Two Brain Cells

This screen (or something similar) comes at the end of all installations powered by the Installer VISE package, and has done for many versions past:

Click to enlarge.

If the installation has completed successfully, why would you ever need to ‘run the installer again’? I’m sure this was useful ten versions ago for some obscure reason, but now it’s just another weird UI holdover that serves to confuse your average user.

I have a problem with the built-in camera on my MacBook Pro. If I angle the screen so that the camera is pointing at my face, the screen is uncomfortable to look at. Allow me to explain.

Normally I arrange myself and my laptop like this:

The screen is angled so that it is roughly perpendicular to my line-of-sight, and my eyes are slightly higher than the top of the lid. This provides a lovely, expansive computing experience, approximately like this:

However, the iSight camera is positioned at the top of the screen, and stares straight out:

This means that the resulting camera image is centered too high:

Of course, I can adjust the angle of the lid downwards so that the camera image is centered on my beautiful fizzog:

But if I do that, the arrangement now looks like this:

The camera is perfectly aligned, but I’m having to stare down at my screen at an angle:

(Angle in photo slightly exaggerated for dramatic effect.) It feels cramped and wrong and I can’t stand it for long.

Mac users are usually pretty obsessive about their computers, and are quick to whine about perceived design faults, but I haven’t heard a peep from anyone else about this situation. Am I really the only person who has this problem? Am I using my laptop in a completely non-standard position? Am I nuts?

…you come across a real physical button on a device in the real world, you can’t figure out what it’s supposed to do, and you find yourself hovering your finger over it waiting for a tooltip to appear.

It begins: Soundbooth, an audio editing app by Adobe, will be released in the middle of 2007 with no support for PowerPC Macs, only the new Intel Macs that have been released this year.

Will there be a PowerPC version?
No. Apple is quickly moving its focus towards Intel Macs, and no longer sells Power PC systems in many places. By focusing on Apple’s future, we have been able to bring this powerful application to the Mac platform much more rapidly, and with a stronger feature set.

When Apple announced that they were switching to Intel chips, the first question on many people’s lips was, “How soon will it be before they drop support for PowerPC Macs?” The fact is that Macs tend to stick around for a long time: they hold their value well, and there are plenty of professionals working on Macs that are five years old or more.

Apple knows this, which is why the next version of OS X is going to be Universal (compatible with both Intel and PowerPC Macs). Even Adobe knows that their core customers — graphics and design professionals — will have PowerPC Macs in use for a good few years yet, which is why they are making the next version of their flagship product, Creative Suite, Universal.

It’s inevitable that PowerPC support will one day fade away entirely, but it’s a bit sad to see it start happening so soon.