1FPS|by David Chartier

It was… their destiny.

Mark Jaquith, one of the lead WordPress developers, had the same trouble many users did when trying to figure out how to edit comments in WordPress 2.5. Turns out that, like clicking a post’s name to edit, you click the commenter’s name:

This sort of mirrors how post edit links work. To edit a post (or a page), you just click the name of the post. That is quite intuitive. I learned that behavior in about a day, and now the old way of clicking the “Edit” link seems strange. I’ve not had the same experience with comments. I think the problem is that comments don’t have a title, like posts do.

I agree, this really isn’t intuitive. I get the line of thinking that led to this decision, but it still just doesn’t feel right. Perhaps a simple “(edit)” link next to each commenter’s name would do the trick.

A subtle and obviously arguable change, but an appreciated one nonetheless. I decided to try out the iTunes Store’s new movie rentals by grabbing Spiderman for the flight back to Denver, CO tomorrow, and I noticed this new iTunes sidebar items this morning when my download was finished (never saw this one in the theaters, and my wife doesn’t even want to bother, so I figured finally finishing the Spiderman trilogy and sorting photos in Aperture would be good ways to spend the flight). I’ll transfer it to the iPhone this afternoon when work is done for the day and perhaps write up my experiences for Ars. I have a few specific things I’d like to test and see how Apple decided (or was allowed) to handle.

Maybe that iPhone 1.1.3 firmware Gear Live somehow got its hands on isn’t the finished, shipping version:

MacScoop is reporting that the upcoming firmware update — an “incomplete and unpolished version” of which has already been leaked — will allow users to enjoy copy/paste functionality. This means that when you read something in an email or on a webpage, you can paste that into a contact or a memo. This has long since been available on Symbian and Windows Mobile devices.

[From Mobile Magazine: Copy-Paste Finally Coming to iPhone Via Firmware 1.1.3]

Of course, CNET France also claimed that 1.1.3 should’ve landed early last December, complete with voice capture and disk mode, so don’t put too much stock in any of these claims.

That said, Mobile Magazine embedded an intriguing mockup video of how copy and paste could work on an iPhone:

I can’t decide whether this feels like the way Apple would do it though. Part of me thinks it’s too clunky, and too much awkward two-fingered tapping. On the other hand, like some of the other iPhone operations, I could see myself getting used to this. After all, many aspects of the iPhone’s UI were pretty wild and new when it came out, and I’m sure Apple isn’t finished shaking things up.

Tweetr Betr 0.76 * now with URL shortening

This is exactly why I have such a vendetta against Flash on the whole as a platform for any serious app development. Tweetr is a Twitter app built in Adobe’s Apollo, their new cross-platform application environment that incorporates Flash, HTML, CSS, etc. It basically allows people to build web apps using already existing technologies that can live on the desktop. Sadly, it has to brag about mouse wheel scrolling as a new feature:

cleaner design, use mouse wheel to scroll message window

Even in its latest form, Flash (and apparently by extension, Apollo) is still riddled with usability stupidity like this. Why the hell hasn’t Flash done this by default since 1.0? Since pre-alpha-beta-0.0.1? Why do developers seemingly have to spend time to build this in as a feature or added functionality when desktop software has done it since the dawn of the mouse wheel itself?

So it’s true - Adobe completely screwed up their window controls (minimize, close, etc.) in the rewritten Mac version of Creative Suite 3.

A design company
screwed up on a design and UI fundamental
when writing their design software
for an OS with high standards and a design following

Astounding.

I finally started digging into Yahoo! Pipes tonight and - wow, that is one heck of an impressive service. I’m grasping how some of the key modules are working and putting together some decent feeds. Stepping outside of one of Yahoo!’s first actually exciting products in years, however, things went downhill fast.

I decided to swing by the discussion boards to get some feedback on how to pull off a few tricks. This made me realize I needed to update my Yahoo! profile with current information - which turned out to be a downward spiral of a mistake. Going to edit my profile whisked me away from the discussion forum page to a profile editing area that retained absolutely zero references back to where I came from. I also noticed my correspondence email was old and wanted to update that… which again took me to a series of new marketing/email pages which each broke all ties from the profile page I had just left. Ugh - how can these dependent pages have nothing to do with each other?

Fortunately, through the beauty of the drop-down menu on my browser’s back button, I returned to the original profile page to also notice I didn’t have any kind of profile picture. Getting sucked in once more, I tried updating that - which took me to yet another completely unrelated page that prompted me to create my first Yahoo! Photos album…

Yahoo! - stop it. I know you have a billion little services that integrate about as well as oil and water, but it’s 2007. Can you at least try to make your sub-sites relate to one another? As you stand right now, this supposed network of broken relationships destroys the user experience and insults us. You’re one big company - make your web services look and act like it.

[tags]Yahoo, design, UI[/tags]

Kaboodle, my shopping and wishlist service of choice, has a slick-looking poll feature that runs in Flash. Once you make your choice, a Flash text box appears to allow you to enter any comments you might have. Hoping that Flash Player 9 might have fixed some of Flash’s silly problems with text, I go to make a comment and - whatdoyaknow - you still can’t use cmd-a to select all text, you can’t use opt + left/right arrows to leap back and forward entire words, you can’t use cmd-shift-arrow to select and leap to the beginning or end of a line… and you can’t do any of the other fantastic things that makes working with text in Mac OS X such a joy. How can such a popular piece of software be stuck in… geeze, I don’t even want to guess how old these wonderful Mac OS X text controls are.

And like the last time I complained about Flash (thanks John for taking the time to stop by), it doesn’t matter if these controls are actually present and not switched on by default in Flash (though given Flash’s not-so-fantastic history with text in general, I would be surprised if the controls actually are there). The point is: they should be, and they should be enabled by default, just like those video controls that apparently must be added manually and designed for. These things are basic necessities of these operating environments - text controls for input boxes, as well as time controls and a scrub or timeline bar for video - that need to be present to help the experience not suck.

Make users and designers happy - don’t make them work for the functionality Apple already provides.

[tags]Flash, UI, wrong[/tags]

*Sigh* I guess this is what 7.0.3 is for, right? And 7.0.4, and .0.5…

[tags]iTunes, UI, silly, design[/tags]

Mac vs. Windows - It’s All About The “Maximize” Button | restiffbard.com

Yea, that’s the *only* difference between two of the planet’s most wide-spread GUI operating systems. Never mind the army of engineers working for these two companies, or the decades of work that’s gone into both the underpinnings of the OSes and the markets and uses for which they’re designed: the whole “your computer is t3h s4×0r” argument comes down to a damn button and a UI behavior.

Jesus, this is why magazines and newspapers have editors, and why even our blogs employ some form of self and team policing.