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Sara Cammeresi

Apple are smoking serious crack —

I have upgraded my Mac workstation to OS 10.4 (aka OS X Liger). It is nice to run an operating system bred for its skills in magic, but after using the Dashboard for all of about 10 minutes, I find myself asking myself what in the hell Apple were thinking.

I don't care where the idea came from or if they burgled it from some third-party tool, but it is a very tricky interface to use from the perspective of a widget developer. The whole problem stems from the fact that either you can see and use the Dashboard and its widgets or you can use the rest of your computer. Because of this, you can't do some of the most elementary things, such as copying text from a widget and pasting it into some other application.

Aside from all of the gratuitous eye candy, the only way the Dashboard can properly be used is by widgets which by their nature, you bring up, you use them, and then when you're done, you're DONE. Stock quotes, parcel tracking, a calculator, and weather forecasts are examples of proper widgets. A dictionary interface cannot be made properly into a widget because if you look something up and then want type into your word processor while looking at the widget, guess what, you can't! After the Dashboard loses focus, it vanishes. You'd think that at least the Great Silver Father would get this right, but even Apple have got it wrong: the dictionary widget example I mentioned ships with the operating system.

We'll have to see of what use other developers make this new system, but my expectations are not very high.

posted by Sid at 18.32 / 022 in Apple     [ Comments: 0 ]

Link changes —

I have removed a few links and added a few others. The new additions are, in alphabetical order by surname: Ms Cole, Mr Kalafut, Mr Lowe, Mr Schlachet, and Ms Zasada's paintings.

I also purged a couple of the ‘other’ links and added a link to Macintouch to reflect my affection for my Mac workstation.

Speaking of the Mac, I have a few comments to make about Core Data, but they will have to wait.

In other news, I decided to retire the Japanese title. (It joins the Elvish title in retirement.) I replaced it with Esperanto, la lingvo de la futuro.

posted by Sid at 23.08 / 214     [ Comments: 3 ]