Apple heads back to the mac with some very subtle UI changes.
A couple of weeks ago, my excitement was ratcheted up a notch or two with the prospect os OSX Lion presenting us with a new unified skin for “the world’s most advanced operating system.”
For years we’ve had inconsistencies between the design and icons of the various native OSX apps, even being left with version 1.0 scrollbars in most apps, long after Apple’s aqua interface was otherwise replaced.
While OSX Lion’s introduction was relatively brief, and the screen shots on the teaser page don’t offer much (going so far as not even showing any non-fullscreen scroll bars at all), a little digging and we can find the following:
Towards better commenting on the Web.
When we originally built the commenting system on the old PTE (pre-Tumblr era) Say Yeah website, we required users to create an account and sign in before they could comment. This created an unnecessary barrier to entry that reduced the likelihood that a user would comment. It just took too long.
At the same time, we wanted to ensure that we weren’t dealing with moderating spam comments all the time and the account creation process pretty much eliminated this. Additionally, the same user account for commenting allowed a user to post or like an event on the TO Events Calendar, so the barrier to commenting for calendar users wasn’t as high.
With all that in mind, and to encourage the conversation by making the process less painful for users, we took a fresh look at the relationship between commenting and user accounts on the Say Yeah site. For users who weren’t using the TO Events Calendar, it was clear they had no reason to make an account unless they wanted to comment, so we worked to combine these actions.
Blackberry 6, better for users.
After struggling mightily with a Blackberry 8900 over the weekend (seriously, almost every aspect of the OS on that thing is broken - from email to Wifi to Web browsing. What a nightmare!), it’s nice to see that Blackberry is actually attempting to improve their user experience with Blackberry 6.
