and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

I noticed that my trusty google toolbar has just blocked it's 500th pop-up. Might seem like a small number to some, but try not surfing for porn every once in awhile and you'll notice that a lot of sites on the web in fact don't have pop-ups. It's really quite nice... although all a moot point since the google toolbar saves us all.

I'm just mad that there isn't one for Apple's Safari browser yet.

And I'm mad that Mac OS X (jag) has no easy keyboard shortcut to minimize everything and no easy way to cycle through application windows even if they are minimized and even worse? EVEN WORSE? iPhoto, which they seem pretty damn proud of along with their iPods and their iMovie and their iTunes.. yeah, well it sucks.. So much so that it makes me iRate. That's irate, for you morons. Angry. If you edit a photo.. crop it down and adjust the brightness and contrast or maybe even enhanced the image a bit.. you can't export the results. You can try, but it will only export the original photo in all it's original crap-ass glory. And if there is, in fact, a way to do it they certainly didn't make it intuitive like you'd think they might want to.

Intuitive my ass.

The problem with Apple is that everyone out there nowadays learned to type on Microsoft Word so there are standards that are set. No matter how easy your operating system is to work with, if someone is used to something else (even something that sucks) they're going to be a little pissy with things at first. And since it's 2004, no one knows what Bank Street Writer is anymore and so we're stuck with Windows. I don't love it.. but I don't hate it either.

Having used Mac OS X for about a year at home now, I still get frustrated with some of it's limitations.

And that iTunes thing? You can dumby down something like the concept of a library so much that at some point it will become practically useless to everyone but the most basic simpleton.

That's the danger of oversimplification. Usability ultimately suffers.

This is the problem we are seeing in a lot of software and it frustrates me every day. Certain complex processes can not be simplified past a given point and still expect to be useful. It's like giving a nuclear power plant a control console with two buttons: ON and OFF. Seems like a great idea? No, not really.

When making any design decision one should ask themselves:

"Am I removing control for the sake of form?"

If the answer is yes, stop. Step back. Increased ease-of-use should not mean decreased control. Usability is a broad term and doesn't just refer to intuitiveness but usefulness.

Which is to say - not form over function.. nor function over form.

It's all about harmonic balance.

and harmonic balance is what i get when dumbass pop-ups are blocked by the google toolbar.. so why can't I have one in Safari?