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Stuffit Archives and .hqx encoded files
Stuffit products have been on my Macs for years and have done a wonderful job of compressing and decompressing. Stuffit Expander shipped with all versions of the Mac up until OS X Tiger. Now that zip is built into the OS and even has extensions for keeping the Mac resource fork (newer applications don't use the resource fork anymore), I haven't been able to come up with a reason to keep Stuffit Expander around except to deal with files I download that are still in .sit and .hqx formats. I find that some companies are still putting files on their websites with these extensions; if the app doesn't have a resource fork, zip it. If it does or you want to customize the look, use a disc image (.dmg) and let a user download that. I think by now users are used to using disc images. Also, the disc image doesn't need to be zipped or .bin put on the end; just make sure your web server serves up the .dmg file as application/octet-stream.
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Passing off Windows software as Mac software
It amazes me that companies recompile their code to work on the Mac (either using cross platform GUI libraries or trying to make a Mac interface without basically ever using a Mac) and expect Mac users to not be offended when no real effort is put into making the app look like it belongs on a Mac. In one app I ran today they even used a screenshot of a Windows dialog in the dialog! As a die hard Mac user, I avoid software that is done this way as much as possible as it doesn't instill confidence in me if they can't provide a Mac user experience which really wouldn't take all that much time. This is similar to my complaint about Palm applications in an article I wrote called "Common User Interface Mistakes. Some Real World Examples" published for the PalmSource Developer Conference, May 2003. In that article, I used screenshots to point out errors in user interface according to the Palm OS guidelines. One line that I really like from the article is:
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HTML Email
Yesterday I received a message from the Palm developer program; it looked liked there was nothing in the message, so I poked around and found that it was an HTML formatted email. I'm a bit of a luddite when it comes to HTML email in that I completely oppose it. I go to great lengths to only display plain text email in Mail.app. I think my aversion to HTML email goes back to when I worked on Eudora with Steve Dorner. Steve opposed many things and he didn't believe that HTML belonged in email which makes a lot of sense to me. One of my arguments against it has always been that I don't want the sender of a message to force how the message should be viewed on me, in particular, the text color, text font, and text size. This argument doesn't hold much water if you think about it; every website I visit forces me (more or less) to view it how the author intended. However, in most cases, people don't go overboard in websites to display stuff in 20 point bold, red type, like I've seen in email. Why people do this, I have no idea.
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Spoiled dog
Our dog, Marley, is one of the most spoiled dogs I know. I work from home, so he has free reign of the house all day long. He sleeps in my office, outside of my office or on the couch. Some days I even let him roam the backyard for awhile. When we leave, he still can roam the house (we close off a few rooms). He always wants attention and when he doesn't get it, lately, he has decided to pull the blankets off the couches that we're using to try to protect them from him. He knows he's done something wrong when we scold him, but he keeps on doing it.