24 February 2009
Unsafe UI
The most prominent new feature of Safari 4 Public Beta is Apple's Google Chrome-inspired tabs-on-top combination tab/title bar. It's not a bad idea, but the design, while clever, is flawed.
Tabs-in-the-middle has always bothered me. It doesn't make sense conceptually. The tabs control the visible page, sure, but all the controls above the tabs also reflect which tab is frontmost. They belong inside the tabs. That the tabs-in-the-middle is conceptually irregular is evidenced by Apple's bizarre original decision to turn the tabs upside down. Apple wasn't comfortable with their position either (though it had already been established as the standard position by Firefox), so they reconnected the tabs with the controls and disconnected them from the page. Same problem upside down.
Tabs-as-title-bar is its own kind of confused. The two competing interests of tabs and title bar overwhelm each other. The title bar is the only way to move the window, so dragging must move the window. That means you need an extra widget to drag the tabs. Clicking a title bar brings the window to the front, same as clicking a tab. But now clicking a tab in the background brings that tab and the window to the front. You can even close tabs while the window is in the background; since Safari still has no undo for closed tabs (without Saft, that is), you have to be extra careful where you click to bring the window forward. It's no longer a "safe click", leading to distrust. That's not good UI.
That said, I'm happy to see Apple experimenting like this and doing so publicly. That's a dramatic and welcome shift in behavior. They haven't fundamentally changed any aspect of window controls or behavior in years. So maybe it took Google building a browser out of WebKit to get someone over at Apple to start thinking outside the (window) box. Either way, I'm glad they're doing it. I just hope they're not too stubborn to evolve it into something more useful and less anxiety provoking.
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5 November 2008
Proposition 8
Slightly more than half of voting Californians have done a bad, bad thing. In voting to amend the constitution to make marriage a discriminatory institution, they have made marriage itself illegal, according to the California constitution, which states:
Free exercise and enjoyment of religion without discrimination or preference are guaranteed. This liberty of conscience does not excuse acts that are licentious or inconsistent with the peace or safety of the State. The Legislature shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.
Since marriage now specifically supports one religious viewpoint, marriage as a legal entity is unlawful.
Way to go, Prop 8 supporters! You saved marriage!
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4 November 2008
President Elect
This was a triumph
I’m making a note here: huge success
It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction
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22 September 2008
George W. Bush's Final Fuck You
Dubya's $700B plan to bail out his BFF's on Wall Street is his final gift to the United States. Perhaps hedging his bets in the face of a likely Obama victory, it's his (and Cheney's, of course) attempt to bankrupt the U.S. government once and for all, ensuring that the next president (and the next and the next and ...) has no resources with which to reverse the staggering damage Bush has done to the country, the constitution, the environment, and the economy.
Democrats and republicans are both calling the bill out as a poorly written, panicked response to a problem we knew has been building for years. Even Newt Gingrich is decrying it as "a very, very bad idea", pointing out that the proposal's author, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, has spent the last year and a half saying there was no problem at all and now wants $700B to solve that lack of a problem.
But this being a Bush Whitehouse plan, the proposal is deceptive. A large part of the outcry focuses on the provision that there be no judicial oversight, no accountability, no way to track nearly three quarters of a trillion dollars as they flow directly into the pockets of Wall Street's wealthiest. This is all subterfuge: by putting in a clause so outrageously extreme, Bush has given himself a convenient bargaining chip. He can easily concede those terms without giving up any significant part of the real proposal. Congress gets to say they pushed back and won concessions while Bush and his cronies walk away with the biggest payday in history.
The feigned urgency with which Bush, Bernanke, and Paulson are pushing this plan belies their true intentions: given a moment of analysis, Congress and the world would see the scam for what it is. For a crisis to have materialized in a matter of weeks with such urgency that action must be taken within days to avert a global economic meltdown would require a sudden economic shift of gargantuan proportions.
The Bush administration's stubborn denial of any economic worries for the last several years, in spite of endless and repeated warning signs, followed by sudden calls to action can be explained one of two ways: either they were lying to us then that there was nothing wrong and are now panicking because it's already too late; or they are lying to us now about how dire the problem has become in order to shove through legislation that borders on criminal. (For the time being, I will set aside the third option, that they are colossally inept and honestly did not see this coming.)
Whatever the genesis of this proposal, it is clearly fundamentally flawed, in that it seeks to erase the debts that Wall Street incurred with little or no penalty on the perpetrators, while foisting the entire burden on those who can least afford it. Any bailout, if such action is truly necessary, should be crafted in such a way that it pays the minimum amount possible to keep these banks afloat.
It should hold the banks and their $73M-a-year executives accountable for their actions (just as Bush does our nation's shamefully underpaid teachers).
Tax the executives at 90% (they'll survive on the remaining $7.3M) and see how many loans you can buy back.
And reinstate the regulations that were designed to prevent this sort of unrestrained corruption from taking control of our economy—and our government—in the first place.