Saturday, September 12, 2009
Somehow I woke up when Patrick did and shortly after he left I saw lightning at 4:47 AM. A few minutes later I saw brighter lightning followed by big bursts of thunder. Fell asleep again. When I woke this time, tweets reported that the Castro got big rain, but it seemed to have passed us over here in the Sunset. Breakfast: nonfat cherry yogurt, strawberries. Restarted Airport Express and my iMac. Wrote a complaint to the city about last night's construction noise from the house next door. Talked with Patrick about it and a lot of other things. Web work for Danny and Drew: elizabethW. Lunch at home by myself: leftover-chicken sandwich. Uploaded old photos for Estebahn. Web work for Danny and Drew: custom gift certificate. Dinner at home by myself: biryani, garlic naan, vegetable spring rolls—a Trader Joe's dinner! Today Patrick helped Aaron celebrate the birthday of Aaron's relatively new boyfriend. Today while using my iMac in OS 10.5.8, I happened to accidentally open every icon on my desktop and left this status update on Twitter and Facebook: "Frank Farm thinks OS X should ask something like 'Are you sure...?' when > 5 items are selected and one of them is double-clicked - accidents happen". If you still aren't convinced, try this: Click once on your desktop, Command+A, Command+O—feel the pain, I dare you. The same kind of thing exists with the "Open all in tabs" feature in Mozilla Firefox but there it's less likely to be an accident. One way programmers could implement this would be to include a way to cancel the entire operation at any point along with progressively increasing delays with the first 3 to 5 opens followed by progressively decreasing delays among those that follow. Bonus points if you can make it undoable, but that's not likely to be very useful. Yes, the user initiated the command, but accidents happen, the feature has the potential for being very unproductive, and it's not nice to remove control from the user at any time as is the case while 100+ icons or tabs are sequentially opening automatically.