Pfeiffer consulting group has apparently analyzed the ease of use of theinterfaces of Vista, XP, and OS X. Their conclusion is that Vista is worse than XP, and both lag far behind OS X.
I don’t know exactly the metrics they used to determine this “friction” score, but I would hazard to guess that Macs have a high score due to better adherence to Fitts’ Law. Basically, in order to maximize the ease of accessing a user interface element, it should be a) close, b) a large target.
Take for example the menu bar in OS X versus Windows. The menu bar in OS X is an infinitely large target, at least vertically. You just throw the mouse to the top of the screen and it stops on the menu bar. Or, take for example, pop-up menus. On a Mac the current selection is under the mouse on a pop menu, but not so on XP. (This is another reason I use Safari or Camino rather than Firefox, Firefox has generic non-Mac pop-up menu behavior.)
So, I’m not surprised that OS X comes out ahead of Windows, but I am a bit surprised about Vista lagging behind XP. That’s a trend in the wrong direction.
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There is a handy IDL syntax coloring plug-in for Textwrangler that I find quite useful. It colors built in IDL functions, among other things.
Installation is fairly easy (you put the file in TextWrangler’s language module folder and then assign .pro to IDL) and described on the download site.
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MSCRED may complain that fitsutil isn’t found. That’s because the iraf.net included extern.pkg file is defining a lot of tasks that you may not have. Edit /iraf/iraf/unix/hlib/extern.pkg and remove the two lines defining fitsutil
reset fitsutil = /iraf/extern/fitsutil/
task fitsutil.pkg = fitsutil$fitsutil.cl
and you’ll be good to go. There are plenty of other extraneous lines you could delete or comment out as well.
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Well, the link for GUIAPPS was broken, and then the installer in question didn’t work on Tiger. I had to compile these binaries myself on my iBook as the binaries at iraf.net seemed to have some issues. The updated installer is on the download page.
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Monolingual is a handy tool that removes extra localizations from MacOS X and installed Applications. Buried within many .app bundles and other parts of OS X lie specific localization directories. In fact, if you wanted, you could probably switch your Mac to Chinese or German or Spanish at this very moment using the International system preference panel.
And while that’s kind of fun to show off the Mac’s multi-language abilities, you can reclaim a decent bit of space by clearing out languages you won’t use. I reclaimed 600 MB on my iBook. So, for those of us with laptops needing to squeeze out every last bit of space for storing astronomical data – cleaning out the unused localizations may be a useful step.
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