New Magic Mouse

So I got the new Apple Magic Mouse and I am finding it to be very nice. I also liked the previous Mighty Mouse a lot too, but I think I must have been one of the very few. I have small hands, have RSI and some arthritis, and for some reason the smaller mouse worked best for me.

The Magic Mouse works pretty well for me, though one could feel that the software is half finished and that the multi-touch surface could do a lot more than it actually does.

For some reason I could only use the wired version of the Mighty Mouse, I experienced a lot of lag and ‘float’ with the bluetooth version for some reason. The Magic Mouse has really tight tracking and no ‘float’ which is very nice. It has been a while since I used a wireless mouse that works this well in this respect.

Finally there is the small matter of power consumption, I bought mine on November 5th, it is now the 12th and the batteries are down to 70% already. That is 30% over a period of 7 days, which suggests that they will be dead in a month. These are the included batteries so presumably they were new.

I will post a follow-up on December 5th with more information as to battery consumption.

VC Website Organization

I have been spending a lot of time this weekend looking at VC portfolios on their website for a client. My sense is that VCs would want these portfolios to be well structured and easy to navigate, after all the idea is to have a favorable exit. Turns out that there is a lot of variability in the way these portfolios are presented making navigation sometimes very difficult.

So here are some suggestions on how to improve this:

• Show the company logo, web site and a short description together in a simple list. Do not force the user to click a link to see the company description.
• If there are lots of companies be sure to give a way to narrow the list down quickly either through a faceted search or via tagging, so Networking, Social, Music, etc… And there is no harm in having multiple tags for each company.
• Separate prior investments from current investments, or provide a way to do so easily.
• Make sure the company descriptions are accurate and skip the marketing/hype adjectives, if I don’t see descriptions such as “Delivers revolutionary software solutions” or “Discover breakthrough improvement opportunities”, it will be too soon. This tells me nothing about what the company does and my time is limited.

The idea behind listing a portfolio is to communicate, the less I have to futz with the website the better the communication.

iPhone UI

Some interesting user interface ideas for the iPhone as more and more apps are put onto it. An Exposé Concept video (on MobileCrunch) from a Swedish design house, and a redesign from Bruce Tognazzini.

Both worth looking at.

I don’t have too many apps, but I have grouped them into logical groups and have 5 screens to navigate, going to the home screen is easy, going to the far end is more complicated. All least iTunes allows me to move screens around so that I can put the most useful stuff closer to the home screen.

Search User Interfaces

Great post by Greg Linden on a new book from Marti Hearst called “Search User Interfaces“.

The book is available online for free, or you can get it from your favorite bookseller.

Document Palette

I have been looking for a tool like this for the Mac for a while. Something which allows me to create a new document somewhere on the file system based on a template of some sort.

This capability has been in Windows for a while, and which I first ran into when I tried out HP NewWave.

Really big Kindle

Apparently Amazon is about to release a really large Kindle (NY Times, AppleInsider.)

I am wondering if this is a good idea. Part of the appeal of the Kindle is that it is very portable, you can just toss it into a bag, a satchel, a handbag, take it with you and taking it out wherever you are and using it. Making it larger is going to make it a lot less transportable. We put up with the challenge of transporting laptops because they are so multi-function, and I am not sure that the Kindle is on the same level.

Then again I don’t know what the size is yet.

Muting Noisy Websites

Here is an interesting idea, muting noisy websites. Like a lot of people I listen to music on my computer and the only choice I have when I come across a noisy web site (ads most of the time) is to mute everything.

Apparently Apple is looking at implementing such a feature.

It should not be too difficult to come up with a plugin which allows me to selectively mute websites, or an application which does the same for other applications.

Amazon AWS Console Irritations

I have been working with the Amazon AWS Console for the past couple of days and there are two things about it, actually three things, which are really irritating…

• First it seems to be really hard to find it on the AWS web site, why?
• Second it always forgets my login name, why ??
• Third it keeps logging me out, again why???

For some reason Amazon’s quite excellent main web site has not rubbed off on it.

Losing functionality with each new release

So this is a rant about the AppleTV and the new version of iTunes.

First AppleTV, the new software release that came out yesterday (2.1) has some bugs in it, one notable one is that new podcasts are not immediately designated with the blue dot if the podcasts section were selected on the AppleTV, which is annoying.

Second, iTunes loses more and more selection context with each new release. In the previous release when you had an artist selected, they remains selected and you only saw their albums when you went back to the music library after looking at the Apple music store for example (or podcasts). Now that is no longer the case, you get to see all the music in your library. And in the early days the scroll bars were not reset when you moved off a pane which they are now.

So what is it with losing functionality with each new release?

Apple design process

Some interesting insight on the Apple design process outlined in a presentation at SXSW by Michael Lopp (by way of Apple Insider).

What is really interesting is this part of the process:

Paired Design Meetings
This was really interesting. Every week, the teams have two meetings. One in which to brainstorm, to forget about constraints and think freely. As Lopp put it: to “go crazy”. Then they also hold a production meeting, an entirely separate but equally regular meeting which is the other’s antithesis. Here, the designers and engineers are required to nail everything down, to work out how this crazy idea might actually work. This process and organization continues throughout the development of any app, though of course the balance shifts as the app progresses. But keeping an option for creative thought even at a late stage is really smart.

Where you open up people’s thinking (going crazy) and let their imaginations run wild, and then focus on what can actually be delivered. It is hard to see each process not feeding into the other.