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August 07, 2003
OS X
I upgraded at last to OSX last night on my old G3 Powerbook, now that I've gotten around to putting a big hard drive and more RAM in there. So far so good, although I haven't installed any apps yet.
Only complaints so far are that the install "time remaining" was totally off-base the entire install. First "time remaining" counted up to about 2 hours, then started counting down at about twice real-time. So at no point did I really have any idea how much time was left. And then the second install CD--of all printer drivers and language resources I don't need--had no "time remaining" readout at all.
But who's idea was it to make the default icon for the hard drive a picture of an actual hard drive? That's about the dumbest thing I ever saw. In fact, so far OSX seems a good argument against over-reliance on icons; you're constantly having to interpret those bastards or scan around them to read their captions.
Posted by Andrew at August 7, 2003 09:40 AM
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You should rush right out and install Launchbar [ http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html ] It's a little shareware utility (I think it's like $25) which will vastly improve your OSX experience.
Posted by: Nadav at August 7, 2003 06:00 PM
I remember Peterme mentioned this thing a while back. It's very Jef Raskin, no?
Posted by: Andrew at August 8, 2003 09:07 AM
And LiteSwitch X!
http://www.proteron.com/liteswitchx/
It makes switching much easier than the default dock way. LaunchBar has switching built in as well, but I prefer LiteSwitch, which works more like switching does in Windows - only better.
Regarding the icons, do you think that after time, the icons actually improve the usability of the interface? I was a bit put off by them at first too, but found that after I used OS X for some time, I could recognize certain icons faster than I could ever read any text.
Posted by: Joshua Kaufman at August 8, 2003 03:00 PM
From an entry I posted in 2001, from a paper written by cognitive scientist, Kyle Cave:
http://bradlauster.com/weblog/000066.html
"In our visual system, attention is distributed in the sequence:
1. location
2. color
3. shape"
So ask yourself, is it the icons you're recognizing or their location (or some other attribute)?
Posted by: Brad Lauster at August 8, 2003 03:48 PM
Location, no question. Even after only a couple days of OS X, I'm already finding myself jumping pretty close to the *positions* I'm learning: "Safari's about here, Entourage is about here..." etc. But I still can interpret a word more quickly than a picture.
Posted by: andrew at August 8, 2003 03:57 PM