Matt Legend Gemmell Modesty is Lying

Irate about User Interface

I mentioned recently that I’d imported the posts from my old blog into this one, and I’ve finally had a chance to go through some of those posts and tidy them up. The overall impression I get from the more memorable ones is… man was I grumpy.

I wrote three complaints about Apple’s increasingly-custom UI within four days back in the golden year of 2003, before finally having the good grace to post an “it’s not all bad” follow-up. Check them out:

• Death of a Dogcow
• Nails in the Dogcoffin
• NSSchizophrenicControls
• Apple UI: A Brighter Note

I even managed to have a snark at the easy targets of Netscape and Microsoft respectively, before audaciously nipping at the heels of the then-upcoming new Mac OS X Panther:

• Netscape Button Placement
• Microsoft MenuItemTextField
• Panther Hunted For Tabs Theft

Grumpiness aside, there are some fairly decent UI-related posts in there. It’s interesting to note how features given to us by Tiger and Leopard now render some of those old discussions mostly irrelevant:

• Live URLs in Editable Text
• Conclusions About Live URLs in Editable Text
• Autosave

Lastly, these couple of non-development-related (and non-UI-related) posts still tickle me.

• The Lessons of Zelda
• Mailsmith and the Release Notes Pervert

I’ll continue to update and fix the old posts as time permits, and do please excuse the extreme indulgence of this trip down memory lane.