alex.mullr.net/blog

I don’t know where to start with this.

My Favourite Windows 7 Feature from Alex Muller on Vimeo.

The taskbar glow is just gorgeous. It takes the most prominent colour in the icon, and makes the entire application bar glow that colour.

Dear Apple,

I’ve had my iPhone almost a year now. It’s been out for a little over twenty-four months, if I can add up right. Is there a decent reason that I have still have to jump through hoops to add music I play to Last.fm? Sure, Last.fm is a comparatively small site¹ – but you’re touting Facebook and Flickr exporting features as a pretty major upgrade to iPhoto. Plus, I can’t imagine that something like this would be particularly difficult for you guys to code.

It’s not like scrobbling is really data-intensive, either. Basically, I just don’t see why you haven’t done it yet.

Cheers,

Alex

Click the images for bigger versions. No, you get no points for realising I did them in Photoshop; it’s not tough.

Here’s one I’ve never seen before, never even seen it mentioned, and it was pretty cool to happen upon. If you right click on a user in System Preferences » Accounts, you get a sheet that looks a little like this:

Is it just me, or is that big red WARNING: one of the least Apple-esque things on the Mac?

I took the photo below as a bit of a joke (hey, Vaio stickers are a joke… right?) but it’s interesting to have a record of the "old" Google Reader which was on my screen at the time. When it recently changed, I remember quite a few people complaining at how the layout seemed less intuitive; now, of course, I’d easily vote for the new, cleaner look.

Sometimes, I guess you just have to get through a few days or weeks of your users complaining at change – especially in this fairly new space of constantly evolving online software. And other times, the change isn’t so great and your users might actually have valid concerns (hey, Facebook, look over here).

Here’s hoping Tweetie for Mac fills the void.

I’ve had the chance to play with Plasq’s new beta-invite-only software Skitch for about a month now, and it’s really great.

At the same time however, it highlights (for me at least) a problem with beta software in general. I’ve been sitting, making silly little pictures, happily using this software. The thing I’ve failed to take into account is that so far, it’s been completely free.

I wonder what happens when I have to pay £15 for the software – chances are, I’ll stop using it… and this goes for everything, including (but not limited to) Gmail, Flickr and Lastfm. As a side note, I actually do pay a tiny amount for some extra features on Lastfm and probably would pay for Gmail if they implemented the same system. So beta software is all well and good, but remember that it won’t stay beta forever (or maybe it will, who knows these days).

And as for invite-only sites and software: keep doing it, but make sure I get an invite – it makes me feel all special inside…