Passing clouds of inconsequential observations
Splendid! A £1,400.00 tax refund. But wait a minute…
“Dear Customer”? Since when have I been a customer of HMRC?
“How to return itself have not changed, only the format of what you claim and how you get paid back from HMRC has changed digitally.” At least they have cleared that up.
It is the cheery “Best Regards,” that is the clincher.
My early morning ritual includes a look at the statistics for this site. There is usually a handful of visitors between midnight and 5am. Today there had been a steady stream each one had searched for “Steve Jobs”:
I did not need to read the news headlines to know why.
As Martine was sprouting some [wikipop]alfalfa[/wikipop] seeds I borrowed some to make a [wikipop]time-lapse[/wikipop] movie of their sprouting. You can watch the live updates on the Alfalfa Cam page as we capture individual images to build the time-lapse movie or just come back here:
Martine says “A watched alfalfa seed never sprouts”.
Traditionally a [wikipop]Bank holiday[/wikipop] is a time to slow down and unwind. So I took a short snippet of piano music (by [wikipop search=”John Adams (composer)”]John Adams[/wikipop] if I am not mistaken)
and slowed, unwound and tweaked it:
and then a drum loop
which was slowed and turned on its side so all the percussive (steam train) comes at the end:
Mac users have come to expect a certain standard and consistency from their software. OK we can tolerate the non-standard interface once in a while but some things are just assumed. Until today’s launch of the Mac App store. What we have are a lot of ports from the iPad/iPhone school of app development with no consideration for, or perhaps even an understanding of, how such apps will be used and be expected to work on a Mac. Sadly these are supposed to have been vetted by Apple before being allowed into the store. With no demo/trial versions available from the store you do not know what you are getting until you already have it. So please can we have apps that…
…ask if you want to save your unsaved work when you Quit them?
…have an Edit menu and an Undo?
…comply with click and drag norms instead of leaping back several decades with a click, move and click again interface? These probably worked fine with a couple of fingers on a touch screen but not so good on a Mac – even with a Magic Track Pad.
…accept images dragged into them rather than having to Open them from the File menu?
…give us a clue what we are supposed to do? There is a Help menu on the Mac. I posted instructions for PinBall HD this afternoon… A couple of hours later it had been well used…
It also seems a bit hit and miss which apps are marked as installed. Those you acquire through the App Store are but those from other sources are not; yet some of my Apple apps are marked as installed Aperture, Garageband etc. although not from the App Store while others are not iWorks etc. If we are going for seamless updating surely all installed applications should be noted and updated as and when.
Update:
It seems software purchased directly from Apple through an Apple account is recognised as installed by the App Store; if purchased elsewhere it is not recognised.