Maybe he’ll shed some light on it himself at some point, though he’s probably under some crazy NDA. But before people start slinging mud at Apple for ‘ripping off’ the ‘wooden shelves’ look for the new iBooks app from Delicious Library, consider that Mike Matas who designed that interface for Delicious Monster worked for Apple for a couple of years (leaving in july of last year).
Update: “[Delcious Monster co-founder] Mike Matas was a UI designer on the iPad, [former employee] Lucas Newman is an iPhone / iPad engineer, and [former employee] Tim Omernick was an iPhone / iPad engineer but left a while ago to work on games independently.” #
I love me some Chrome, let there be no doubt about that. On Windows it’s my browser of choice, no contest, and on OS X it’s getting to a point where it’s usable as a default browser. But, there is one thing that is really grating me on OS X.
That’s Chrome’s 100 vertical picels toolbar highrise vs. Safari’s lean 72px. Even with its bookmark bar folded, Chrome is taller than Safari…
28 paltry pixels don’t seem like a whole lot, but considering that all of Google’s web apps also take up at least 25px at the top for links to other Google apps, sign out, help and settings links… Well my 13.3” MacBook Pro’s screen is starting to feel vertically challenged.
I actually ahppen to love Chrome’s ‘oversized’ address bar and on-top tabs, but something’s gotta give.
Update: After some discussion below, it should be noted that Safari actually exceeds Chrome in vertical… eh… chrome pixels if you also turn on the status– and tab-bars.
I immediately imagined the possibility for a multiplayer tabletop strategy game, along the lines of Warhammer 40.000, in which there is no board and no pieces, just players. Bring the game with you, when you meet up with your opponent, have a quick round, wherever you are. I was going to say, that all you’ll need is a flat surface; but you obviously don’t even need that, when everything is virtual.
Another thing struck me. Since the iPhone knows where it is, which way it’s pointing and how it’s tilting, it should theoretically be possible for it to apply that data-over-time to a video stream and in essence create Google Streetview-like spheres; employing some clever math, no doubt.
At work, where I’m forced to use Windows Vista, I use Google Chrome exclusively. And a thing I’ve grown to love about Chrome, is how it handles moving tabs, which is slightly different — and better — from Safari 4b, which I use at home.
In Safari, you grab the small lined area at the top left of a tab to start dragging, something introduced with Safari 4, where before the entire tab was draggable. Once you start dragging, the semi-transparent tab follows your mouse arround until you let go of it, whereupon it either integrates itself into a row of tabs or into a new window. Most annoyingly, Exposé doesn’t work while dragging tabs.
In Chrome, you can initiate dragging anywhere on the tab, and if the tab is the last remaining member of a window, that window will disappear when you start dragging. This allows you to move a tab into a window behind the current, without first rearranging windows; quite nice in Windows’ maxmized windows regime.
Dear Apple: Please steal some of these interface tricks for Safari.
PS: I would switch to Chrome on OS X in an instant, if I could; extensions or no.
Recent Comments
toby, lewism, Michael, lewism, Johan Svensson, Michael, daragh
Michael, thomas finn
Thor, Chris
Joen, Michael, Joen, Max, tbeirau
Michael, Matt Brett, Michael, The Frosty, Mladen