Category: Design

…are the days of the never-ending palm rest cracks over?

The problem affected almost every single MacBook, since the very first models back in 2006, and up until today, Apple didn’t make any real adjustments to the design of the machine to resolve the issue — but today, that seems to have changed.

From looking over Apple’s photos of the new machine, I feel safe saying the issue will no longer be a problem. The new MacBooks are built like the unibody machines — from a single chunk of material (in this case, white plastic).

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iSpazz is:

…a plugin for iTunes on OS X, controlling the MacBook Pro/PowerBook backlight keyboard and optionally the display backlight.

Here’s a video of it in action.

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Ars Technica:

In the LP we dissected, Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King, the root directory consisted of 12 items. This included seven folders, an .xml and .plist file — which appears to point to full media files inside an iTunes library — an iTunesArtwork file, an .itlp file with a file size of 0KB, and a standard, run-of-the-the mill index.html file. Inside the HTML file, the doctype is HTML 4.01 with meta name properties set to “hdtv-fullscreen” and “hdtv-cursor-off”. This particular one made use of three stylesheets and 34 JavaScript files, which were marked copyright of Apple Computer.

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Mac|Life:

About 10 months later, at Macworld San Francisco in 2001, Apple debuted iTunes alongside iDVD and the CD-RW-enabled Power Macs. While it wasn’t exactly a show-stopper (though 275,000 copies were downloaded in the first week), the “world’s best and easiest to use ‘jukebox’ software” definitely raised the bar for music players on the Mac, which were relatively sparse and rather pricey (SoundJam cost $40). By offering iTunes as a free download and installing it on every new Mac, Apple essentially cut down the competition at the pass–or at least put a good scare into them. “Apple has done what Apple does best–make complex applications easy, and make them even more powerful in the process,” said Steve Jobs at the time. “iTunes is miles ahead of every other jukebox application, and we hope its dramatically simpler user interface will bring even more people into the digital music revolution.”

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From Engadget’s in-depth Zune HD review:

Perhaps the most compelling reason to buy a Zune HD right now isn’t the gorgeous screen or forthcoming apps, HD radio, or slick design. Make no mistake about it – this is a fine, fine device, and no one would fault you for buying one – but it’s not the device itself that is the most attractive part of this package. To us, it seems like the single most compelling reason to choose this device over something like the iPod touch can be boiled down to one thing: Zune Pass.

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iLounge has posted a photo over on Flickr of the entire iPod and iPhone family, from 2001 until today. Pretty cool.

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Nate Anderson over at Ars Technica, on the Zune HD:

Can it succeed? That depends on whether users buy into the Microsoft way of doing things—a way that includes paying for a monthly music subscription. Those who take the bait will find themselves hooked (in both senses) by one of the best portable music discovery experiences yet created. The full subscription experience on the Zune is now unbelievably compelling, offering something that feels like more than the sum of its parts—but consumers have so far shown little interest in subscription music services.

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SimpleNote is a wonderful $2 app that syncs text notes back and forth between the iPhone and the web. As a web app, it can be run in Fluid very easily, but has always looked… wrong.

John Hicks has released a stylesheet that cleans up the look of SimpleNote-in-Fluid, making it much easier to use.

To complete the package, you can grab a high-res copy of the SimepleNote icon to use for the app icon. Brilliant.

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Webdesigner Depot, on Apple and Microsoft’s websites:

Which site is the winner? If you’re looking at usability alone, Apple comes out ahead. They have a better designed homepage that offers less choice, which means the user needs to think less.

They have consistent navigation across all of their pages. They use a lot of white space and sub-headings to make everything more readable, yet they keep things simple by not overusing too many different text treatments.

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Sebastiaan de With:

After a huge release like Leopard, which brought very radical change to the way our favorite OS looks, feels, and works, including a complete redesign of its icons and UI ‘theme’, Snow Leopard’s (incomplete) roundup of UI changes can only feel minor. Nevertheless, it shows some beautiful classroom examples of what composes true attention to detail.

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Wired:

The new Motorola phone’s biggest asset will be its custom-designed user interface, Moto Blur.

“The Blur makes text, e-mail, Facebook, Twitter feeds and photos from sources like MySpace, Gmail, Yahoo and corporate e-mail appear in a single stream and sync them together with no different logins,” says Sanjay Jha, co-CEO of Motorola. “This means you can focus on what people have said instead of how and where they said it.”

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Steve Jobs:

Originally, we weren’t exactly sure how to market the Touch. Was it an iPhone without the phone? Was it a pocket computer? What happened was, what customers told us was, they started to see it as a game machine. Because a lot of the games were free on the store. Customers started to tell us, “You don’t know what you’ve got here — it’s a great game machine, with the multitouch screen, the accelerometer, and so on.”

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