OSX Usability Nicety #87886

In OS X, scrolling the mouse wheel whilst holding ctrl allows you to zoom in to any of the desktop pretty much infinitely. From there you can pan around any of the desktop you need to with your imaginary mangifying glass. It’s a really useful little feature for when you need to quickly scrutinise an image, text which isn’t resizable for whatever reason or any other piece of UI chrome.

However, what I particularly love, from a usability point of view, is the fact that if you scroll back to almost the regular size — say, just one notch off — when you next move the mouse pointer, the desktop will snap back to a 1:1 zoom, as if by magic. In other words, you can’t accidentally leave the desktop in anything but an obviously zoomed state — perfect for when it’s been activated by accident or when you haven’t quite returned it back to normal.

July 2nd, 2007 | Usability • Apple/OS X | 0

Delivery Options

Orange has one of the most sensible delivery options I’ve seen in a good while. First thing this morning I received via text:

“Your parcel from Orange is out for delivery today. If you need your delivery on an alternate date reply to this text. 1=Wednesday, 2=Thursday, 3=Friday.”

Simple, but effective and definitely better than some package trackers.

June 26th, 2007 | Usability | 0

Meandering [RSS]

Aimless wanderings from around the big ol’ interweb…

Sleeveface
My new favourite blog.
Offbeat Guides
A really neat new service for compiling custom travel guides, which are then available as a PDF or in print. The events list for around the time of your stay is particularly nice.
KavaMovies
An interesting new application for managing your movie collection. With a few more features, this could be quite useful.
Cursebird
What the f#@! is everyone swearing about on Twitter?
Ack In Project
A Textmate bundle for using ack for project searches in Textmate. It's a ton quicker than the built in project search.
TinEye
Impressive image search technology which aims to find similar matches to images across the web.
Multicolr Flickr Search
Search 10 million Flickr images by colour.
Kayak
A really powerful flight search tool. I really like the interactive sliders for refining flight times, trip durations and the like. I'm surprised I haven't heard of this before!
Lab Tick
Manually adjust the keyboard brightness on Apple laptops - something that's not supported by the OS.
HostsWidget
Allows manipulation of /etc/hosts right from the dashboard. It also flushes the DNS cache automatically.
Zattoo
Live streaming of pretty much all UK terrestrial channels. It seems to work really well.
The Twitterverse On Glossy Displays
Considering Apple's seemingly relentless desire to give us all glossy displays, the consensus doesn't seem to be pro-gloss. That's because glossy displays are WRONG.
Earth From Above
A fantastic looking photographic exhibition in New York, running in May and June next year. See today's Boston Big Picture for many great photos from the photographer, Yann Arthus-Bertrand.
Remote Buddy
Very impressive looking remote application for Apple Touch devices to control desktop Macs.
Photo Aging Project
Dan Hanna's pretty amazing photo-a-day project, which so far has two photos for every day for the past 17 years shot in sync with the rotation of the earth around the sun.