photo credit: Andrea Costa Photography

The Future

But Apple won’t stop here. If you’re looking at Safari’s new way of moving back in the history by moving the active page to the right (effectively scrolling to the left further than possible) so that the last page in the navigation history appears below the active page  shows where this could lead. If you try this left and right-scrolling in iCal and do it really slowly, you get an effect like in iBooks where a new calendar page slowly flips over. This kinda semantic way of moving things is also followed with mission control, where you push everything away from you (four-finger-swipe up) to get an overview of everything running and do the opposite to get back close to the windows. I believe this kind of semantic movement of windows and content will sooner or later work in a lot of menus, the finder, the AppStore and anywhere else where “back” usually would be a button.

Criticism

If this is the course of the OS, I wonder why Apple didn’t go further with this. In the new iCal, you can move forward and backwards with this new side-scrolling. So, if you move the content (for example the month August on a sheet of ‘paper’) to the left, on the right side ‘September’ slides in. In my opinion, this is exactly the natural way it should work. Why then, if you use three fingers and make the same gesture (three finger swipe to the left) it moves the other way round, back to July? Because three finger swipe left is defined as ‘back’. Putting the ‘back’-command on three-finger-swipe right sounds silly, but I think this is the way it should work as you’re always moving the content to the right when you’re going backwards, and vice versa. This would also give a sign to third party applications like Twitter, where in a conversation the same confusing three-finger-swipe to the left actually moves the content to the right side to return to the stream.

What I would like additionally is a three-finger-down gesture for minimizing or closing a window, or better some way to define gestures as triggers for actions in programs, as possible in BetterTouchTool (with that you can remap and define new gestures for touchpads and magic mouses).

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Huddles for the Webapp

Additionally, Huddles for the mobile app are extremely handy for shorthand-group chats has you’ll get a push-notification for each message, but for each of such communications it should be possible to silence the push-notifications or just send one on the first new message instead of one for everytime someone writes a message.

Hangouts for the mobile apps

Hangouts are about the same as Huddles, you just can talk live and chat and watch Youtube while you’re in the room. Why shouldn’t you be able to talk with the other people while you’re using your mobile phone? Especially if you’re in a WiFi network? Or at least see the chat? If Google treats group-posts, messages, group-chats in GTalk, Hangouts, Huddles, mail and just everything differently, how should users know which one to use?

Fix the mobile app’s bugs

The Android and iOS apps are buggy. Sometimes they crash without any reason, and oftentimes the notification count is not what I should be. This needs to be fixed.

Improve Circle’s posting

Cicles are a huge win, and everyone knows it. What I miss from here is operations you can do with there circles.

For example, it would be nice to define that “Friends” and “Coworkers” are automatically in “Contacts”, so you have lesser clicking if you know the implications of adding a coworker for example. Inheritance would be a nice feature, although not everyone might use it.

Being able to do set operations would be another huge advantage. My use case is to have cicles of people understanding English, and people understanding German. If I do a german post, I would like to make sure only people of the targeted circle (for example “contacts”) that are also in the circle “german” can read it, the intersection of those circles. In theory, this is a very simple operation, and I would love this. If you think adhead, having other set operations could be nice too. If you for example make a joke about how stupid programmers are, you might want to post if to all your contacts minus those that you’ve also added to “programmers”.

Make Spaks useful

Spraks seem to be an aggregation of Google news. I would love to be able to set the “metatags” of a certain Google+ post. For example, if you find out a nice feature about the new Macbook Air that just came out, you should be able to tag it with the appropriate words, so it appears in everyone’s sparks for “Macbook Air” for example.

Open up the API

Facebook and Twitter weren’t extremely useful without clients, and Google+ isn’t too. There’re unofficial APIs out there (and Abelssoft has already released a Windows client for Google+ here), but these unofficial APIs rely on HTML parsing and therefore are not very convenient to use, are not too fast and also don’t open up all the functionality that Google+ offers.

That’s what I think. Am I missing something?

photo credit: vernhart

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ToDo is not perfect. But I’ll begin with the nice little tidbits that make me keep on using this app, which is the best feature a ToDo app can have: continued usage.

• There’s a keyboard shortcut to quick add tasks, that can be defined in the settings. After the shortcut, just type the task name and hit return or tab, which adds the task and lets you go on typing the next tasks name unless you hit return or tab again. Great feature for quickly adding tasks.

• Clicking on the blue linked day in the calendar filters everything by tasks due today

• CMD + N is the shortcut for a new task, or, if you’ve selected a project or a tasklist-task adds a new subtask. With the arrow keys you can navigate in the list, hitting right or left arrow folds or unfolds projects and tasklist-tasks.

• If you’ve selected a context or tag, you don’t only get the whole list filtered by that tag / context, but also have new tasks get the context and tags automatically selected for the active values. Very nice thing if you’re seperating contexts as work and private and projects as tags.

• I should mention that I only use “lists” for the default one “inbox” and “ideas”. I’m throwing everything into ideas that shouldn’t be deleted, but that I usually won’t want to clutter my list. And you can completely filter out lists from your views, what I did with “ideas”. Additionally, context and tags are kept, so I can scan for ideas very targeted, if I need to.

• Via drag-and-drop you can drag your single or multiple selected tasks to tags, contexts, lists or on a due date (in the calender) to set those on the task(s). Very nice way to easily set stuff on tasks.

CRITICISM:

As I like this app, I want to make some point that could be improved, and if anyone reading this develops this app or knows someone who develops this app, please forward this.

• automatic recognition of context by WIFI-SSID (or place on iPhone)
• keywords for the quick-entry dialog (for example #tagname or @contextname), autocompleted if possible
• more folding levels for tree-like tasks
• tree-like contexts
• more performance after CMD-N: sometimes half the typed name is missing because I didn’t wait for the new task to pop up in the tree

OVERALL:

The app fits my workflow most and keeps me using it – what no other ToDo-list-tool has ever achieved as I’m to much of a GTD freak. Have fun with this app.

photo credit: @superamit

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I never had this opinion. I would always look at how easy an operating system lets me fulfill the tasks I need to fulfill, including the initial learning curve, therefore I chose Windows on computers and iPhone on smartphones. I hate having to configure stuff all the time. I hate how the Android OS makes me click on way too small buttons and phone makers try to combat this with bigger screen sizes. I hate when I have to make way more clicks or text input to get anything done. And I really don’t like when the web browser stutters or I doubletap on a paragraph and it zooms to the sidebar. All pretty small things (yeah, rewriting the UI elements isn’t really a small thing), but if this were different, I’d definitely chose Android. And if Windows Phone gets more powerful and easier to use than iPhone, I’ll choose that one. I really don’t care about religion. And I never advised anyone to pick an iPhone “because everyone does” or “because it won”, and this is my only plea in this whole post: when you’re advocating for Android, please don’t mention that more copies were sold, as this has nothing to do with the quality of the hard- and software.

photo credit: kevindooley

As this post might have religious comments, here’s a disclaimer: I like iPhone best among smartphones, so in your opinion I’m a fanboy – no need to mention that again. I also love customization in my phone from time to time, so I’m jailbreaking – but I also didn’t miss it much when there wasn’t a good jailbreak available. And for the pricing: since here in germany the T-mobile monopoly fell, iPhone is not too pricy anymore – so leave me alone with “I can’t pay for it” – if you can pay 500€ in two years, you can also afford 600€.

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The workaround I use now is the Firefox Addon “Session Manager“. In it’s preferences, you can set “Close Firefox on close of the last Window” and “On close: save current session” and “On start: choose session: last session”. This let’s Firefox always open with the last session, that means with all the tabs you had open before you closed it. Happy Maccing, Mr Firefox. Also works with 4.0 btw.

photo credit: Tambako the Jaguar

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First, you need to be able to type and grasp some basic concepts, like the way the file system is laid out, which types of other stuff in the operating system is mapped into the file system, and basic usage principles. This alone is enough reason most users won’t bother with this ever. Typing is strictly not what most users want to do, they want to surf the web, listen to music, watch movies and when typing is only needed for messenging or typing in profile information in Facebook.

Well, normal users stink anyways, you say, and as a programmer you should be comfortable with typing on a keyboard too. So let’s look at the positive aspects of the command line: it’s all just typing, you don’t need to take away your hands from the keyboard to use a mouse and thereby it’s all faster anyways and also, there are so many commands with so many fine grained parameters that you can do basically anything using the shell.

This is true, and I don’t want to argue with anyone here. Surprise! I don’t think the command line is inherently bad. Instead, I think it’s an expert system. If you have invested years and years learning commands, parameters and when to use which parameter and which parameter won’t work with another one. The leaning curve is steep. You’ll need to learn the use of every single command that you’ll need for every single of the the most trvial of actions. You’ll need to know that there is this command, and how to use it, you’ll need to learn with parameters do what and you’ll ask yourself who decided on the defaults parameters or the absense of them and you’ll read man pages over man pages for that.

So if you did that, congratulations, you have aquired a valuable skill. At least as long as there’s no good GUI based solution for that. But there’re more problems with only working in text mode:

You type, the program executes and you get output. The sequential cycle of this dance has no possibility to give you additional information while you type or while the program executes. When it dumps a lot of text on the screen, you scan it for what you need to know, and then you type and wait again. For a lot of problems this won’t matter at all. Sometimes it’s even faster, for example when you grep for a certain file you’re searching for. But in the shell, there’s no mouseover, no intuitive visual design that could give you clues what to do and how to do it, no spelling correction when you mistyped a character in the middle of a three line-wrapping command. Type and execute.

Don’t misunderstand me here: I wish I would be a master of the command line. As the myth of doing command line magic is what let’s us admire those who can. The basic thought in every person who needs to use the command line is always “damn, this is hard” and “it’s take forever till I get all this” and “I guess I have to learn all this stuff”. This makes us admire those who CAN do all the stuff and know all the commands even more.

But times are a’ changing. The first really well usable wide-spread operating system that you could accomplish pretty much everything with was Windows XP in 2003. In all other systems you always had to be mastering the command line to be able to do what you really wanted to do. It’s 8 years since, and a lot has changed. GUI programmers got better at what they’re doing and they’re giving ordinary users the power to use the computer. Windows 7 is a very nice OS, and MacOS gets better with every release.

To me, command line commands are a basic foundation that you can base an operating system on. But commands are badly designed by default, and therefore you should never have users be dependent on them. Never ever. And as it’s not 2003 anymore, you cannot expect power users to know or even aspire to know the command line anymore.

I can do work in the command line when I need to, but I’m always very slow at that and I’d always rather have a GUI based tool at hand, that shows me instantly what to do and how to do it instead of Googling and guessing – and for my part if something cannot be done conveniently without the command line in an OS, I think the OS is badly designed and needs work.

I’d rather stay clicking.

photo credit: Robert S. Donovan

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Now for my feeling of this machine (Pro):

• I can use this little thing as my main machine now, and thats purely superb.
• The high build quality is amazing.
• The screen is small but very high resolution – wouldn’t recommend it to anyone with bad eyes, but for me it’s perfect.
• Having an SSD easily makes this thing a very responsive device. I never wait for my machine, my machine always waits for my input.
• The touchpad is so amazing, that I cannot describe it. Let’s just say if you haven’t used a modern multitouch trackpad on a Mac so far, go to a Mac Store and just try it. I cannot stress enough that this trackpad made me dismiss the idea of even using a mouse on this machine, because the multitouch gestures just make you execute everything better than a mouse could, and you don’t even need to take a hand away from the keyboard.
• Some of the interface choices in MacOSX just blow my mind – others like the Windows 7 snap to corners stuff that I really like can be easily installed via external programs.

Contra:

• I still didn’t grow accustomed to the Mac – keyboard layout. Additionally, I really don’t like the “fn” function key in the bottom left corner of the keyboard. If there were some tool out there that would let me switch this function key with the CTRL key, I would be happy.
• High price. An older but equally powered MacBook would have done the trick for me too.
• The basic layout features 2GB RAM and 64GB disk space. I really wanted 4GB RAM as I don’t like swapping to disk when programming or using the iPhone simulator, and the only device they had with 4GB also came with the 128 GB hard disk. Didn’t think I really need the space as I was going to keep private stuff on this machine to a minimum and use Dropbox for the rest, but even after just installing all the software I wanted I already went over 64GB. That means Iwouldn’t advise anyone to go without the 128GB hard disk, and also not without the 4GB RAM if this should be your main machine or if you plan on doing more than just basic tasks with this thing (read: Photoshop and above). The 1.6GHz processor instead of the 1.4GHz is wasted money in my opinion.

UPDATE: after about three month:

• Overall, I’m happier than ever. I cannot believe that there’re people in the world who work with a computer most of their lifetime and don’t even try another alternative. The carpenter also won’t use the cheapest biggest hammer he can find, he’ll use the best tool for the job (that might also be a bit more expensive), and so should you.
• There’re apps for everything I did with Windows. This means, there’re no tasks I need to go back to windows to, as for everything there’s a solution on the Mac (and most of the time a better one).
• I totally grew accustomed to the keyboards scheme. The main thing you need to understand is that you’ll only need the CMD key most of the time in all apps you use. Therefore, both are put at prominent places that are easy to find even if you don’t look at the keyboard: next to the giant space bar. The idea to put it in the middle needs you to flip your brain when you come from Windows: don’t use the small pinky finger to hopefully find the CMD key somewhere in the corner of your keyboard, but instead use the left or right THUMB to just always correctly hit the CMD key besides the spacebar. After some weeks, you won’t want to get back to the Windows way (and yes, you’ll be able to copy-paste with no problems).
• The touchpad is so amazing (and with BetterTouchTool even configurable as hell) that I won’t ever consider using a mouse for the MBA.
• Talking about Better Touch Tool, that thing also gives you the Windows-spnapping that you love about Windows 7.
• I’m happy I took the 128 GB of harddisk. 64 are just not enough to get all your stuff on there.

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