By John Gruber
Mux — Video for developers
Linked List: December 1, 2008
Monday, 1 December 2008
- Klicko 1.0 ★
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New (freeware, donations accepted) utility from Rainer Brockerhoff that disables click-through system-wide. Lets you enable click-through by holding any modifier key while you click, and lets you configure an exception list of apps where click-through is enabled. (If you don’t know what click-through is, my 2003 “The Problems With Click-Through” piece describes it.)
I’m giving Klicko a try, but I’ve lived with Mac OS X’s inconsistent click-through policies for so long now that my resistance has been worn away.
- America’s Other Auto Industry ★
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The Wall Street Journal on the industry for U.S.-manufactured cars from companies other than Detroit’s Big Three.
- ‘How Bad Is Bad?’ ★
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Chris Fahey nobly attempts to defend the UI design of Bulk Rename Utility:
So if it’s not the number of features that’s bad, let’s focus on the UI itself. The signature quality of this design is that every single feature is shown on one page. There are no layers of dialog boxes, no multistep wizards. The fields are numbered, too, which seems to suggest the order the transformations are processed. The entire transformation is right there for the user to see, no surprises. What’s more, showing all the possible transformations on this one screen educates the user on what the application can actually do: No poking around through menus and manuals to find out what this app is capable of. It’s all right there.
Exposing all functionality on one screen can be useful in some cases, but once a certain level of complexity is reached, it’s no longer a reasonable idea. Bulk Rename Utility is well past that level of complexity. If your UI even vaguely resembles an airplane cockpit, you’re doing it wrong.
Put another way, it’s a worthy goal to reduce the complexity of software to the point where it can be cleanly exposed on a single screen. That’s very different than cramming any arbitrary amount of complexity into a single screen.
- A Better Finder Rename 8 ★
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Another example of a reasonably-designed file renaming utility. There’s even a Windows version.
- Name Mangler 2.0 ★
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In the wake of yesterday’s User Interface of the Week winner, several readers asked for recommendations for a Mac file renaming utility with a good UI. Many Tricks’ Name Mangler is a good one. Donationware.