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  Measuring PDFs with Skim

  mike 5:00 pm on November 6, 2009 | 0 Permalink
  Tags: design (2), mac (11), skim, ui

  

  I love it when I can guess how to do something new in a program. Skim just did this for me – I needed to figure out how big the rectangle of text in a paper I’m working on is, in inches. I looked for rulers, and then decided I’d just see if I get any size feedback when I make a rectangular selection. Turns out there’s a nice feedback status line in the bottom right – clicking toggles between measurement in pts and in inches.

  I like how this solves my problem without adding a lot of new UI for measurement – no rulers, no extra tool to measure length.

   

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  mike 9:30 am on July 22, 2009 | 0 Permalink
  Tags: design (2), desktopvswebapps (3), typography, ui

  With all the news about web fonts lately, I’ve been thinking about typography as a difference between web apps and desktop apps. No one expects web apps to conform to any standard UI, so designers can experiment and give us distinctive interfaces, using different fonts and color schemes.

  It seems like there’s less room to play in desktop apps – you’ll see unique interfaces with new button styles, new controls, different color schemes, but as far as I can tell, not much variation in typography.

  The only example off the top of my head is Panic Sans, used in Coda.

  Why so little variation?

  Is it the presence of a standard system font, UI guidelines, or just habit?

  Is there a licensing issue for redistributing fonts with software? I tried to look for licensing terms, but this doesn’t seem to be a common question.

  I wouldn’t mind some more tasteful variation in my desktop apps – I think the best web apps have shown us that different isn’t always bad.

   
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  iCal's Text Field Jumble

  mike 2:38 pm on November 2, 2008 | 0 Permalink
  Tags: cocoa (2), mac (11), programming (3), ui

  I’ve written here before about text fields, particularly the problem of having a good-looking ‘display’ mode and a separate ‘edit’ mode for data you don’t edit so often, like in AddressBook.

  The most recent version of iCal decided that events are write-once-read-many as well. You now have to use cmd-E to get into edit mode, while cmd-I just gives you a small display mode.

  I’m mostly OK with that, although I find I edit events about as often as I look at their info windows – after editing I usually just deal with alarms, not the events themselves. The casual glance at the time and title is always enough – I think either you’re looking at the time and title or you’re editing. I don’t see the appeal in the new ‘info-only’ mode (if it’s actually new – it seems new.)

  However, the change does highlight the jumble of editable text fields and text-like fields in the edit window:

  

  The “Add Attendees” link and the “None” placeholder for url act the same – you click on them, and enter text. One’s a link and one’s mute gray text. Why? For my part, I think the gray text is too understated, and the link is too garish.

  There are other differences: you can tab to the “url” field, but you can’t tab to “attendees”… until you add one, then you can. Once you click on either of them, the url field pops up a plain white raised NSTextField, but the attendees field is sunken and translucent, apparently an NSTokenField?

  Both of the blue links could also be buttons. I’m still not completely sold on replacing buttons with links, but I can understand the trend. I think a small plus-sign button would be fine for “Add File”, though, and “Attendees” ought to be a text field. Why force the user to use the mouse when adding data to an event?

  All in all, I think the “Add Attendees” link/field is pretty strange. I’m curious if I missing a precedent somewhere.