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Quick Hands On With OSX Lion

Messing around with Lion. So far so good.

Mission control might actually get me to use spaces and dashboard more than I currently do.

I’m going to reserve judgement on Launchpad since I am a huge fan of LaunchBar. That said I could see using it for apps I don’t use on a day to day basis since I can’t remember them all by name. Maybe as a multiple dock replacement

Finder has received some love with AirDrop integration and file arrangements in views (types, modified dates, app creators, size, labels,et al)

Full screen view feels odd as it’s a kiosk or windows paradigm, but I could easily see using it to stay focused. One thing at a time right?

Looking forward to upgrading in about a month once the dust has settled, all the upgrade woes are known, and all my apps are Lion friendly.

Hardware sidenote, I’d never played with the Bluetooth Magic Trackpad and I do like it more than a mouse – it needs more gestures though.

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Lowest Common Denominator User Experiences

There are a two UX trends happening now that are absolutely infuriating and cause me to waste precious time every day: awful Mobile versions of sites, and popup login boxes that don’t respect browser password managers.

These atrocious mobile versions of sites are replicating like cells because the publishers seem to think I have a circa 2000 era cellphone and want to force a lowest common denominator experience upon us. Between iOS and Android devices, there are probably about 200M users whose devices can render the real experience, so let us choose how we want to experience it. And while you’re at it, please stop disabling pinch and zoom…

The other huge gripe is that they have “full site” links, always at the bottom of an incredibly long scrolling page, which when clicked does one of two things: it doesn’t work whatsoever, or if it does, it loads the full site at the root level (ie the homepage) of the site and not the page you were viewing. Neither of these are solutions by any definition of the word.

As for the modal login boxes, they too are replicating because they’re perceived to be an acceptable UX design pattern, which they’re not. By ignoring browser password managers, they too cause a negative experience. I have my laptop locked down, but if for some reason someone gets in, I am not going to be too worried about whether the intruder has access to your blog or SaaS, so stop coming up with new ways to make me waste cycles. Just honor our choices and settings…