Brian Kerr

From the party-like-it's-2000 department:

A couple of the Mac OS X developer previews had a weird purple button at the top right corner of window title bars, where the magical lozenge can be found more recently. This button appeared in a few developer previews, but was removed before the first really crappy public release.

This button was actually a toggle between normal layered windowing and a nasty “single window mode” which allowed only one window to show at a time. Single window mode simply minimized the existing (single) window whenever an action opened up a new window.

For more on this behavior and screen captures of what the button looked like in disabled and enabled states, see John Siracusa’s review of OS X developer preview 3 (start reading around ¶5).

The magical lozenge which occupies the same spot in more recent Mac OSes has two purposes. First, you click it to show or hide the toolbar. The second purpose — and the reason it’s a magical lozenge — you ⌘-click it to cycle between the various icon/text and toolbar size configurations. Like all forms of magic, this one has its downside as well, in that the odd ugly duck application may manage to do something just totally insane when you click the magical lozenge, at least until they fix the thing.

(tags: design feedback-loop interaction mac visual)

Some recent searches that brought people here, with links and commentary as appropriate.

annual film farm ann arbor

Film Farm is an annual student film competition hosted by M-Flicks. This year’s Film Farm X was held last night (Friday, April 6) at the Michigan Theater. Attendees vote for their favorite films in several categories, which are then showered with micro glory.

kabob palace ann arbor

Kabob Palace was a restaurant near U-M campus in downtown Ann Arbor. It closed in February 2007, but the kitchen and service started to fall apart long before that. From about 2001 to 2004, Kabob Palace was my go-to spot for big groups, since there was plenty of seating and friendly service. They made excellent mjaddra, simple and tasty.

oddmuse analytics

OddMuse is a very cool wiki engine with a modular design — a svelte core backed by a bunch of extensions which add particular kinds of features or black magic. If you want to collect analytics for your OddMuse wiki, just use Google Analytics. A bigger problem is making sense of the data you’ve just collected. By setting up clever conversion goals that track progress through your wiki and, in particular, your wiki login / edit / preview / save cycle, you can differentiate between visitors who show up and read versus those who actually make changes.

osx keyboard navigation menubar

Hit ⌃F2 to select the menu bar using a keyboard. You can then press arrow keys to navigate around, and type the names of menus or commands to jump to them. You can remap this keyboard shortcut in the “Keyboard Shortcuts” tab of the Keyboard & Mouse settings in your System Preferences.

If you are a Quicksilver person, another (arguably easier) way to do this is to set up a trigger that looks like this:

and map it to a key combination of your choice.

slicehost jabber

Just do it! One fun use case: if you don’t feel like running mail on a slice, just send status or update messages via jabber.

(tags: annarbor feedback-loop lunch mac movies slicehost wiki)

Quick test post using Textmate’s new Blogmate plugin, which wires a shockingly minimal xmlrpc blog editor into every Mac person’s favorite purple-grey insectoid hulk. This means I can now post a text buffer to this blog without even saving the file!

(tags: mac weblogs)

Same adapted (hands-free) work process as Have geek looking for artists. The theme was transportation/mapping of space:

(A full-size version of this image.)

The SmartNav is still super tiring to use, especially for finicky rectangular selection and trying to more or less line things up along whichever axis. I probably don’t use it enough, or long enough, to get truly acclimated.

(tags: design mac media process self umsi)

Screen captures from one of today’s projects, adapting Seashore for easier use with a SmartNav head-mounted mouse. Seashore is a free software Macintosh derivative of the GNU Image Manipulation Program. Since Seashore uses nib files for its interface resources, it’s a piece of cake to open up Interface Builder and resize, realign, remove, and re-bind keyboard shortcuts for user interface elements throughout the application. Here’s a simple example, options for the paintbrush tool:

(A full-size version of this image.)

The original, on the left, uses small control sizes and presents options for a pressure-sensitive devices. The modified version, on the right, uses regular control sizes, and we’ve added tick marks to the slider and hidden controls irrelevant to the human interface devices we happen to be working with. These are small changes, but it’s enough of a difference to make a difference.

Slider controls are tricky because they ask you to first move a tiny target over a continuous range and then stop moving it in order to make a precise selection. In almost all cases, we’ve turned on between 8 and 12 markers, and checked Stop on tick marks only so that sliders snap to markers. You lose a lot of precision that way, but this doesn’t matter if you’ve chosen a strategic number of markers. This approach for slider controls is inspired by the way a similar user interface element responds to stylus or finger control in Animal Crossing.

(tags: design mac process umsi)

One of today’s activities:

Collage of two images from RecentChangesCamp 2007: 1 and 2; a higher-quality image of the result.

Made in Seashore using a SmartNav plus a few labor-saving voice commands. This means, no hands. You move the cursor by moving your head. You click by saying “click” or triggering a button or puffing into a tube. The little tiny hotspots and buttons in Seashore are hard to select; slider controls are the hardest.

OS X is pretty easy to wrangle with this kit, after a learning curve. Some applications are better than others, with Quicksilver (not too surprisingly) coming in dead last. It’s a shame because Quicksilver really helps to cut down on mousing and typing, both at a premium when you’re not using your hands.

See grad student bkerr a4a project for more like this.

(tags: design mac media process self umsi wiki)

Thus twitter’d Ed:

Hit the big red next button to see what you need to do next.

This sort of came up over lunch on Monday. It’s a problem with at least three parts:

1. a big red button,
2. something that tells you what to do next (Hiveminder?), and
3. glue code.

Glue code

This could imply USB Overdrive and friends, or the more likely candidate of a Quicksilver trigger + Growl display, wrapped around the Hiveminder shell interface.

What to do next

Of course, the hard part is deciding what to do next. Hiveminder would actually make a good decider, if you somwhat randomized the order it showed your open items.

(tags: design mac)