Smashing Magazine does a good old-fashioned "why OS X is so much better" piece -- ok, well they're not that blatant (it's actually focused on the "top ten usability highs"), but with all of the iPhone/App Store news going around, it's kind of refreshing to see some nice, traditional Mac praise.

So why is OS X better than other (*cough*Windows*cough) operating systems? Metaphors play a huge part -- when you use a Mac, you're not just browsing through files or using plugins, you're flipping through what look like album covers, or pulling up a "Dashboard." And everything is extremely intuitive -- it's clear upon first look at the screen what does what or where to find certain features of the operating system.

Every system has problems, and OS X is no exception. But using it day to day, OS X definitely gives out all kinds of "wait, it was that easy?" and "just works" moments. And that's why we're such big fans of it in the first place.

UK web development team Clearleft has released its web site usability testing application, Silverback.

In short, Silverback turns a Mac into a portable usability testing laboratory. What used to require a complicated and cumbersome set up involving several computers, a video camera, and lots of time, can now be done much faster and with less hassle. You only need a Mac with a built-in or attached camera, and a copy of Silverback.

The application records video footage of the user, and combines it with recorded footage of their activity on screen. Clicks, inputs, pointer movements and the user's speech and facial expressions are all combined into a single video file that can be quickly exported. One nice touch allows the test facilitator to add "bookmarks" during a session by clicking a button on the Mac's Apple Remote. Nothing distracting will show up in front of the user, but the bookmark is still recorded invisibly in the background.

The only thing that doesn't appear to be included - at least in this initial release - is the ability to edit the output video file before exporting. Even so, it looks like it could be an invaluable tool for anyone who makes software or web sites for a living. If you want to find out more, watch the five-minute demo video, which is a useful summary of aims and features.

Silverback is Tiger and Leopard compatible, sells for $49.95 and can be used as a fully functional demo for 30 days. As an added bonus, 10% of all profits generated will be donated to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.

Many folks who were used to the array of features iMovie '06 offered were understandably upset when iMovie '08 uprooted just about everything they knew. After all, they had the figurative rug pulled out right from under them. Eric at no one sequel, however, doesn't see this as a bad thing. Eric's entire post is definitely worth a read, but to summarize: while iMovie '06 is a good product, it doesn't exactly live up to the Apple and iLife reputation of "just working." iMovie '06 users need to learn a little too much about video editing - time codes, time lines, "rendering", etc. - causing a significant portion of the public to avoid the practice altogether. I agree with Eric - perhaps it isn't Apple's job to bring pro features and workflows to the general user. Instead, maybe it's their job to to eliminate the need for those features to exist in the mind of said user, greatly simplifying the barrier to entry in video editing so that more can use these otherwise complicated tools.

By completely rethinking the practice of video editing and redesigning iMovie around the new paradigm, iMovie '08 could perhaps be the first product that really captures the attention of the larger mass that hasn't caught the bug yet (no pun intended). Sure iMovie is lacking a few features everyone can enjoy, such as a few effects and transitions, but users no longer need to learn what a 'timecode' is just to cut together the summer vacation or a cute puppy montage. It's just skim, click and drag and poof - a video.

Isn't that the way Apple products are supposed to work?

[via Daring Fireball]

The iPhone offers many ways to send mail. Unfortunately, consistency is not the strong point here. You'd imagine Apple would have designed a single universally recognized "compose email" button and placed it more-or-less in the same place for each application. You'd be wrong. Here's a quick run-down of several extremely different ways to create a new message across several programs:

• Compose Button. The compose button, which looks like a square with a pencil through it, appears at the bottom right of many Mail screens and in the SMS Text application at the top-right of the screen. The Reply/Forward button appears just to the left of the Compose icon in Mail. Tap this to reply to a message or forward it on to another party.
• Envelope Icon. In the Notes application, the envelope icon appears on the bottom of the page, to the left of the garbage can. Tap it to email the current note.
• Use-For Icon. The use-photo-for icon appears at the bottom left of the screen. It looks like a rectangle with an arrow jumping out of it-the arrow is basically a mirror of the Reply/Forward button. Tap this and select Email Photo from the pop-up menu.
• Share. You can share YouTube video and Safari URLs by email. Tap the Share button on the Information page in YouTube and in the navigate-to-URL screen in Safari. To find this in YouTube, tap the blue reveal button located to the right of the video name. In Safari, tap on the URL bar and then look up and to the left.

So why so many ways to do what is essentially the same task? This inconsistent design speaks volumes to me about rushing the iPhone to market. It's as if the different groups simply didn't have time to communicate with each other and standardize the way they do what is truly a core task with consistent icons and naming. What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

AppleHound has posted a list of all the (supposedly) reproducible bugs they could find in iPhone 1.0. There's 68 in total, and they range from various system hangs (the Phone app will hang if you start a sync while editing a contact photo) to many different UI/Usability bugs. Some of the usability bugs are a little iffy if you ask me-- many of them, like the "bug" where photo albums with less than 20 images don't display an actual number of images, seem to be "working as intended" (because why would you need an image count when you can easily see how many images are there?), and others have already been shot down according to the Apple HIG.

But on the other hand, I can't really fault AppleHound for being such sticklers. First of all, this is a cell phone that costs $600, and you should get what you pay for-- quibbling about interface quirks now means there's a much better chance of getting them fixed in a future firmware update. And second, this is Apple we're talking about. While other cell phone companies get complaints about call reception and service outages, these are complaints about tiny, half-a-second visual inconsistencies. Heck, I love my Razr, and the screen goes nuts without reason almost daily. There's nothing wrong with holding Apple to a higher standard, and maybe if Apple is kept on their toes with the iPhone, hopefully other cell phone companies will find themselves with their feet held to the fire as well.

Thanks, Leonard Nimrod!

Following a dilemma that Gus Mueller faced when designing the UI for his latest release of VoodooPad 3, Mac DevCenter has posted a request for feedback on this most heated of UI topics: palettes or sidebars? Preferences can easily sway in either direction, and I personally miss the old-school functionality of Mail's pre-Tiger drawer (yay for column widths that don't have to be constantly re-adjusted), though I will concede that the drawer look is old and ugly by today's slick UI standards of palettes and sidebars.

But what do you TUAW readers think? Do you prefer palettes, like in Photoshop, OmniOutliner, iWeb and Pages, or do you prefer the sidebar UI of Tiger's Mail, ecto and NetNewsWire's subscriptions panel (though it's interesting to note that NNW also uses a drawer for its site catalog)? Sound off.

The iPod is the 800-pound gorilla of the DAP industry - there's no doubt about it (well, almost). In its 4+ years of existence, the player has quickly won owner's hearts because of its ease of use and seamless iTunes management experience, amongst other reasons. I personally have owned one of every generation of iPod since the original 5 GB model with the *gasp* mechanical scroll wheel, before all this fancy touch wheel stuff you young whipper-snappers are spoiled with today.

In all this time, however, the iPod's famously simple UI has more or less remained that way - staggeringly basic. While I personally am no fan of devices that add features and options simply for the sake of claiming 'it has more', I'm starting to think that there are a few areas that the iPod's UI and experience are in serious need of an update. Music (and video) collections are getting larger, people are interacting with their devices and the libraries on their computers through increasingly new (and truly useful) ways, and I think the iPod needs to catch up with the times.

This rant about Mac OS X, multitasking and usability is brought to you by the letter Q and a disgruntled design student:

I heard something snap in my head today as I sat down at the back of an art history lecture hall (where outlets are, I follow) and got to peek over the shoulder of a girl using a 15" PowerBook in front of me.

This girl was using Safari to browse MySpace and - arguments about that site's damage to civilization as we know it aside - the browser window was 100% maximized across her 1280 x 960 display, obliterating what I would estimate is at least 1/3 of useful screen real estate. Then, she switched over to Word to keep working on a paper - again, Word had been manually maximized across the entirety of her widescreen display which was throwing easily half of her usable screen space into the garbage. Unfortunately, she is just one of many I have witnessed throwing away all sorts of useful screen space while using Mac OS X.

Men and women, boys and girls, please: Mac OS X more or less offers only one way to manually maximize windows across your entire display for a reason - because they don't have to be that large. "Multitasking" is defined as "the simultaneous execution of more than one program or task by a single computer processor." If we apply that definition to a person's ability to multitask, it means that you too are able to work on and look at more than one thing at once - which is why Mac OS X intentionally makes it difficult for one application to dominate the entirety of your display (Applications, such as Firefox, that don't obey the Mac OS X windowing rules I'm referring to are exempt from this post).

While the various tricks and design ideals that Mac OS X uses to accomplish this fantastic feat of productivity-inducing magic are outside the scope of my rant, I just want the word to get out that it is actually safe to trust your operating system's judgments in these kinds of matters. Tell your parents, inform you friends. I'm especially looking at you, switchers. I know the way Mac OS X handles windows and changing their size is strange, but trust me - once you get used to it and wrap your head around why it works this way on Apple's side of the fence, you'll be overjoyed with all the extra screen space you just reclaimed.

So go ahead, live on the edge: use that green "best fit" button and the Window > Zoom options, and be happy that you've taken a positive step towards getting just a little more done on your Mac.

Adding to the small pile of gripes with the new technology Apple is using with iLife 06, such as complaints about iWeb's bloated CSS or RSS standards and photocasting, I just developed a beef that I haven't really seen mentioned yet: the crummy new URL scheme for iWeb sites, both on and offline.

First of all, in the olden day the .Mac "homepage" did't seem to be case sensitive, as in: homepage.mac.com/user will get you to the same place as /User. iWeb is a bit pickier, as a wedding site I'm working on lives at web.mac.com/myuser/iWeb/Wedding/, but /wedding/ will result in a 404 error. Yes, a friend already reminded me that "Unix = case sensitive," but I don't care. While this could be labeled a minor complaint, my fiance and I have plenty of family members who aren't too hip on these computer thingies. They're going to get confused by something silly and minor like this, and I'm sure our relatives aren't the only ones.

Next on my list is the URL scheme itself. web.mac.com/user/iWeb/sitename? Could that get any less friendly? Granted "homepage.mac.com" might seems a little unprofessional to some, but this new scheme feels pretty cumbersome and just plain ugly. Why couldn't we simply have web.mac.com/user and web.mac.com/user/othersites, Apple?

Last but not least is how the new sites are organized in a user's iDisk. Old homepage sites still live in iDisk/Sites/, while shiny new iWeb sites live in iDisk/Web/Sites/iWeb/sitename. Nevermind a discussion about how needlessly buried that file structure is - I'm sure this dichotomy of old/new sites and content is going to confuse plenty of .Mac customers if they ever want to get at any of those files, or make a backup of their sites or entire iDisk.

But enough about my gripes, what do you guys think: do iWeb and its underpinning .Mac support have more issues besides CSS and standards? Let's hear your thoughts.

This time around the "What would you change" topic I thought I'd forgo an actual app and post on a part of OS X; the menu bar, in fact. While I really dig the menu bar and how it works, it leaves much to be desired in the customizability department. For example: I don't know of a way to increase its width or the font size, and it would be great if there was some kind of a power-user option to make it easier to hide the menu bar altogether, instead of only some apps (like Photoshop) being able to do it. Or how about the image I have here: a comparison to XP's system tray, which includes a crude icon management system of hiding 'inactive' system tray icons. Fellow TUAW blogger Scott is quick to point out, however, that this hiding of inactive icons on XP is a great way of allowing all sorts of unwanted software to install itself and run right under your nose. Nevertheless, if you have a lot of icons up in the menu bar, it would be great to have some way of managing all the clutter besides simply dragging them around manually with the command key.

So what say you, TUAW readers? Since we can't even get Macworld press passes I'd say it's a safe bet that Apple won't be taking notes, but a good UI conversation might be a nice way to pass the slow-news holidays.