Two Leopard Bugs: Followup

By Matt in OS X, Design, Commentary

Just about two months ago I identified two visual bugs in Leopard that were annoying me: application switcher icons were darkening, and Mail wasn’t properly changing the font color of quoted text. I’ve come up with a reproducible case for the former and a workaround for the latter.

I haven’t the faintest idea why, but if your cursor is in motion over the application switcher while it’s appearing (we’re talking fractions of a second), the application icon over which your cursor was moving will be darkened. Here’s a video demonstrating the oddity. While I hesitate to call this a 100% reproducible case, I am able to trigger the bug on my machine reliably at any time. Reports from readers such as yourself are, of course, appreciated.

And for getting properly-colored indented quotes in Mail, you have two options. First, the workaround: cut the offending text and any leading or trailing whitespace and paste to an empty text document in your favorite editor, and then cut it from there and paste back into Mail. The text will have lost whatever it is that causes the color issue. This is, admittedly, ridiculous. Thankfully, your second option works just as well and is a lot easier: just ignore it. It may display incorrectly before being sent, but once sent, the quoted text in your delivered messages will not stay uncolored, so you don’t need to worry about your recipients seeing something unexpected.

Minor offenses though they may be, attempting to find the cause of bugs like these is a valuable exercise for the developing and curious alike. We’ve filed bug reports through Apple’s Radar Bug Report system for the switcher and Mail issues: #5671975 and #5671970 respectively. Though 10.5.1 brought no cure, we can always hope for a fix in future point releases.

Dollar Signs, Dollar Signs, Dollar Signs!!!

By Matt in Information Design, Constructive Criticism, Usability

We don’t think you should use dollar signs to indicate the price of an eating establishment. It’s too ambiguous and deliberatively uncommunicative to be very useful, and it needlessly conceals one of the most important factors in making a dining decision.

Want some reasons why we think so? Well, here you go:

• There’s no consistency across the myriad websites that have decided to perpetrate this disaster of information design — what should be shorthand always needs to be supplemented with some sort of popup that explains the approximate value range that each group of dollar signs represents.
• The strategy suffers even more when it is out of context. Google search results quite ingeniously display excerpts from each individual page, which are concordanced around your keywords. It is these snippets which guide your decision to click on a page or ignore it as irrelevant. Searching for “greek restaurant honolulu” returns results with useless strings of dollar signs littered everywhere; it’s just not helpful when you’re skimming results looking for grub. You want to know which pages feature Greek restaurants with meals that cost $8–12, not ones with meals that cost two dollar signs.
• The definitions of “cheap” and “expensive” are entirely subjective. A $30 dinner may seem completely reasonable to a working professional, but to a college student, for example, it’s a complete deal breaker. Prices differ significantly in different geographic areas, too.

We’ll pick on Yelp for our constructive criticism this time around, because they sprung to mind (and to the top of our search results page), and because they provide a perfect example.

It’s okay to include a popup to explain how the price strata were established and assigned, but in this case it’s completely unnecessary to enforce that level of indirection — the ambiguous iconography should just be changed to what the symbols represent. (At least, though, Yelp explains what the dollar signs mean — neither Frommer’s nor New York Magazine give even a clue as to what a three–dollar-sign restaurant translates into in real dollars.)

But, this post isn’t really just about dollar signs in restaurant reviews. The general problem here is that the symbols serve very little purpose, except to cloak information and degrade communicative efficacy. The string ‘$30–$50′ takes up precious little more space than ‘$$$$’. Why would you not just include the information itself rather than a placeholder for it? On a map, for example, where information is correlated to coordinates with absolute spatial interpretations, it may very well be prudent to succinctly condense information with symbols. However, a table of results or a restaurant detail page are not maps or graphs — their design should be crafted to expose the information they need to communicate. In these cases we think you should consider very carefully the reasons for employing a scheme that requires further explanation. If you find your interface needs a legend embedded somewhere, that should set off warning bells. There’s usually always room to be clear.

Rails Rake Tasks Plugin

By Cody in Rails, Software Development

Just like everyone else who develops software, we found ourselves constantly typing the same commands over and over for a variety of little tasks while developing Rails apps. Over the course of a number of projects, we developed a collection of rake tasks to automate many of them.

I find some of the tasks really useful, so we created a plugin called the Sakuzaku Rails Rake Tasks Plugin to make them available to everyone.

Some of the tasks that are particular time-savers for me are:

• db:remigrate, which drops your database and migrates it from scratch.
• db:migrate:all, which migrates both your development and test databases at once.
• db:migrations:test, which runs any uncommitted migrations backwards and forwards to test them.
• db:migrations:merge, which renames uncommitted migrations as necessary to make them follow any migrations committed while you’ve been working.
• The testing convenience tasks, which drastically reduce the amount of typing necessary to run tests. For example, you can run all tests for the User model and User controller by doing rake user (instead of ruby test/unit/user_test.rb ; ruby test/functional/user_controller_test.rb), or just the name test on the User model with rake user:name (instead of ruby test/unit/user_test.rb -n test_name).

We’ve added this plugin to a little section of our site called the Sakuzaku Goodie Basket, which contains a growing collection of random, potentially useful, open-source stuff that we’ve developed. We’ll keep adding to the goodie basket as we have the time to pull out and write documentation for all the internal stuff we’ve developed that might be useful to other people. Watch for more additions soon.

Surly: Shortened URLs from Multiple Browsers and Services

By Matt in Web Services, OS X

In response to recent well-founded worries about URL-shortening services and inspired by John Gruber’s endorsement of Metamark, Dr. Drang posted a short script for getting the URL of the frontmost Safari window (or tab, as it were), shortening it with the Metamark URL-shortening service, and storing the result in the clipboard. Even better, it can all be done with a flick of the wrist in Quicksilver.

Awesome, but I don’t use Safari. So I created some scripts to generate either a TinyURL or Metamark URL for your clipboard that works with your default browser. The scripts currently support Safari, Firefox, Camino, and Opera.

Surly — TinyURL to Clipboard.applescript

4 Kilobytes

Surly — Metamark URL to Clipboard.applescript

4 Kilobytes

Or, grab them all in one easy-to-download package:

surly_and_furly.tar.bz2

8 Kilobytes

Installation

1. Download the Surly & Furly collection.
2. Move the scripts you want to somewhere out of the way, but where Quicksilver can find it. Dr. Drang recommends your home directory, but if you like to keep your directories clean, you can put it in ~/Library/Scripts, which Quicksilver will index automatically if you’ve enabled the “Scripts (User)” catalog item in the “Catalog” section of your Quicksilver preferences. After a re-scan of the Quicksilver catalog (which you can force by activating QS and running ⌘+R, the appropriate scripts should be available.
3. Activate Quicksilver and call up your script. If you want to create a TinyURL from your browser’s frontmost URL, for example, typing TinyURL should find TinyURL.scpt (if Quicksilver has figured out where you’ve stored it). Just hit Enter, and after a few seconds your shortened URL will be in the clipboard. Note that Metamark seems to take a few seconds more than TinyURL, but you shouldn’t need to wait more than 2 or 3 seconds for either of them.
4. Paste away!

Questions, Comments

I will modify and create scripts for other URL-shortening services and browsers upon request by email. Also, don’t hesitate to send bug reports — you might get a Sakuzaku pin badge for your trouble.

Acknowledgements

Inspiration for these scripts is owed to the aforementioned Dr. Drang, to whom I extend many thanks. (If you’re writing about webpages, Dr. Drang’s furl script for getting full URLs is a great companion to Surly.) Thanks also to Daniel Bogan of Waferbaby, who provided testing and debugging.

Hunt and Peck: An Investigation and Proposal for Better Custom Keyboard Shortcut Management in OS X

By Matt in OS X, Constructive Criticism, Design, Commentary, Usability

The short story: The interface and functionality of custom keyboard shortcuts in OS X is awkward and unreliable. There are two possible direct reasons for this — Apple’s development priorities and non-standard application resource organization — and any number of underlying causes. I propose a solution.

This is the very long story. I am primarily a Camino user, but like anyone developing for the Web on a Mac, I usually have Firefox and Safari open at the same time too. My keyboard shortcut habits were formed in Firefox, though, and it’s too late to switch from ⌘+K for the search box, and ⌘+⌥+← and ⌘+⌥+→ for tab navigation. Having acquired a new laptop recently, I was reminded just how awful the process for setting up custom keyboard shortcuts is in Mac OS X.

Of Mysteries and Ellipses

If you’ve set custom keyboard shortcuts before, this interface will look familiar. In fact, it remains unchanged since OS X 10.3.

The problems here are manifold.

First, you have to find the exact name of the menu option you want to access. This requires switching back and forth between an open application and the Keyboard & Mouse preference pane, with nowhere but your mind (or a piece of paper, or a Sticky, but come on) to store the title of the menu command, which is itself potentially buried several levels below the top-level menu options.

This is further complicated by the fact that keyboard shortcuts don’t take effect until you’ve closed the very application you were getting the menu option from. (It doesn’t say that anywhere in the interface itself; you just have to come to that conclusion by trial and error or Help when it doesn’t work immediately.) Even if you remember whether, say, that app capitalizes “to” or “from,” there’s no way to assure you’re typing the right thing. The best example of this is the ellipses, used to denote a menu option that triggers further action in a dialog box.

Can you spot the difference?

Here you go:

Apple specifies in the HIG section on Style that menu options requiring further input or confirmation should feature genuine ellipses:

Important: Be sure to create the ellipsis character using the key combination Option-; (Option-semicolon). This ensures that an assistive application can provide the correct interpretation of the character to a disabled user. If you use 3 period characters to simulate an ellipsis, many assistive applications will be unable to make sense of them. Also, 3 period characters and an ellipsis do not look the same because the periods are spaced differently than the points of an ellipsis.

But just because something’s in the HIG doesn’t mean developers will abide. Firefox is a great example. A sample custom shortcut:

And sure enough, it matches up:

This is problematic.

Of course, it’s known that third parties aren’t the only ones who don’t adhere to the HIG. The “Search Google…” menu option in Safari, pictured above, raises a few tangential questions: Does it even deserve an ellipsis? It just quietly puts focus on the Google search bar, which I didn’t notice until I’d tried selecting it a few times. The neglected HIG doesn’t account for menu items that do things like that. Hidden as it is, this menu option in Safari almost seems to exist for the sake of being custom-shortcut’d.

Assuming you do get the menu command title right, there’s no guarantee that setting the custom shortcut function is actually going to work. I spent twenty minutes trying to set keyboard shortcuts in Safari and wondering why they would show up sometimes but not others. In the end I had too many screenshots to deal with. I think this one, taken after I attempted to create a shortcut for “Private Browsing,” will suffice:

Some sort of type-ahead mechanism that would fetch the right menu command for you would solve this problem, but that brings us to why this functionality isn’t already built-in.

Not a Key Feature

Obviously, making the custom keyboard shortcuts interface eminently usable is not a priority for Apple. For the most part, only a minority of users actually know and use keyboard shortcuts. Of those I bet a significant number desire at least some level of customization, but at the end of the day, it’s not a feature that moves units. It’s understandable, then, that it hasn’t been prioritized.

I initially suspected another reason: that improving the process would actually be quite difficult. Here’s why.

While it’s possible to get a complete list of the menu options of any running application with Applescript, it would be best if the preference pane didn’t need to run the application just to get the menus. So instead, providing a searchable list of default menu options for an application (dynamic things like the bookmarks and history in a web browser should be ignored) would require a registered list thereof for every available application. But do these even exist? If so, where?

Turns out they do. But “where” is exactly the problem.

In many applications (both Apple’s and those by third parties), the default menus are found in the MainMenu.nib interface file of an application. See for yourself: ‘Show Package Contents’ on the Safari application, navigate down through Contents › Resources › English.lproj › MainMenu.nib. If you’ve got Developer Tools installed, you should be able to open that file. You’ll see in the MainMenu.nib window something called “MainMenu,” an object of the NSMenu class, which manages an application’s menus.

Theoretically, a list of menu options should be obtainable from this .nib file. Unfortunately, it’s not always in the same place. For Calculator, it’s in Calculator.nib instead of MainMenu.nib. With DVD Player, it’s in MenuBar.nib. For Mail, I couldn’t even find it. So the preference pane wouldn’t know where to look without loading the application to tell it. Right?

Wrong! The location of the MainMenu-containing interface file is specified in the NSMainNibFile property of a given application, listed in the Info.plist directly inside the Contents folder of every application. Knowing this, it’s easy, for instance, to find the appropriate .nib for Mail, MailViewer:

Peachy Key’n

I’ve leave the implementation for another day, but all of the pieces are already there. The Keyboard & Mouse preference pane can already tell when an application disallows keyboard shortcuts:

And it knows that because — and here’s the kicker — it checks the Info.plist file! Check it out:

If a property exists to disallow keyboard shortcut customization, we can only assume that the list of available applications listed in the Keyboard & Mouse prefence pane is drawn from a cached list of applications whose menu commands can be edited. It wouldn’t be too far a stretch to get Keyboard & Mouse to then cache a list of the available commands from the MainMenu object in the appropriate .nib for each safe application.

The interface for finding the right menu command should work just like the new Help menu in Leopard. The screen would dim and a facsimile of the selected application’s default menus would appear. Start typing a command, and the close matches would be pointed out visually with the bobber. Once you’d selected a command (by searching or by manually navigating through the menus with the mouse), the command would fly from the menubar into the preference pane, where you could set a keyboard shortcut for it which would then be checked against existing shortcuts.

Click for a larger view.

A warning dialog indicating that changes to existing keyboard shortcuts wouldn’t take place until the application was restarted would then appear, offering, like Software Update, to quit said application immediately or postpone quitting.

It can be done. It should be done. The ball’s in your court, Apple.

See Also

John Gruber’s article Losers, Weepers speaks to the problems of the OS X custom keyboard shortcut feature, and was written way back in 2003 when the feature first appeared. (There are a lot of similarities there, but it’s worse that the problems haven’t been addressed in four years than me not remembering John’s original post.) He mentions a key problems not mentioned or addressed here but just as vital — the lack of conflict management.