Sunday, September 16, 2012

DaisyDisk Live Updates Icon While Scanning

DaisyDisk (Mac App Store Link) is a utility for scanning hard drives and presenting the used space in a beautiful interactive map. It's a great app, and it works wonderfully well. But it wasn't until today that I noticed the amazing attention to detail by the developers.

While scanning on of my hard drives, I noticed that the icon updates itself with the scanning progress on both the Dock icon and the icon used when cmd-tab is invoked. Sadly, I was unable to get a screenshot of the latter.

Dock icon at 45% of scanning complete

Dock icon at 70% of scanning complete

Monday, September 10, 2012

Google Chrome for Mac (retro-post)


This was written when Google Chrome was just released for Mac in 2011, but it sat in my Drafts folder since I never got around to writing a full post.

Chrome has since become a permanent addition to my dock, so it's interesting to see my thoughts when it was first released. I've added annotations for some of the items in hindsight.

Likes


  • animating tabs
  • delete to go back to previous page (I still use this alot and get annoyed when a browser doesn't support it, *mumble*Safari)
  • themes (I liked them at first, but stopped using them after about a week. The clean look is much nicer.)
  • speed (It's still a really fast browser)
  • the video is cool: http://www.youtube.com/googlechromethemes
  • child tabs open next to parent tab, grandchild tabs open next to child tabs, new child tabs open between child and grandchild tabs (Safari now does the same thing for child tabs)
  • status tabs popup on the bottom when loading or mousing over a link
  • unified search field (Safari 6 has this now as well.)

Dislikes


  • opening lots of tabs shrinks them. Much better in safari. (This is still relevant. Also, Safari 6's new Tab View is much nicer.)
  • the website icon takes up a lot of horizontal space. Safari's centered text is much better. (Still relevant.)