1. GearGoblin - My personal favorite, very clean Web 2.0 layout, with some very cool features such as a fee calculator. Specializing in music instruments, music equipment, and computers.
2. Bidtopia - A new site with a pretty clean layout where all auctions start at $0.99
3. WeBidz - Pretty much an eBay clone, if you can stomach the ugly layout, it’s a pretty cool site with a lot of users
4. PriceNap - Another ugly-looking auction site with lots of users
5. uBid - The venerable merchant-oriented site. Not the best if you’re interested in just selling your old stuff, but can be a good place to deal-shop.

After stumbling on a clip of Jimmy Page’s prototype version of “Dazed and Confused” with his previous band, The Yardbirds, I have to wonder if we’d even care who Jimmy Page is, or if we would have gotten to know the immense talents of Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, and of course John Bonham, if Page had decided to stick with his old band.

Compare this to Led Zeppelin’s performance of the song on the Danmarks Radio program in Iceland, 1969, from what I would guess is about a year later. (or fire up your Led Zeppelin DVD for a much better quality rip of the same performance.) Upgrade!

I actually like both approaches, being a Mac user who originally fled to Windows 95 after the demise of the Amiga (a platform with some of the best typography of all time - far superior to that of Mac OS in those years.)

I think that Apple needs to support a style of font rendering that more closely resembles ClearType. Fonts on screen and fonts in print are two different use cases. I am a big believer in bitmap fonts and screen fonts, and I don’t think that these things have to get in the way of having clear vector rendering for Desktop Publishing applications.

Sadly, anti-aliasing routines are a nuance at best and an afterthought at worst in today’s whiz-bang feature obsessed OS market. I just wish Adobe would license the anti-aliasing routines of Microsoft and Apple for Photoshop to do accurate testing of font rendering in mockups. Adobe’s routines are awesome - but they don’t closely enough resemble the OS X, Win XP, or Win Vista font rendering to be precise enough for web and application oriented mockups.

Speaking of fonts - when is somebody going to come up with a cross-platform, open standard for embedded fonts over the web? Using the overhead of Flash is a hack at best for the sole purpose font embedding on a web page, and is of course proprietary technology. Everyone gets so excited about Web 2.0, CSS, and AJAX, but we’re all still using the same stupid, limited selection of default web fonts that Microsoft put out in the late 90s.

The hypertext construct is hindering the ability to rapidly create and enjoy truly integrated software experiences that leverage the data strength of the cloud but provide the rich multimedia experience of a desktop app. Instead of zillions of Ruby On Rails apps, I propose what we’re going to see transform the whole notion of the Internet is more applications like Google Earth that are true to the spirit of using the hardware on your desk to its fullest - hell - the game industry is already fully embracing this kind of thinking with World of Warcraft - try doing that in a browser!

Some interesting further reading:

• Death to the Browser
• Death of the Browser
• Flash to Jump Beyond the Browser

After about a year of Spotlight in Mac OS X, I’ve found that its newness has worn off. Sure, it’s still forward-looking even in relation to where the ill-fated Windows Vista is headed, but in many ways it feels like a downgrade to me from the simple inline search in Panther. Think I’m crazy? Read on…

Embrace the Dark Side with Predictive Search

Let’s say I was searching for a file that I know is called “WebsiteLayout3.psd,” but I can’t remember where I put it. The predictive search mechanism, while flashy, innovative, and press-worthy, makes the assumption that I am so clueless about what I’m looking for that I want to search my two 300-gig drives (full of thousands of nested folders) for each combination of the initial letters in the filename, and any typos I might make along the way. I haven’t heard my drives chug like this since System 7!

It’s gotten so bad that I’ve resorted to typing my search queries into Stickies, then copy-pasting to Spotlilght so that I can circumvent the predictive search mechanism. Let’s make the assumption that I’m somewhat unusual - all Apple has to do to fix the problem is put in a checkbox to enable/disable predictive search in the Spotlight System Preferences Pane. How hard would that have been? They could still have it enabled by default to garner all the media hype they wanted in the first place, without irritating people like me who want to make more narrow, targeted queries.

Modal Madness

Why does a Spotlight window have to be a different mode than a regular Finder window? The UI is really odd and confusing, particularly the way in which you narrow the search based on path with textual buttons that are placed underneath the title bar in a muted font. Spotlight already wants to act as though it’s behind the scenes, in the background of the whole OS, but in actuality it’s just a mode of the Finder. Think about it for a minute - What is the Finder for? It finds your stuff - it always has. Let’s expand the concept and realize that all Spotlight has added is a persistent search menu and some strange modal windows to the Finder’s set of tools.

Power Tools

What if I want to do a Boolean search, or use Grep syntax? Sure, most people don’t know or understand what these are, but what about those of us who want to have some powerful searching built into our OS? Again, it can be disabled by default.

Back to the Future

The integrated search in Panther was (almost) perfect. Sure, it didn’t search emails, wasn’t metadata-savvy in the same way that Spotlight is, but it was a lot faster, more efficient, and had a much less obtrusive UI. I love having a persistent search menu, but I wish it worked like a smarter version of the Panther integrated Finder searching.

Spotlight 2.0

Let’s have it! Here’s my proposed feature list:

• Optional (rather than forced) predictive search
• Seamlessly integrated into the Finder (no wacky modes)
• Boolean and Grep query syntax support

But here I am in 2006, I’ve had Tiger installed on my Macs for a while, and I’m actually starting to get simultaneously nostalgic and forward-looking. As a result, I’ve thought of some things I’d like to see out of OS X and its included apps:

1. Themes. Sure, we have ShapeShifter, but I want native theme support that’s even more powerful than Kaleidoscope was in OS 9. Allow developers and geeks to post new OS X themes on Apple’s website, just like Widgets!
2. I miss Audion. Or more to the point, I miss what I could do with it. iTunes is great, and I’ve owned 3 iPods, but after several major releases of iTunes, I’m still missing features I enjoyed in Audion and even the inferior SoundJam (iTunes’ predecessor.) Give us some themes, detach the controls window from the Library/Store window. Give us audio plugins, not just visualizers - why can’t we use our Audio Units plugins with iTunes? After all, Apple owns Logic/Garageband, why not let us take full control of our audio experience?
3. Make .Mac a better value. I’m a disgruntled .Mac user. iDisk is incredibly slow and error-prone, and it doesn’t support resume. Why the hell does Transmit, a third-party FTP client, work better/faster with my iDisk than Finder? I don’t care about Podcasting, or my Homepage, and I haven’t even upgraded to iLife ‘06 yet. Just make
   iDisk work how it should and I will be happy!
4. Make Finder more stable. I swear, the most crash-prone app on my Mac is essentially the OS itself - the Finder. For some reason, Finder freaks out if there is any kind of connectivity problem with mounted network shares or iDisks. Why? Finder is supposed to be multi-threaded and rock solid! While Finder has never forced me to restart since Jaguar, I do find myself often force-quitting it when I get beachballed due to network timeouts - which in turn crashes any file requesters I may have open in other apps! I don’t care about Spotlight - it’s great, just make the Finder work how it should!
5. Give Mail a makeover and/or themes. I hate the look of Apple Mail in Tiger. It even violates Apple’s own humane interface guidelines!

• Mac Pro - This will be the new tower enclosure, will be the most radically fast Macs ever made, with dual Duo CPUs (that’s 4 cores for you math wizards.) Perhaps a redesign is in order?
• MacBook Pro - Already exists. May receive Gestures update
• MacBook Mini - This “tablet Mac” will feature the Gestures interface, making it much more than just another tablet, as it will have no keyboard or trackpad. MacBook Mini will take the place of the iBook and oriented towards students/backpacks. Will come in White or Black, similar to iPods.
• Mac Mini - Same as it ever was, except Intel inside.
• iMac - Already exists. May receive Gestures update.
• Displays - May receive Gestures update.

My main justification here is that I’m guessing 2006 is going to be the “year of the Mac” much as 2005 was the “year of the iPod+iTunes market domination.” I surmise that Steve Jobs wants to put the word “Mac” in the name of every Mac, so that there’s no confusion. Hence, the name “iBook” doesn’t really fit in with the new strategy.

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From: ztigmond
Subject: Tonight

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