Oh my. The internet is a strange place. Digging up things weeks after they were made in an hour, sent jokingly to a few close friends, and mostly forgotten, and throwing them all over Twitter and the Apple blagoblag.
Is it just me or is Shake to Undo one of the worst features of iOS on the iPad? You are happily typing an email on the train and then you screw up and delete a bunch of text. To undo it, you have to pick the iPad up off your lap or off the table and shake it pretty damn hard.
Few people know this, but you don't have to pick it up off your lap to trigger the redo action. There's a redo key on the #+= page of the iPad's keyboard.
I know that this isn't particularly great design on Apple's part because it's not intuitive or easily discoverable, but once you know it it's quite handy and better than nothing.
Funny joke and all, but it got me thinking.
Why not some sort of gesture for undo like a multi finger scribble (similar to 'rubbing something out' with an eraser)?
Then I tried a bit harder & thought why not just use cmd-Z ;)
Does anyone know if this will work with my 27" iMac? ;-)
Joking aside, the shake-to-undo gesture in iOS is one of the worst things about the platform. It's either not sensitive enough or too sensitive, and either way makes you look a bit odd
It actually makes the HD parks the heads out of the platters in a really mean way. It's better than having heads collide with the platters but it's a wear sensitive operation designed as an emergency countermeasure. Doing it repeatedly on purpose is certainly a bad idea.
If the sensitivity was just right, and it only measured a shake like smacking the monitor on the side, it might actually make a nice UX.
Think of typing away at this message and then deciding, "never-mind", and reaching up with your right hand and smacking the screen on the edge. Could be a very natural feeling undo.
I'm pretty sure there was a virtual desktop manager for OS X around 10.3 or 10.4 that, in one fork, supported smacking each side of the laptop to cycle left or right. I also recall being able to use the ambient light sensors under the speaker grills for the same thing: Cover one with your hand, and the desktops move that way.
(Amusing to look back on this since I work on Cydia now, which is all about non-app software like neat accelerometer toys [one of the more popular packages is Graviboard], just on little bitty devices I wouldn't have imagined back in 2006.)
Thanks for linking that, really neat. I just ran it, and after configuring to use command-arrows to switch spaces, it works really well on my MacBook.
In fact, rather than hitting the side of the screen, just a gentle tilt to the left or right is enough to switch spaces. The dynamic feels really good.
While the idea is interesting, this is probably not something I would use on a laptop. Picking up and shaking a laptop while it's open and running goes against all my "protect fragile and expensive equipment" instincts. Tablets and phones are normally held in one's hands anyway, and weigh much less and are better balanced.
Agreed, with pure solid state though its not as big of a deal. But I remember having to manually park hard drive heads before moving desktops. Shaking anything that spins activates my spidey sense that I will cause head crashes.
While a pretty funny article, I disagree with the underlying message that Apple is making Lion too similar to iOS in ways that decrease its functionality.
For me, launchpad has been perfect for organizing my apps because just clicking the applications folder presents me with too many unrelated options. For example, my second launchpad window is only apps I've downloaded, so it's obvious to me how I would launch Starcraft or Braid as opposed to TextEdit.
Launchpad may be useful (though between Stacks and Quicksilver, I don't need it), but there are other areas where Apple made changes that they shouldn't have, even by their own standards. For example, the new full-screen mode nice on a small screen, but is detrimental to anyone who has multiple monitors, and Apple didn't even ensure that the transition animates smoothly with their own apps. Mission Control is at least an understandable attempt to integrate Spaces and Expose, but the new layout mode for Expose that lets windows overlap by more than 80% is a pretty big sacrifice that doesn't seem entirely necessary. They also removed several features that were mostly harmless or completely harmless to noobs, but useful for power users (eg. the mode-switch button on Finder windows, or the ability to browse a PDF in two-page mode with continuous scrolling on.) Simplification is good, but there's no reason to remove features that don't get in the way or make things cluttered.
I don't mind Apple experimenting and iterating with their UI, but it feels like with 10.7 they took things too far and were too single-minded about it. On the other hand, I've only been using OS X since 10.3, so I missed out on all the early roughness, and almost all of their changes from 10.4-10.6 turned out to be for the better.
I'm actually a big fan of the full screen mode. I spend about half my time on a 13" screen, and the other half on 22.
I actually like the auto sort mode for fullscreen/desktops as well, which surprised even me. But I like being a swipe or two away from my browser or email or vm.
That said, I am frustrated that I can't bend the rules a little and bring a terminal up on another app's fullscreen. Many times I'm following an example and have to take whatever browser I'm using out of fullscreen. Dterm helps a little.
I like launchpad, but I don't use it much. It does a good job of staying out of the way.
I do miss the old expose, and mission control's reduced expose is not adequate to replace the old. I almost never need the single app expose, if anything I wish they had dropped that and kept the 10.6 expose as well as mission control.
Launchpad could be pretty nice but it’s half-baked. One big problem is that it ignores OS X conventions. Organizing it is a pain. One example: It makes sense that iOS only allows you to drag one app at a time. Making it possible to select more than one app would only complicate things and confuse. It absolutely doesn’t make sense to have the same limitation in Launchpad.
Nice one. :-) Very soon, I'll be playing games that needs me to shake my Mac violently, twist, turn and sometimes requiring me to flap the screen repeatedly to ward off the lazer guns of attacking Stormtroopers.
Yeah—the new Airs don't have Sudden Motion Sensors. Which makes sense, since there's no hard drive to stop, but it breaks all the clever hacks that used the accelerometer.
The twisting motion illustrated is more dangerous to hard drives than a simple up and down or side to side shake; the heads are being pushed into the gyroscopic platters. [citation needed]
Bringing features from a cut down mobile OS released in 2008 to a full blown desktop OS with 20+ years of UX development behind it was the best idea we've ever had!
"Mission Control removes the confusing grid that previously plagued Spaces. Where a user with four spaces could previously end up on any of the other three with a single keystroke, he or she is now presented with a much less confusing choice between one or two."
I liked the ability to traverse a 2x2 grid of Spaces with a single keyboard stroke. Now, if I set up four screens with the new Mission Control in Lion, I have to press the right arrow four times to move from screen one --> four. The result is I only use two screens at most, meaning they get quite cluttered.
You can still jump directly to a numbered space by pressing "control" and any number key. This is default behavior as far as I know, but I might have switched a setting for it.
For consistent behavior, disable "Automatically rearrange spaces based on most recent use" in the mission control system preferences.
Ugh, it's not sensitive enough. I don't know how sensitive the HD shock sensor needs to be though... but I wish I could just tap the edge of my monitor.
