My personal opinion on this long (very long) piece by Jensen Harris on creating the Windows 8 user experience is that, Microsoft has finally found the right approach in creating a new piece of software. They have shown that in Windows Phone 7, now they are trying to do the same in Windows 8. It is extremely ambitious to converge tablets with laptop, and I do admire their audacity to try it.
If they could pull everything they said in the article in the final product, and achieve them in the right way, it could be a huge competition to Apple’s offering in both iPad and Macbooks. I truthfully believe this is a big deal in the future, however the question mark now lies with that it is a big “IF”.
I strongly encourage people who like user interface studies (like I do) or latest software development trend to read this. It’s long, but it’s good. Very good.
23rd May 2012
The xx announce a handful of North American summer dates. Read our report from their recent show in London here.
Yeah. Finally they are coming out of nocturne.
(Source: seyseyseysey)
Reblogged From pitchfork
Notes: 482
I know Max Payne 3 is going to be a good game. But, without that cheeky face as the Max Payne for the third installment, I just gonna pass this out.
I like the cheeky face.
Absolutely brilliant game. 10/10. Enuff’ said.
After realizing that the Genius doesn’t really help me discover the music I like, nor do I like to listen to my songs in a shuffled-garbled way, I decided to turn off my Genius in iTunes.
But how would you do it?
Looking at the iTunes main user interface, it doesn’t give out any indication of disabling the Genius. So the next thing I do is to right-click on the Genius pane on the left sidebar to see whether there is a “Turn off Genius” option available. No luck.
Now, when I reached this point I knew that it wasn’t easy as it seemed to disable Genius and the option of doing it maybe hides in a very deep-down option menu that normally wouldn’t be seen. To find the solution quickly, I next go to Google.com and search for a forum post that is also discussing the same problem. Well, one might assumed that he/she can find a solution in less than one minute by doing this since a typical Google search takes less than a second and finding the right result might take you another 30 seconds to do so. This wasn’t my case because most of the result dated back quite sometime and the step-by-step solution just doesn’t work on the latest iTunes version.
Basically at this moment I was quite infuriated. However, suddenly I remember the Help panel on the top of the window is inherently different from the one Windows have (I am a one year old Mac user), and maybe I will have some luck in finding the way of turning the genius off immediately. I typed ‘Genius’ into the Help text-box, and just below the box displays “Turn off Genius”. I was surprised. I clicked it, iTunes showed a prompt asking for confirmation, and clicking ‘Confirmed’ turned the Genius off immediately. I never thought it could be that easy.
I should explain why this doesn’t occur to me in the first place. As a Windows user for almost 18 years (I used a Windows 3.1 back in 1993, when I was 4 years old), I knew that hitting F1 to search for help doesn’t really turns out to be the best option. I need to type in my query, and it will display all the possible questions that an user would ask, and clicking on one of them would take you to a step-by-step instruction on how to resolve your request. And the flummoxing problem behind this is that it doesn’t always work. So my mind basically switches off the “Help” panel when I need a solution to a problem and instead turn on to use Google search instead. In the Mac however, ‘Help’ is totally different from the ones in Windows and the OS (or iTunes) ingeniously figure out the request I want to make by simply typing in the subject in mind.
This is when the ‘Help’ in the OS actually helps one in solving problems instantaneously. Maybe I should use ‘Help’ more in OS X in solving my problems.
Marco Arment is on the spot with two of the most important points why Apple’s success cannot be easily emulated by other companies. The “taste” section is exceptionally well-written and encapsulates my own thoughts on the whole taste issue.
Probably the Das Keyboard is going to be my next purchase for my personal computer setup. Not buying the ultimate, though, I still be looking at the characters.
A good piece by the New York Times ruminating on the problems with Sony for the past two decades.
