Wingedpig.com - Mark Fletcher's Blog

I hope you enjoyed your leap day.

Posted by Mark Fletcher at 02:48 PM | Permalink

I'm in Aspen, at Snowmass, this week for the first time. The weather's fantastic. Here's a picture from about half way down the Cirque run, after the bowl.

Posted by Mark Fletcher at 09:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I first saw the documentary The King Of Kong when it came out in theaters last summer. It's the story of two guys and their attempts at getting (and keeping) the high score in the arcade game Donkey Kong. But it's much more than that. It was the funniest movie I saw last year. The DVD just came out and it has an update to the story (apparently it's still not over), along with a bunch of great extra footage. The extra footage is worth watching just for the Mr Awesome segment alone. Highly recommended.

Posted by Mark Fletcher at 04:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Yesterday, I bought a MacBook Air. It's an amazing little machine. I went for the model with the hard drive, not the SSD. With that purchase, my conversion from a combination Windows/Linux environment to an Apple-only environment is complete. Over the past year, I have bought 3 Macs (Pro, iMac and Air), 4 Apple TVs, 2 Airport Extremes and 1 iPhone, and have been almost completely satisfied with everything I've bought from Apple. (Yes, I actually liked the first version of Apple TV, and now with Take 2, it's even better.) For the most part, things just work, and I really appreciate Apple’s focus on design. In general, their products just work better than the competition's.

So, it really stands out to me when something doesn't work as well as it does in the Windows world. There are three things about OS X that bug me in this way. The first is the menu bar, which is the widget that has the 'File', 'Edit', 'Help' and other menu tabs in it. In OS X, the menu bar for each application always appears at the top of the monitor (if you have multiple monitors, it appears at the top of the main monitor). In Windows, however, the menu bar appears at the top of each application's window. This is a much better solution, IMO. The menu bar is where you need it, at the window, where your mouse pointer, and attention, is. You never have to take your concentration off the window you're working in, in order to access the menu. This is especially bad if you have more than one monitor and the menu bar is in a monitor you're not working in.

The second thing is the behavior of the red, yellow and green window buttons. These, I think, are for closing, minimizing and maximizing a window. But they don't always do that. Or at least the green button seems to act differently for different applications. Be consistent people!

Finally, and related, there's the behavior of closing an application. In Windows, if you close the main window for an application by hitting the little X button on the window, it closes the window and quits the application. Simple. Expected. In OS X, if you hit the red button on the application window, the window disappears, but the application still runs. Why would I want that? If I'm closing the main window of an application, I want the application to end. Don't leave applications running without a window. That doesn't make sense to me.

So, there you have it. Am I wrong? Have I missed any? Tell me in the comments.

Posted by Mark Fletcher at 09:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (20)

I recently ordered a "Big Boy" Rocket Lamp from Cool Rockets. Just doing my part to support the lagging economy. Well, it arrived today. It's every bit as cool as I had hoped. After unboxing it, however, I noticed that someone had written on the side of the box:

It's difficult to see in the picture, but it also looks like someone has taken a pen or other small, sharp object, and stabbed the box many times.

I'm left to wonder what could have caused such anguish, that would cause this person to reach out to a random customer of his products with such a cry for help. I want to know.

I feel your pain, sad, anonymous rocket scientist. The last few months have been bad for many of us; I do truly feel your pain. But if it helps any, I want you to know that you make a bitchin' lamp.

Posted by Mark Fletcher at 09:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)