The “next” and “previous” arrows in the message section on Facebook are backwards. What gives? Since the advent of audio cassette tapes, right is always forward in time, left is always backward in time.
We have bread, bread and bread
Impressive how Microsoft used the exact same blue as Adobe. Now wake me when you’ve finished “initializing” and “optimizing font menu performance”… there was no danger that I wouldn’t be able to capture this screen shot before the two apps had finished loading.
Point for discussion: when browsing items in your favourite RSS feed reader, does it not make more sense for the reader to present the oldest new items first?
It’s a continuity thing: if I’m catching up with a blog that has a few unread posts, I want to see the oldest items first so that if newer items reference them, I get the reference. I use the “next unread item” command in NetNewsWire all the time, but by default both the Mac edition and iPhone/iPod touch edition put newest items first, so the order of reading always feels backwards to me. (I’m only talking within one particular blog or site: I don’t care that much which order I read the different blogs themselves.)
There doesn’t seem to be any preference to control this in either edition of NetNewsWire.
There is a disease endemic to open-source software projects. Almost all of them have web sites that fail to accomplish the fundamental task that every web site should accomplish: explaining what the damn thing is.
I’m sorry to pick on fish, but it’s as good an example as any, and it’s one I stumbled on today courtesy of the ever-useful Mac OS X Hints. fish is a “user friendly” command-line shell, built to replace the likes of traditional shells like bash and csh. (Mac OS X uses bash by default.) Sounds good so far.
Except nowhere on the home page does it explain what fish does. Shouldn’t this be the most obvious thing on the page? There is a link to a mostly-empty wiki, and there is of course the ubiquitous “list of recent changes”, which no open-source project can live without.
There are screenshots, but, um, this is a command-line shell. On the screenshots page, they even say, “Since fish is a text based program, it is not very well suited for screenshots.” Yeah.
In order to find out what fish is, the web site actually recommends reading an article on some other web site.
Open-source programmers of the world, hear this! Tell me what your software does before you bother telling me about what’s changed in every single version. If I’ve never used the software, why would I care how it’s changed?
It isn’t that hard to write a bulleted list of features or a couple of sentences summarizing the point of the software.
End of rant.
Recently, I solved a weird problem I was having trying to use Apple’s MobileMe syncing — the problem being that refused to sync with an unspecified error. It turns out that my router has some sort of “black list” defence mechanism that is above and beyond the normal firewall. And for some reason it was blocking traffic to the MobileMe sync server and iDisk (idisk.mac.com). I have a Belkin ADSL modem/router and I was able to track down the command necessary to disable this “feature”.
You have to telnet into the router’s command-line interface using Terminal:
telnet 192.168.2.1
Login as admin using your admin password (it may be default if you never set it). Then type:
firewall set IDS blacklist disable
Case is important. If you ever reset the router, you’ll need to type this in again. I have a feeling this blacklist feature is responsible for a number of apps failing, including iChat’s video chat and some weirdness with Facebook chat as well. Routers are really the weak link in the Internet chain.
