Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

Brent Simmons, author of NetNewsWire, is on a roll. He is blogging about all kinds of user interface inconsistencies among Apple's applications. Not only do Apple's programs provide similar user interfaces in very different ways, but the tools that the provide to developers are different even from that! Certainly nobody at Apple seems to know about, or care about, consistency, either in their own applications or in what they provide to third-party developers!

This kind of discussion might seem trivial to some — certainly to non-Mac-users — but as a software developer, this is important stuff. We have to walk the line in our user interface decisions all the time, trying to make an application look consistent with the Mac interface, and also "modern". This means eschewing many of the controls and widgets that Apple provides us as developers, or customizing them drastically, in order to make our applications look or act consistently with Apple's applications. For instance, in our upcoming application, we are using a custom Split-view class (RBSplitView for the developers reading this) so we can have a cleaner, no-border look found in Tiger's otherwise ugly Mail application. We had to make some adjustments to the standard text input widget to make it look modern. We had to hand-roll our own subtle gradient backgrounds (which seem to be replacing stripes more and more, as Brent points out). We've had to make graphical buttons instead of using Apple's standard text buttons.

All this, just to get an application that looks like it belongs on Tiger rather than, say, Jaguar.

Here's an unsolicited testimonial. I recently purchased some CDs from the store CDBaby.com. Their e-commerce site is nothing particularly special, but where they shine is in being silly. Take for example this excerpt of the email I got from them annoncing that the CDs have shipped:

Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved 'Bon Voyage!' to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Monday, May 16th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as "Customer of the Year". We're all exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Lots of fun. I'll probably order from them again. Now if they would just put an RSS feed on their new arrivals list....

I came across MyPyramid.gov — the new, improved "food pyramid" brought to us by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. You know the pyramid, which replaced the heavily-lobbied "Basic 4" a few years ago. Well now they have changed things again, making it slightly more personalized, but also making it much more confusing in the process.

Whoever came up with the new pyramid was clearly not a student of Edward Tufte. I'm no expert at informational graphics, but this has so many flaws to my eye.

First, the shape. If you are trying to convey proportions, a "pie chart" is probably a better way to go; then again, the USDA probably doesn't want to give people the idea that they should be eating more pie! The retention of the triangle ("pyramid") shape was probably done to ease the transition or keep people from criticizing them from changing things again, but doing so is counterproductive in this case. I find my eyes moving from the base of the triangle, where at least you can get a sense of relative thickness of the wedges up toward the top, where the lines converge to the same width. This is a step backwards to the days of Basic 4, where all food groups seemed to be of equal importance.

My other complaint is the white lines between the colors. That's distracting; what's worse is that the slightly thicker yellow line is actually fats & oils. What was clearly there yet small on the old pyramid is now just an artifact.

I'd be very curious to see what Tufte would say about the best way to present this information. The USDA needs to go at it again!

As I mentioned in my previous post, scaling with CIImage can be a bit tricky, if you want to do it just right.

First off, the main CIFilter you should use is CILanczosScaleTransform. Originally I started using an affine transformation, which was in some Apple sample code, but that didn't produce as good of a result. You pass in the scale (along the Y dimension) that you want the image resized to, and an aspect ratio, usually of 1.0 unless you want something anamorphic going on. Here's a fragment:

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By now, developers have probably seen some of the demos of Core Image, or played with it using programs like Apple's Core Image Fun House (in /Developer/Applications/) or Stone's similar iMaginator. The list of image processing features that are built-in are pretty amazing, and you can make some wild effects.

But Core Image is about more than just cool effects; it's also a great workhorse. When we decided that our forthcoming application would be Tiger-only, I started experimenting with Core Image to try and speed up some of our basic image processing needs, such as simple scaling of images. I don't have any benchmarks comparing image-scaling between NSImage and Core Image, but it's noticeably faster. Plus, you can take advantage of some subtle techniques to make your processed images look great.

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Readers of this weblog and visitors to the Karelia website may have noticed (or not) that not much has changed around here, visually speaking. The design is kind of plain... which is OK, but maybe it's time for a refresh. Especially with a new software product coming in the near future, we're going to need the expertise of a web designer to help us out.

Now a lot of people can know HTML and lay out a page — heck, even me. But I'm looking for somebody who's really good at it! And somebody who has swallowed the CSS "Kool-Aid", who can maybe do something of the caliber of the beautiful designs at CSS Zen Garden.

If you're qualified, interested, and available, please drop me a line.

A chilling, yet entertaining, metaphor. http://www.truemajorityaction.org/bensbbs. But hey, it's only 17.6 billion dollars a year!