Jorge Arango

Computers are hopeless! They?re so under-evolved! Of course, they offer the promise of the future of music, but Jesus, they?re badly designed! The fact that three million years of muscular evolution should end up being translated into an index finger clicking a mouse, this is the problem. Think of any analogue instrument: playing a guitar, for instance, you?re doing at least six things at once. I believe musicians have shrunk to fit the pathetic nature of the interfaces.

(From a 2001 interview for MOJO.)

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Switched feeds to Feedburner – testing…

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I’ve been hosting my sites with Dreamhost since 2004, when my prior hosting provider suffered an infrastructure meltdown (and subsequently fumbled over the response). I’ve been a happy Dreamhost customer, for the most part.

However, over the past year or so there been small incidents that have made me question my commitment to DH as a hosting provider. There have been site outages, email outages, a control panel “upgrade” that feels clumsier than its predecessor, and most recently a major security breach that sent me scrambling to reset passwords.

Two things have kept me from moving to another provider:

1. Inertia – I have lots of stuff on DH, and migrating away is going to take more time and effort than I can muster at the moment.

1. Transparency – Even though DH’s service has been less than stellar as of late, they’ve consistently been very transparent about communicating with us clients about the issues. Here’s a good example. This frankness is refreshing, and very different from my experience with other providers.

   That said, I’m still on the fence about whether or not to switch. I’m particularly worried about Dreamhost’s mail servers’ performance; one of the options I’m exploring is switching only our mail service. (Possibly to Google Apps.)

   If you have any recommendations or thoughts on these issues, please drop me a line.

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One of the new OSX Leopard features that Steve Jobs unveiled today is a unified theme for the operating system. Apple has been experimenting with app themes for a long time, and the result has been a hodgepodge of inconsistent UIs. The current Finder, for example, shares the same (butt-ugly) brushed metal theme as iCal, iChat and a smattering of other applications. iTunes and the iLife apps have another skin, and older apps – such as MS Office – have another still. They just don’t feel right. Given Apple’s focus on UX as a differentiator, it was about time the company did something about this.

Leopard has a new unified UI that seems similar to the one currently used by iTunes and the iLife apps. It is clean, sober, and – most important – consistent throughout the whole operating system. And they didn’t stop with the OS and applications: apple.com has also undergone a redesign that adopts the new UI look and feel. (They couldn’t well announce a “unified” theme for the OS while still feature the old tabbed UI theme on the site, could they?) This attention to detail is a testament to Apple’s commitment to develop and differentiate their brand through consistent design.

A side note: I’ve never seen a better online presentation of a new software app than the Leopard pages in apple.com. The screencasts, especially, seem perfectly integrated with the rest of the site, and do a great job of presenting the new features clearly.

Kudos to all involved!

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• The Design Constitution
  A document that lays out the basics of interaction between Creative (designer, copywriter, photographer, illustrator, and so on) and Client.
  (tags: design inspiration management)
• FlexLib component list
  Open source Flex components from Google Code.
  (tags: flex opensource components)

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