2 posts tagged “ui”

Another September, another iTunes release. This doesn't really feel like one that entirely requires a major version, but with the last release already up to point seven, I suppose it's not a big shock.

The preferences window has seen a bit of an overhaul, which is probably a good thing, as it was getting horribly unwieldy. (I'm hoping that Sven-S. Porst will provide his usual exhaustive review in a day or three.) However, it's also lost one of my pet choices, namely the ability to switch off the genre browser. (That's the thing that comes up when you hit Command B. Once upon a time, it even had a button in the toolbar, but that's years ago now.)

Thankfully, there's still a hidden preference. Just open a new Terminal window and type the following:

defaults write com.apple.itunes show-genre-when-browsing  -bool FALSE

Lo and behold, your browser window is usefully wide again, and those nonsense genres are banished from your sight.

Twitter seem to be going through a phase of minor interface tweaks. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that they'd added a title attribute to the list of messages from your friends, so that you could see if a message was private. The site stayed that way for a week or so, during which time I ran a little Greasemonkey script that looked for that attribute, and changed the background colour of the appropriate entries.

Unfortunately, that change vanished at the end of last week. I'd been intending to redo the script, using an API call to find protected users, but it was a bit too much work for me to do quickly at work, and so I didn't manage. However, yesterday evening I noticed this on the site:

Having an icon is what I'd wanted all the time, but Chris Heathcote mentioned on IRC that there may have been a conflict between the "Favourite" button, which is clickable, and the lock indicator, which isn't. Personally I'm happy to see it, even if there is a slight confusion there.

I don't think this is the only UI change that's been looked at. John Gruber has been following the evolution of the mobile version of the site. Hopefully the site will soon settle down, but it's nice that these things are being taken care of.