Binary Bonsai

In laying down this new design — Kalamari — I decided to try and go with a fluid-width layout for once. Traditionally I haven’t held it in particularly high regard; but I experiemented with it for a few hours, and ended up somehow finding it a natural fit alongside the ‘book-like’ typography.

What’s interesting about fluid-width designs, is that for me, they actually only make sense under OS X. After all, under OS X, no window can be maximized and locked to the screen. Quite the contrary in fact. Not only are windows rarely sized to fit the full size of the screen¹, but all windows are movable at any time. And the ace in the hole, is that you cannot move the upper edge of a window above the lower edge of the menu bar, and you cannot resize a window to be bigger than the size of your screen.

Combined, these factors are very significant, as they directly influence the way you work your windows.

Contrary, on Windows, un-maximized windows most often differ in size and vertical position from window to window. And without the menu bar blocking vertical movement and the screen-size dictating the size of windows, it isn’t quite that easy to quickly move and resize a window, while retaining a tidy workspace; and so I most often simply maximize all windows.

Hang on, I’m approaching the point.

Because of this, I work much better with OS X’s windows paradigm. Much better. My work environment simply remains more fluid than when I’m working on Windows, and I often find myself resizing windows to fit whatever content they contain.

In turn, because I do that², Kalamari felt more natural on OS X, since I find myself resizing the width of the window to where it feels ‘right’. But at work, on Windows, the window was maximized, and… well, it looked almost grotesque actually, because of the vast wasteland of whitespace on either side of the column in a maximized window.

So I have to come up with some way of countering that I suppose.

Yay.

1. The lack of a maximize button in OS X has been known to drive some people to the brink of madness. ↩


2. Well, and because Baskerville looks amazing in Safari on OS X, and Georgia looks like shit in Firefox on Windows ↩

If you know of some neat screencasting software, let me know. Windows or OS X; either is fine.

Today I read the most curious sentence on Wired:

Safari has never been especially well-regarded as a browser, even among Mac users […] #

It seems like it was only yesterday (it was in fact the day before yesterday), that we talked with Aza Raskin about Enso and its price. And today, the price of Enso dropped from $25 to $20, which for me is the magic number. For now I’m still evaluating my use of Enso, to see if it is something I genuinely use on my Windows PC here at work.

I like to think of myself as open-minded and a share-alike kinda guy, which is why I don’t get Paul’s response the other day. Luckily like-minded people exist, and Stewart was kind enough to come through for me and provide a whole slew of new Vista screenshots.

And not only are these open source, royalty free, do-what-you-please, can’t-steal-if-you-wanted-to screenshots. They’re also not resized and compressed like Paul’s are, so it’s kind of a win-win situation for all. So now I can exchange Paul’s shots with these, and Paul can go back to rating games with his own head. Win-win.

I’ve also uploaded all the screenshots to a flickr set on my own account where I’ll be commenting on them as soon as I get the time.

PS: You can get Vista Beta 2 for yourself and create even more screenshots, as long as you hurry!