Category Archives: Apple

Mac, user experience

the silent installation of Growl

I know plenty of other Mac geeks love Growl, but I’ve never liked it.  To be more accurate, I dislike any kind of notification system; it’s just that Growl is the most visible example of it.  I find notifications to be disruptive.  I don’t mind an Adium window appearing when I get a new instant message.  Beyond that, though, I prefer not to be interrupted from whatever I’m doing.  This isn’t to say that other people shouldn’t like Growl.  Everyone works differently.  If it works for you, I’m perfectly happy for you.  It’s just not welcome on my Macs.

Today, Macworld published an article about the mystery of spontaneously installed Growl.  This is one of the things that drives me crazy: other applications which install Growl without notifying me.  Adium gives me the option of installing it (and I thank them for that option), but Adobe CS5 doesn’t.  This is an especially frustrating user experience, given that I did a custom installation of CS5 and so have an expectation that it shouldn’t install anything other than what I selected during that custom installation.

I really appreciate that one of the developers for Growl said this in their interview with Macworld:

We hate it when people install software—any software, including ours—on other people’s systems without permission.

That’s pretty classy.  An official comment from Growl is a great thing, even though Growl has no way to enforce it.  It’s something that I hope that software developers take to heart.  If your software is going to install something else that’s not advertised as part of your software on my system, then you’ve got to both tell me about it and let me opt out of it.

iPhone, user experience

iPhone notifications and time zones

Before I went on vacation, I cleaned up my calendar.  I declined meetings organised by others that I wouldn’t be attending, and I deleted my own events that no longer applied.  This was mostly to remind others that I was on vacation, but also to ensure that my iPhone calendar only had stuff relevant to my vacation on it.

yesterday at 9am

I missed one event, which is my team’s weekly meeting.  This led me to notice a not-entirely-unexpected display bug with the notifications on my iPhone.  The event on my calendar is in my home time zone (PST, GMT-8), and I was in another time zone (AEDT; GMT+11).  The event fired at the right time, adjusting for time zone.

The notification itself has an error in the display: it shows the time for the meeting as being “yesterday”.  Which it kinda is: the meeting is scheduled for Thursday at 4pm, but it is Friday at 9am in the time zone that I was in.  The notification system should be smart enough to tell me when the meeting is in my time zone.  I’m not necessarily near my phone with the notification sounds off, so I can’t tell just by glancing at the notification when the meeting is.  The notification looks like it’s firing a day after the event, but it’s actually firing at the right time.

Notifications are only useful if I know what they’re notifying me of and what action I should take.  By showing “yesterday” when an event is actually occurring now, I think that I’ve missed a meeting when I haven’t.