Andrew’s Mac Tips Weblog

A new Apple reseller opened a shop in my local shopping mall. Unlike most of the department stores that sell Apple products here, this one was modeled loosely on proper American Apple Stores. The fittings were pristine and elegant, the sales people were friendly and not pushy, and best of all — I could play with the products as much as I liked.

So this was my first real hands-on look at the iPod Touch. It was almost uncanny; I’d read so much about it, and the similar iPhone, and seen so many demo movies, that when I did get to play it was being re-united with an old friend.

I tapped and swiped and pinched my way around the interface and found that, just as Andy Ihnatko had said, it all seemed so totally seamless – and obvious. I appear to have a lot of luck with hand held devices: the keyboard worked like a charm for me. I hammered away two-thumbed in the Notes section of a contact, completing a whole paragraph before glancing up at my handiwork.

There were only two errors. Incredible.

That’s it: I’m officially in love. It’s that “Seeing the 128k original Mac for the first time and realizing that this is the future” moment all over again.

 
Spooky flashback time. Above is Leopard’s icon for a connected PC.

You Guys…

Funny thing about rounded corners. You either love them or you hate them; I’m quite schizophrenic on the subject. When I first built the Andrew’s Mac Tips site everything had rounded corners.
 

 
Lots of people liked them and wanted to know how I did it. I liked them too, otherwise I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble; but eventually I decided that they didn’t really serve any purpose, and they looked a little too “whimsical.”

Then I went all sharp edged and simple and square.

Mac OS windows have rounded top corners as a rule and I can understand that; there’s a lot of history to them, and they — in a subliminal way — suggest that if you want to resize a window: don’t look here, do it at the bottom-right corner.

As for the menu-bar: I was a little peeved — when I first saw Macs — that it too was rounded, but I came around. When Panther gave way to Tiger they went for a shiny title-bar, but it looked (and still looks) more like a smudge than a sheen to me.

Now Leopard has a new title-bar; all the focus has been on the fact that it’s semi-transparent. But look! No more rounded corners!
 

 
The Mac OS just lost its trademark. If the new title-bar reminds me of anything, it’s the title-bar of the iPhone. Are we slowly transitioning to the iPhone paradigm — one notch at a time?

I’ve started some Wordpress hacking to give this blog a new look with more of a Mac theme. The main pages are working out ok (gotta drop the size of that Header font though); it’s the comment fields etc. on the inner pages that still need a few days more work.

Wish me luck…

Dumb Revelation Time

It just occurred to me that I spent the last two hours modifying the Wordpress CSS file to do a kind of reverse engineered version of a perfectly good style sheet on my static site.

What I should have been doing is modifying the Wordpress HTML to simply refer to that style sheet on my site.

“If given a choice, go for changing the nouns rather than the verbs!”

A long time ago I decided to add a new section to the Mac Tips site called Web Based Services. I chose at the time to give it a look that was different to the main site; a lot of the elements are called from the same javascript files, but presented in a different style.

I wanted a clean Mac interface look for the new section so I reverse engineered the iTunes interface.
 

 
The main body was pure white and the buttons and links were as subtle as I could make ‘em. Revisiting it now though, it looks a little dreary. I wanted to “crisp” it up a little; make the sidebar more different from the body, while at the same time not draw too much attention to it, and make the buttons more distinctive.

I tinkered with colors and spacing and so on in the CSS, all the time zeroing in on a look that ended up quite like (you guessed it) iTunes. I guess you can’t beat the classics.
 

 
It’s not a carbon copy if iTunes though; the shade of blue is less in your face and the dividing line is more discrete. Right now I’m pleased with the result. So pleased that after some more tweaking I might revamp this Wordpress blog to the same style, so as to be less massaged Kubrick and more watered down Mac OS.

Andrew’s Mac Tips — Some Great Web-Based Services