Excellent movie I had already seen, but I figured I wanted to share with people who feel less strongly about this.
I’ve been playing the massive multiplayer online RPG (is it an RPG?) EVE Online in 2006 – I left at some point, having played for several months and gotten to a point where I couldn’t find any excitement in it. CCP (the company that makes an maintains EVE Online) also promised my account, with all its assets, would remain saved, if I would ever want to reactivate it when there had been another upgrade or such. A few weeks ago, the Mac client (which is actually the windows client wrapped in Transgaming’s Cider engine) was released, and I couldn’t fight the temptation to join EVE again and see what it had to offer. A lot has changed for me, personally, which inspired me to write a bit about the curious system that keeps EVE alive as a game, and the parts of EVE that aren’t really a game anymore.
When I heard (saw) that Apple did the U-turn thing yesterday on the Dock, I was a bit astonished. First, they haven’t given developers access to the final build of OS X Leopard, so nobody can test their products until Leopard is up for sale. Now they’ve essentially done the same to icon designers like me, by going flip-flop on the Dock. Fortunately, all my time spent on work with clients to make their icon look good in Tiger and the new ‘glassy’ dock wasn’t completely wasted, but they still changed a pretty fundamental design element’s look without giving any type of advance notice.
“Surely,” you may argue, “it’s just the Tiger dock, dark, with some modifications”. Sure. Quick Look windows are just dark backgrounds too; the sidebar accepting just 16px icons are just small additions as well, and Coverflow ‘only distorts’ your icon. But they do define the design considerations and the places where you see the icon most often. I am not trying to imply that I’m in a situation even half as sad as the developers’ (with them not being able to test apps against the Golden Master and such) but it does matter, and there is no real reason to postpone this cosmetic change to the final build. In fact, there’s lots of arguments to introduce this in a quick build before the final one. I hope Apple learns from this, as although they’ve shown they are receptive to input, the time of introduction really couldn’t have been worse.
I just wish we won’t see a lot more of these “surprise surprise!” changes coming from Apple again.
In a subtle email dropped in my inbox a few minutes ago, Paypal notified me of a new button design. In case I hosted my own buttons, they suggested I downloaded the new “stylish ‘Sunrise’ buttons from (the Paypal) website”. I really don’t ever use the defaults, but they look decent, right? White shape, black font on it, doesn’t really look out of place on any website. Here’s a comparison of the old and new button style. Continue reading…
