Category: Macintosh

From Wired:
‘If you are going to go and buy something on a new website, you will fail. If you go to a new website, you will not be able to use it.’

He’s telling me that NO ONE HAS EVER PURCHASED ANYTHING FROM THE INTERNET, EVER? (I understand that he’s referring to the ‘average user,’ but still. My mother has purchased things online, and she only owns an iMac.. :>) Can someone please explain to me why he is perpetually referred to as a ‘guru?’ He’s got about as much guru in him as David Siegel. And Peter Catapano over at Wired even referred to the whole Nielsen Group as ‘a collective of forward-thinking tech experts.’ Forward thinking? You’re kidding me, right? I mean, these guys are designing (excuse me, they don’t even ACTUALLY DESIGN, they just preach about it) for a web that existed 5 or 6 years ago.

Nielsen believes the industry’s refusal to heed the calls of usability proponents directly affected the steep Internet market drop.

Now this might be true. Let me just reiterate that what this sentence seems to mean by ‘the industry’ is the people making the decisions, not the people developing the internet. But this….
Many of the recently dead dot-coms, he said — especially in e-commerce — made the fundamental mistake of drawing users to their sites with expensive promotions, then losing them forever with ineffective design or subpar services. And sub-par services are the designer’s fault? It takes a self-appointed ‘guru’ to say that companies fail because people don’t like how they do things?

Or maybe they weren’t shitty sites to begin with, but were endlessly tweaked by the client or the management until the design resembled nothing like what the designer had originally designed. How many times have I heard ‘We need a banner ad here… here, here, here and how about one here’ from a client? It’s never the designer’s idea to put a banner ad on the page.. I can see it now.. ‘You know what would really make my design …. pop? A ‘Punch-The-Monkey-And-Win-Twenty-Bucks’ ad right about… here.’ He seems to think that we could give a shit about the user, when actually the reverse is true. We strive to do excellent design for the user to be interested in. Because if they don’t like the way a site looks they won’t even stay for 10 seconds to find out how it works.

Those who are ready to see the light and mend their ways can download a series of reports for a fee from the Nielsen Group website. The reports contain the group’s 222 rules for usability improvement. For a fee? Are you kidding me? Rules? See the light? I can’t even begin to start telling you much that sentence makes my blood boil.

‘We can forgive a man for making a useful thing, as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.’
— Oscar Wilde

From CNN:
Palm announced a new web-gadget: the Audrey. It looks an awful lot like a toilet bowl with an 8″ screen. Will you buy one? Not me. I already have an iMac, I don’t need something LESS powerful, with a tiny monitor to do FEWER things, for only a couple hundred bucks cheaper (they’re $499-$599, depending on the color… I don’t understand, either).

I guess what I think about when I see another one of these things really isn’t whether they’ll sell (they won’t), but how much of a bitch it would be if these damn things became commonplace, at least from a development standpoint. We have enough problems with 4 major browsers (well, 2 MS browsers, if you believe some people) to code for, let alone potentially millions of these things. All of them happen to run their own bastardized versions of god-knows-what, adhering to HTML standards I don’t think, and they don’t even really have video cards, at least not good ones. I’ve viewed my personal design site on an iOpener, and it took FOREVER to load, and looked like shit.

At least they might reduce the amount of shitty Flash out there.

HA. Right.

According to WebTrends, Macintosh users account for approximately 2.79% of all web users. So, apparently, we don’t really count. Next time you’re designing a site, just ignore us. After all, we just design the web, we don’t really need to use it.

From CNN:
The newly designed VAIO QR sheds the magnesium-grey outer shell seen on its conventional line of laptops and adopts a blue-black translucent plastic surface that is so dark it is almost opaque.

And with a light grey aluminum pipe surrounding the outer edges connecting into a fold-out handle, it is reminiscent of Apple Computer’s iBook laptop….No plans are in place yet for a wider choice of colors, Sony said.

WTF? Sony might actually be the one to pull this off. Those VAIOs were selling pretty well, as I recall, without the translucent casing. So ‘industry’ analysts will be excited when someone else can sell a translucent computer besides Apple, except they were selling anyway. What a crock. Can NO ONE come up with an idea of their own that sells well? At least they’re not coming in multiple colors (did you ever notice of all the iMac ripoffs, none ever came in yellow, because Apple never released a yellow one?).The writer of this article also misses the translucent point to begin with. ‘The aim is the same — to make laptops a fashion statement as much as portable personal and business information tools. Uh, the iMac or iBook weren’t fashion statements (I won’t go into the well-worn discussion of why the translucency worked on the iMac and not on the HP Pavilion or those ugly-as-fuck pink TVs). Why can’t any of these people get it?

Also, try to find a picture of this damn thing on Sony’s site. It’s impossible. Their’s is possibly the worst navigation system I’ve ever seen. If you try to go to the VAIO section, you end up on a page telling you that the page has moved, and why don’t you try this hideous multiple-dropdown-with-graphics-and-a-go-button-on-the-wrong-side thing?

Maybe I’m wrong. Let me know.