There’s usually little sport in pointing out UI flaws in an OS, but Mac OS X is well-enough designed that it’s actually fun, like catching an erudite friend confusing a tense or saying “kinda”.

Here are several examples. Good times!

Terminology  

Huh? Remapping record identifiers? What the heck?

So, saving a movie is an operation. Good to know.

Controls  

Menu buttons look like a button, but act like a menu. Fine in concept, but the execution—slapping a normal menu against a normal button—is startlingly crude. The menu should really emerge more organically from the button.

 
The sign in dialog contains a useful little flag button that lets you choose a language, but it shouldn’t be in the window title bar.

And lastly, there are some good aspects to the new Help menu, but the way the menu grabs focus and causes selection highlighting to flash in the front window is not among them.

The Seattle PI’s Todd Bishop reports about Microsoft’s multi-touch Surface Sphere, a spherical display with a lens at the bottom to project an image onto the internal surface of the sphere.

What does the demo show?

Interacting with photos  The presenter pushes, drags, and resizes photos, same as in the multi-touch and table-top Surface demos. He also sends a photo to the other side of the sphere by pressing his palm on it—useful, he says, for sending something to a person standing on the other side, and for providing “pseudo-privacy” because the person on this side can’t see it.

Globe  The Earth is shown mapped onto the sphere, an obvious and interesting application.

360 views   The live video image from an omni-directional ring camera is shown mapped onto the surface, as is a virtual drive through downtown Seattle around Pike Place market using video taken from a moving car.
The presenter says that these provide an equally compelling view to everyone around it in high-traffic areas, but that “if multiple people want to interact with it, it becomes problematic”. He says you can socially mitigate those situations.

Pong  Place your palm on the surface and a ball bounces off of it. The article calls this a game, but there’s no evidence in the video that it is anything beyond the ball bouncing off your hand.

Accessing a menu  Press both palms on the top of the sphere and a ring of menu commands appears encircling the top.

Like the demo of multi-touch in Windows 7, this demo featured technology rather than user-focused solutions. Whether that technology is useful remains to be seen. Showing the Earth mapped onto the sphere is great, but a sphere seems a less appropriate surface once you’ve zoomed in.

Similarly, using the sphere as an interactive high-traffic kiosk would be problematic—only one person could be manipulating the display, for instance.

Browsing through the App Store in iTunes.

Whoa, Crash Bandicoot—what is this, the 90s? Pass. Pretty cool to be able to download it for my iPhone, though…Tetris, heh, 80s, yeah right…Enigmo, early 2000? Maybe get that one, yeah…

Click.

Air Hockey? Maybe, but ooohhh, look at Checkers Touch. Now that’s what I want my iPhone games to look like.

Click.

Oh, I’m all over Texas Hold’em. Hell, yeah.

Click.

Scrabble looks a little rough, but still. Click.

Ms. PAC-MAN! Click.

Okay, that should do me for a while. Total’s getting up there.

Pause. Looks at Tetris again.

Click.

Okay, that’s it for the iPhone. I hope it’ll hold it all. I wish they had this for the Mac—hey, why don’t they? The infrastructure’s there. iTunes already supports it.

Hmm…

Mac OS X is so easy to use that, before you know it, you’re running many applications simultaneously to perform different tasks, like uploading to your web site with Transmit and downloading the morning news with NetNewsWire. And you’re probably surfing the web and checking e-mail at the same time.

But, with Transmit buried in the background beneath your browser windows, how do you know when that upload finishes? And is NetNewsWire still downloading? Sure, those apps change their Dock icon, but that doesn’t help you much if you usually hide your Dock.

There’s a better way: try Growl.

Now, when that upload completes, you’ll see an attractive notification telling you the file upload is done. The notification includes the Transmit icon, but it’s really Growl conveying the notification from Transmit to you.

And when NetNewsWire finishes downloading your morning news, here’s what you’ll see:

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In The Matrix, Agent Smith eloquently summarizes a key point about iPhone usability:

In other words, what good is a feature…if you are unable to use it? That Agent Smith—scary, but wise.

Seems obvious enough, but most smart-phone reviews don’t simply overlook this point, they ignore it with complete abandon while distracting you with lists of irrelevant detail.

Here’s Twincities.com on the iPhone’s competitors:

SAMSUNG’S INSTINCT (on Sprint network)
How it beats the iPhone: Higher-resolution camera with flash; photo editing, annotating and panorama building; video capture; voice dialing; voice-guided driving directions; instant/multimedia messaging; drawing pad; stereo Bluetooth; expandable memory; removable battery; handwriting recognition; tactile (”haptic”) screen feedback; laptop-modem option.

— How does Apple’s iPhone 3G compare with new touch-screen phone competitors?, twincities.com

Consumers are learning that features like instant/multimedia message are worthless if they’re not designed to be usable.

Example: Nzherald.co.nz’s Debbie Mayo-Smith writes of a friend’s conversion to the iPhone:

“It’s turned my life around, Debbie,” was his response. “Before I had the iPhone, I was a complete technophobe. I’ve had mobile phones, but never bothered much about them. Because the iPhone has been such an easy-to-use application, it has been my eye-opening introduction to the world of technology.

— iPhone - not just for the geeks , nzherald.co.nz

Many people experiencing usability like that for the first time don’t forget it. They start expecting it, then demanding it in products they buy.

So, many of those iPhones being sold aren’t just a sale to Apple—they’re a customer who appreciates that usability is the biggest feature of all. And because no competitor yet is even close to competing with Apple on usability, they’ll likely be an Apple customer for a long time.

Mac OS X has always supported keyboard commands for taking screenshots, including the ability to select a rectangular region by pressing Command-Shift-4. In Leopard, you can now modify how you select that rectangular region in a few new ways.

Once you’ve pressed Command-Shift-4 and you’re resizing the selection rectangular from the top-left corner, try these new modifier keys:

• Press Shift to grow along one axis only
• Press Option to grow from the center (rather than from the top-left corner).
• Press Spacebar to lock the rectangle’s size and drag it to a new position.

These modifier keys work in concert, too. Press Shift and Option in combination, for instance, to grow along one axis from the center. Here they are in action:

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If you’ve ever tired of scrolling, scrolling, scrolling on your iPhone to get to the top of a long Web page in Safari, here’s a handy shortcut:

(The status bar is the bar at the top of the screen.)

Looks like the iPhone is about to shake up the world of GPS software.

In a Forbes article published today, some existing GPS developers sound a bit shrill when complaining about the iPhone. For instance, they dislike that you will be able to use your purchased iPhone applications on multiple devices:

A customer could have three iPhones synched to the same iTunes account, and thus would only be paying for one copy of the application, but using it on three devices.

— Steve Andler, vice president of marketing, Networks In Motion, quoted in Forbes, July 4, 2008

Translation: “Apple’s model conflicts with our business plan, which is to charge our customers several times for the same software.”

The writer, Elizabeth Woyke, explains that some developers dislike that iTunes doesn’t support a subscription model:

ITunes also presents billing challenges for developers, which typically charge users a monthly or daily access fee for mapping services. The firms say their billing system keeps users’ data current and helps underwrite the expense of constantly updating maps.

— Forbes, July 4, 2008

Translation: “Apple’s model conflicts with our business plan, which is to prevent the user from owning software they’ve already paid for.” (The bit about “keeps users’ data current” is particularly nice.)

And they dislike that Apple prevents iPhone applications from running in the background:

Citysense Chief Executive and Co-Founder Greg Skibiski says plotting people’s movements enables the service to detect which clubs, restaurants and bars are drawing crowds at a particular time. To preserve battery life, however, the iPhone allows only one application to be open at a time, which means Citysense’s app likely won’t achieve its full potential on the device.

Translation: “Apple’s concern for the iPhone’s battery life and customer experience conflicts with our software, which was designed with the assumption that background applications would be supported and that our customers value our software more than battery life.” (Question: if the software is that highly valued by the customers, why can’t they simply leave the application open and running?)

There are also understandable concerns about Apple’s own software plans. A TomTom spokeswoman says they’re taking a wait-and-see approach.

Might be a long wait.

It’s nice the way iChat occasionally inserts timestamp status messages to let you know when events happened within the conversation, but sometimes you want to know exactly when who said what.

When you do, just hover over the speech bubble to see a handy display:

While taking a first look at the Mac version of Avid Media Composer 3.0, HDFilmtools.com reveals among mostly positive comments a few glimpses of the Avid experience, leaving little doubt how Apple managed to grab pro-video marketshare:

I backed up all my project data in the event of catastrophe. (I’m crazy, not stupid) I installed the upgrade, restarted the computer and….

Kernal Panic….Argh!

That’s right, the grey screen of death. I’m thinking, what a drag. Why do I always do this to myself?

— Avid Media Composer 3.0 Mac - First Look, HDFilmtools.com.

It sounds like Avid may have improved things…

In the old days I would have had to pledge my first born, or purchased a very expensive yearly support contract. Avid now offers what I believe is a fair price for per-incident support but better than that, on this call they were kind enough to comp me a 24 hour support ticket!

…but customer relations remain bumpy, as someone points out in the comments, saying the product is still too expensive and dedicated to the Avid line alone—hard issues to resolve for a vertical company being undercut by a cheaper and diversified competitor with market momentum.