14Jan03 (Monthenor): I'm now on to the sixth book in the Anita Blake series, and the writing has improved noticeably. I admit now that my call for a charity Metaphor Drive was years late. But it got me to thinking: "Charity Metaphor Drive" sounds like a propulsion unit from a Douglas Adams novel. Like, "tax shelter" would get you to the outer reaches of the solar system, and "riding the tax-exempt rollercoaster" would zap you across the galaxy.

It looks like I'll be doing tons of actual programming for class this semester. This is a good thing.

Apple + Application Programming = rm ~/
01.14.03 (Morgion)

This time I felt like giving my post a title. Hopefully it will become a trend, and then embraced as a standard. Or something. At any rate, this rant is required… rather, inspired… by Monty's post about coding.

My question is, why is Apple trying to delete my files? Let me explain… with a few paragraphs of leadup and then a shocking whiz-bang* near the end.

I like Apple. Mostly as a hardware and operating system producer. iTunes is cool, and now the iLife package ("Suddenly it all connects" translates to "Now our trendy, wacky-ass naming scheme makes sense") seems like an interesting and worth-while software offering, as does Keynote, a PowerPoint-killing presentation program.

A lot of the new iApps of iLife have a Feedback system. If by system you mean a menu option that takes you to a web form. I've been using this "feature" a lot in iCal to recommend inclusion of a variety of features (not just more brushed metal than you can shake broken UI guidelines at… more on that later) that really should have been in the 1.0 version.

Maybe I'm just expecting too much of Apple, but when I have an alarm pop up and start blaring at me, I want to be able to make it go away now and come back later… otherwise I will forget. That's why I have a digital planner, to act as a surrogate short-term memory. My Visor from Handspring does this; it's not a new idea.

So I'm wondering what's wrong with Apple. If I can characterize their offerings of yore, hardware and software, in one word, it would be "polished"… and not just because they're shiny. They're well thought-out, feature-rich and aesthetically pleasing, and usually, fairly kink-free. Lately, however, it's been a different story.

Mac OS X v10 was hella slow; it took 10.1 to fix that, and 10.2 (Jaguar) to add some needed GUI functionality and reduce the amount of bass-ackwards workflow to a dull roar. The installer for a recent version of iTunes had the potential power to delete your hard drive… something about not expecting spaces in file paths… silly users using spaces! Now, Safari could delete your home directory if you Option-click on a link to download a file, and if you even install it, it could delete /tmp, causing innumerable and seemingly unrelated problems.

Finally, aside from these fatal faux pas, there's a general lack of polish—not to mention common-sense—in the UI of OS X, mainly because an abundance of brushed (metal). From the Aqua User Interface Guidelines (via an arstechnica article):

[The brushed metal] window style has been designed specifically for use by—and is therefore best suited to—applications that provide an interface for a digital peripheral… Avoid using the textured window appearance in applications or utilities that are unrelated to digital peripherals or to the data associated with these devices.

The Web isn't a digital peripheral, at least not in any reality I'm familiar with. A few more points are made by some nobody in this article. Despite a somewhat erroneous analysis and some spelling issues ("Imac"... running MacIntosh, no doubt *snicker*), there are valid observations. I'll have to debunk this article later. For now, take it with a grain of salt.

Bottom line: Apple, please pick an interface theme, obey your original bible—and stop trying to delete my files. Please.

* Shocking whiz-bang is different for every reader. Your results may vary. But we all know what you want.