Category Archives: technology

What can we expect from Leopard’s Core Animation?

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At Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference Steve Jobs and his collegues presented some nice new features of the upcoming OS Leopard. One thing that draw my attention a lot was Core Animation. With it a whole new way of interaction might be possible if developers see them.

One application that already is on a good way but proably couldn’t use Core Animation yet is CoverFlow, a nice application to flip through your iTunes albums. For people who remember the cover art, and I think many people do, this is a pretty way of searching what they want to listen to.

This is only the beginning, I assume people to change the way we work with folders, files, images. Maybe this will lead us someday to something like the scene in “Disclore” where Michael Douglas moves around files in a virtual space.

WriteRoom, Darkroom vs. Word

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Last week two applications caught my attention. WriteRoom (Mac) and Dark Room (Windows-clone). They both do share the same concept of distraction free writing. The only thing you can do is write, no highlighting, no bold or italic, just plain writing.

Especially after reading this wonderful article about managing you daily office life I tried the Mac-version. I really have to say that I did like it a lot. You just type in what comes to your mind and don’t care about layout. That you can and have to do later. However, even after writing just two or three things I changed the way I wrote. I paid more attention to the style of my writing so that even without formatted headings you can do a lot with basic text layout.

So is it a replacement for word? Yes and no. Sometimes I just want to type in stuff and word will not be the tool to layout it at the end, e.g. when writing emails. However, as I neve used layout techniques to a high extend I tried the Word full screen feature. This is almost the same as with WriteRoom, it doesn’t show anything but text and grey background. Then I set up my keyboard shortcuts to have some for heading 1 to 3 and that’s all I need now. It saves the same purpose of distracting free writing for me since there are no toolbars and so on. So, give it a try and see for yourself how different writing can be.

Screen Resolution – 4:3 vs 16:9

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In his new Alertbox Jakob Nielsen talks about his new findings about screen resolution and imporved productivity when using big screens. His recommendation is to use a basic layout optimized for 1024×768 and make it liquid so it will adopt 800×600 or 1280×1024. The most important thing in his alertbox for me was that there is a

need for a new paradigm in the future

.

The reason behind that is not only the screens getting bigger and bigger. There is another trend in screen resolution going on for a while that hardly gets noticed. Many screens do not fit onto the 4:3 layout of applications and web sites anymore. Since many laptops have been optimized for DVD playback or Apple sells the cinema displays designers have to think about different layouts even more – how to build for 16:9.

Offline we still use the portrait format for writing and sharing information. We have books in that format, newspapers and the plain paper are sold in portrait. On the screen we have been used to a landscape format. Since the early beginning of TV we have been accustomed to that format and now this goes on with computers. A few years ago first cinemas and then home TV moved to 16:9 format instead of using 4:3. That was because our eye’s viewing area is landscape instead of portrait and wider than high.

So how do we handle this situation? We have to accept that we no longer have controll over the screen size. Sure, we may write applications and design web sites that share the least common deliminator. But would you really like to have a web site 800×600? That’s where Jakob Nielson’s suggestion comes in place – make liquid layouts that will adopt to a lot of different sizes and proportions. You may not get every case but it should be able to be viewed in at least 5 to 6 different orientations and sizes.

Windows on MacBookPro – which software do you need

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Last week I bought a MacBook Pro because I can now use Windows XP on it as well. I had to wait so long, since I need Windows only for 4 applications, that do not exist in Mac and probably will never be.

Many people do now write on how to install Windows on the Mac. I would like to focus on one thing that is also important. What software do you need on your Windows installation besides the ones you really have to install (the ones that don’t exist on Mac).

Besides that I think it is hard to tell which software you will NEED – but you can make a list of software you DO NO NEED (on your Windows installation).
- DVD Player
- PDF Reader
- different browsers
- CD/DVD burning software
- Printer driver
- …

The reason behind that is, the more software you have available on Windows the less likely you need to switch to Mac – but isn’t that what you wanted to do?