Posted on November 3, 2006 by Rory Prior
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What for years has differentiated Macs, and Apple devices in general from their UNIX and Windows brethren? The user interface, both physical and virtual. In recent years many including myself have noted the ever degrading quality of Apple’s user interfaces, increasingly eye candy has been the sole motivation behind many user interface decisions and usability and consistency have taken a back seat….
Posted on September 4, 2006 by Rory Prior
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I’m excited to announce InstantGallery will be featured on macZOT tomorrow. If you’ve not heard of macZOT before, it’s a site that offers great shareware apps at low, low prices, but in a limited quantity and for a short period of time. The old ‘grab ’em while they’re hot’ adage applies 🙂 I won’t tell you just how much you can save…
Posted on July 11, 2006 by Rory Prior
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Took a little while to get this one out the door – but here it is, InstantGallery 1.5. The big features are previously noted are gallery loading and saving and image rotation. What’s next? Well I’ve already got one really cool new feature lined up for 1.6 and that’s live searching. That is Spotlight style live searching for your web gallery without…
Posted on May 10, 2006 by Rory Prior
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Be small and unintrusive.NewsMac Pro was always a bit of a screen hog, the problem is when you’ve got a lot of information to display there is only so much you can do about making things physically smaller on the screen before you start to compromise usability. NewsLife is parred down to the minimum you need to see to use the app…
Posted on December 7, 2005 by Rory Prior
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What’s in store for the next minor update to NewsMac Pro? Well the usual bug fixes and so on, but also a couple of new features which I think will be big usability wins. The first of those is going to be a new combined layout view that places channels and headlines together in an outline view to allow a new way…
Posted on August 1, 2005 by Rory Prior
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I’m hoping to finish 1.1 this week and get it to testers for a public release next week sometime. Here is a summary of what’s new in this release: New features Adaptive interface – basically the interface configures itself differently depending on the task you’re currently performing. E.g. when you want to view a headline in the web browser it automatically grows…
Posted on March 2, 2005 by Rory Prior
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I’ve been trying to improve the speed at which things download in NewsMac Pro as well as provide support for things like feeds which require authentication. The logical choice seemed to be moving from using NSURLHandle and friends to NSURLConnection which was introduced with WebKit back in OS X 10.2.7. The first thing that struck me about NSURLConnection was that it was…
Posted on February 4, 2005 by Rory Prior
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I’ve noticed that there might be some redundant functionality in NewsMac, the thing is I’m not sure what the preferable solution to the problem is – what’s the best way of marking things that you use a lot and want quick access to? Originally this problem was solved by the idea of favourites – you could mark any channel as a favourite…
Posted on January 13, 2005 by Rory Prior
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Apple has long been known for devising and popularising good solid computer user interfaces. However there has been an increasing, and worrying trend for Apple to throw conventional UI wisdom out the window to apparently either meet the whims of Steve Jobs or the marketing department. The spread of the brushed metal look, like a plague, across every flagship Mac application is…
ThinkMac Software
On the death of the HIG and the triumph of eye candy over usability
Posted on November 3, 2006 by Rory Prior
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What for years has differentiated Macs, and Apple devices in general from their UNIX and Windows brethren? The user interface, both physical and virtual. In recent years many including myself have noted the ever degrading quality of Apple’s user interfaces, increasingly eye candy has been the sole motivation behind many user interface decisions and usability and consistency have taken a back seat….
Category: commentary, mac Tags:
InstantGallery on macZOT
Posted on September 4, 2006 by Rory Prior
Leave a Comment
I’m excited to announce InstantGallery will be featured on macZOT tomorrow. If you’ve not heard of macZOT before, it’s a site that offers great shareware apps at low, low prices, but in a limited quantity and for a short period of time. The old ‘grab ’em while they’re hot’ adage applies 🙂 I won’t tell you just how much you can save…
Category: apps, mac Tags:
IG 1.5 is here!
Posted on July 11, 2006 by Rory Prior
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Took a little while to get this one out the door – but here it is, InstantGallery 1.5. The big features are previously noted are gallery loading and saving and image rotation. What’s next? Well I’ve already got one really cool new feature lined up for 1.6 and that’s live searching. That is Spotlight style live searching for your web gallery without…
Category: apps, mac, news Tags:
NewsLife Philosophy
Posted on May 10, 2006 by Rory Prior
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Be small and unintrusive.NewsMac Pro was always a bit of a screen hog, the problem is when you’ve got a lot of information to display there is only so much you can do about making things physically smaller on the screen before you start to compromise usability. NewsLife is parred down to the minimum you need to see to use the app…
Category: apps, commentary, mac, newslife Tags:
Coming soon – 1.2.3
Posted on December 7, 2005 by Rory Prior
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What’s in store for the next minor update to NewsMac Pro? Well the usual bug fixes and so on, but also a couple of new features which I think will be big usability wins. The first of those is going to be a new combined layout view that places channels and headlines together in an outline view to allow a new way…
Category: apps, mac Tags:
NewsMac Pro 1.1 change summary
Posted on August 1, 2005 by Rory Prior
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I’m hoping to finish 1.1 this week and get it to testers for a public release next week sometime. Here is a summary of what’s new in this release: New features Adaptive interface – basically the interface configures itself differently depending on the task you’re currently performing. E.g. when you want to view a headline in the web browser it automatically grows…
Category: apps, mac, news Tags:
NSURLConnection woes
Posted on March 2, 2005 by Rory Prior
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I’ve been trying to improve the speed at which things download in NewsMac Pro as well as provide support for things like feeds which require authentication. The logical choice seemed to be moving from using NSURLHandle and friends to NSURLConnection which was introduced with WebKit back in OS X 10.2.7. The first thing that struck me about NSURLConnection was that it was…
Category: apps, development, mac Tags:
Mixed metaphors
Posted on February 4, 2005 by Rory Prior
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I’ve noticed that there might be some redundant functionality in NewsMac, the thing is I’m not sure what the preferable solution to the problem is – what’s the best way of marking things that you use a lot and want quick access to? Originally this problem was solved by the idea of favourites – you could mark any channel as a favourite…
Category: commentary, mac Tags:
Brushed metal and graphite blobs, wither the HIG?
Posted on January 13, 2005 by Rory Prior
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Apple has long been known for devising and popularising good solid computer user interfaces. However there has been an increasing, and worrying trend for Apple to throw conventional UI wisdom out the window to apparently either meet the whims of Steve Jobs or the marketing department. The spread of the brushed metal look, like a plague, across every flagship Mac application is…
Category: commentary, mac Tags:
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