Every time the dollar drops in value I make less money from each sale. As the dollar has been steadily declining in value over the last few years this has meant the income per sale I've been earning has been dropping bit by bit. Add to this increasing inflation in the UK (inflation is the rate at which goods and services get more expensive as time goes by) and I can't afford to stick to the status quo.

Why can't you just raise your prices instead of dropping the dollar?

This is an option I've considered, but really it isn't workable. The advertised price of a product needs to be stable or it looks like something funny is going on. Not only that but it would be almost impossible to keep every place where the prices are published up-to-date.

Will this effect how much I pay for your stuff?

Depending on your native currency it may do - although fairly insignificantly. You may pay one or two dollars more on any of my applications depending on the exchange rates on a given day.

How do I pay you in Euros?

PayPal handles the currency conversion for you and will tell you how much the transaction is in your native currency.

Is there a fee for paying in Euros if I have a US PayPal account?

PayPal slightly pads the exchange rates in their favour so you will be paying slightly more than if you were to do the transaction using the official exchange rate figures for a given day. However it's pretty much impossible to change from one currency to another and not end up paying someone commission along the way - this is something I've had to deal with since day one selling in dollars anyway.

Will you ever go back to selling in dollars?

If the currency significantly recovers its value and shows that it's stabilising then yes. This could well takes years to happen though.

NewsLife Beta 3 is here

2007-04-04T18:40:00.000+01:00

Beta 3 has been a long time coming, mostly due to a crush of icon work that has refused to let up since January. But finally today it's out. It's not a massive update by any means, but now the Sparkle update framework is in there it should be easier to roll out incremental updates every few weeks. Beta 3 addresses the most common complaints, like making the side bar resizable/hidable, adding a contextual menu to the source list, fixing the Atom date bug and so on.

Download NewsLife beta 3

InstantGallery is continuing to prove popular and it will be getting its own updates in the not too distant future. InstantGallery is very nearly 1 year old now (it will be in 8 days to be exact). InstantGallery 2 should be released by the early summer, it will feature such niceties as more advanced theming and built-in FTP.

iKana too is turning out to be much more successful than I originally thought, there is a bit more I want to do with it and I've had some great suggestions. One of the most common is to add kanji support to it. The problem is you can't really learn kanji in the same way you learn kana, which makes it a bit tricky for me to just bolt that functionality into iKana. So I guess I'm kind of pre-announcing that I will develop an iKanji to compliment iKana, but that probably won't see the light of day until much later this year.

What are they smoking?

2007-03-10T13:07:00.000Z

I was just checking my referrals (as you do) and I noticed a bunch of people visiting from the Disco blog. Curious I thought, so I clicked through to see where I'd been mentioned. Turns out it's midway down a very ~~narrow~~ long blog post about the development of Disco and its humble beginnings. What I read next was something of a surprise and I'll reproduce it here:

I’m of the firm belief that when someone harms you are insults you in any way, you should give them the benefit of the doubt. Smarter men than myself have said that you should afford tens of excuses to anyone, and make one up and believe it to be true should you not be able to think of them. Without this philosophy, a lot of the posts that I had prepared (that would have ultimately fought fire with fire) would’ve been posted. For those not in the loop, the controversy started with a handful of people hating on Disco for being a different user experience.

The piece I wrote on the death of the HIG is linked from the word 'handful' and next the one TUAW article which didn't sound like a PR piece for them and Paul's piece on the delicious generation. They go on to mention that they got some excellent feedback from some 'smart developers' but they neglect to link to any of them.

What's shocking is they consider this 'hating'. Apparently when someone points out the elementary UI flaws in your app or criticises you for your wall to wall media coverage and hype of a buggy beta that's now called 'hating'. For the record I don't hate Disco, hell I even bought a license because I wanted to support their efforts. That doesn't mean I have to join the chorus of people ooing and arring over their pretentious UI though and to be called a 'hater' for offering constructive crticism frankly makes them look like the unprofessional ones. Any app that gets put in the spotlight as much as Disco was is going to be picked to pieces - and rightfully so - that's the job of the media and frankly the ~~PR echo-chamber~~ Mac media failed miserably on this count and it was left to the blogosphere to even the balance. It's thanks to the so called 'haters' that Disco is a better app today than it would have been if no one had criticised it. Not one of us developers writes perfect code or produces perfect UIs, the way we improve our software is through criticism, be it from our users or from our peers. Hopefully Disco's developers will realise this and understand that trying to polarise people isn't helpful.

Note the title of this article is obviously a play on the fact that Disco smokes I ain't accusing anyone of using drugs :P