I turned 18 yesterday. Hooray.

In addition, Vancouver also received quite possibly the largest dumping of snow in the past decade. I woke up yesterday, when - to my surprise, nearly a foot of snow had blanketed the ground. Driving was very fun to say the least. The power was out in a lot of places but luckily ours stayed on.

Today I woke up to yet another foot of snow, adding up to a whopping 2 feet total! Needless to say, school was closed and good times were had by all.

I'm going to do a few of these styles of posts in the future, as I discuss UI about various things around the world (not limited to Mac apps). One thing to keep in mind is that these are simply my opinions, and I'm not out to insult anyone. Moving on...

One thing to think about when creating an application is how the user is going to use the application (duh). But sometimes this is not so easy. You need to think about what functions are most important and what elements may confuse the user. You need to think about the flow of the application.

News readers are a dime a dozen. They're also a good first subject for this article. The two apps will be NewsMac Pro and NewsFire. Get ready to UI rumble!

NewsMac Pro

NewsMac Pro is an interesting app. Although its intentions are clearly to be a sexy newsreader, the abundance of controls and graphics make it too confusing to use daily.

At a first glance, it's not clear what every button and control does. This is a result of too many controls and not enough focus on the news.

Here are a few of the confusing elements:

1. Tabs
   You can have tabs for different "folders" of news, as well as viewing external websites. This is really pointless (they are all on the left), and you may as well view external pages in Safari. To add confusion, the close button for tabs is located on the right of each tab, opposite to Safari's left of each tab.



2. Split View
   Strangely enough the split control between the news channels and the news view has a few more functions thrown in. In addition to being a resize control, it shows current status on feeds, an unknown progress bar, a button for changing the orientation of the split view, and the number of "channels in Library". Ouch! If it wasn't for the small graphic to the very right, I wouldn't even know this was a resize control in the first place.



3. View Selection
   A control in the toolbar. Two of these options (view selected and view all) change automatically, so I'm not sure why they're included at all. The others would be better suited as columns in the list (like Mail), but then the problem of entire channels arises. In reality, channels would be better suited in the left view.

There's also a ton of preferences, and even themes for the news. In most cases, the addition of preferences and themes is the result of a lack of decision by the developer. The developer does not know what you want, so he/she leaves the choice up to you. This is no good.

In a nutshell, NewsMac Pro tries to do too many things at once without realizing what the user really wants. The application could be drastically improved by simply removing half of the features.

UI Rating: Disaster

Note: NewsMac Pro is apparently being discontinued in favor of a new, slimmer newsreader called "NewsLife". This will most likely address some of the issues listed here.


NewsFire

NewsFire was a late addition into the Mac news reader market. But it packed a surprisingly sexy and simple UI. This is one of the reasons NewsFire is among the most popular readers today.

The simple interface offers feeds on the left with the articles on the right. There are only a few buttons and controls in the main window. It is really clear what each interface element does.

One of my favorite parts is how NewsFire doesn't show items and the content at the same time. When you click on an item the right view devotes itself entirely to viewing that item. You can then use the left or right arrows to go to the next story.

Although NewsFire has quite a few preferences, most of them are arguably necessary. NewsFire has no built in support for themes either, which is a good thing.



While simple, NewsFire is very powerful and convenient for reading your news. It gets to the point, with no extra features in your face. It is clean and easy to use. A perfect example of "less is more".

UI Rating: Great

NewsFire wins this round hands down, thanks to its simplicity and ease of use. NewsMac Pro suffers from way too many features, although it makes an attempt to look nice. You could say that NewsMac Pro lives up to the "Pro" in it's name - but a complicated interface doesn't make it any more professional. Only the most common functions of an application should be kept in a main window, and the rest somewhere else (if you must have them).


Did I miss something? Do you have suggestions for future articles like this? Leave your feedback in the comments - it's much appreciated!

Nintendo's Wii console is the next big thing in living room gaming. If you don't know what the Wii is, I suggest you get out of your cave.

It all started Saturday night when a friend and I went to camp out at the local Best Buy. The store was opening at 8AM. They were only getting 54 units. We figured getting there at midnight (8 hours early) would suffice.

When we arrived at Best Buy, there were already at least over 50 people camped out in tents, and some had been there for most of Saturday. Chances of getting a console in the morning had significantly decreased. But we decided to stick it out anyway, and set up our trusty lawn chairs. Lining up for geeky stuff like this wasn't anything new to me. I've waited outside for several MacWorld keynotes, though never for 8 hours.

The camp out itself was pretty bland. Apparently the very first guy in line had set up his chair and told the people behind him that he was leaving. He said that if his chair was moved he would spray everybody with bear mace. Tough guy. Nobody knew how long he was going for, but after about 3 hours, the people behind him got fed up and tossed his chair out into the parking lot. We never saw him come back, but the chair was later missing. Strange.

6 hours later, a huge amount of people showed up behind us. People were lining up even though we told them they had no chance. And then the Best Buy employees showed up.

They basically walked up to the line, and told everyone that customers who were behind the guy in front of me (yes this was painful) were guaranteed to not get a unit. We told him we'd already been around to everyone in line to get a good count of the number of units. And if someone had cut in line, that'd be bullshit. The employee did not seem to care much and told us that he goes by what he sees. They were about to hand out tickets.

After another painful hour of people boasting about their tickets, the Best Buy guys were finally coming to our small little group of people. We asked how many tickets he had left, because honestly we were all pretty worried. He said five. Amazingly, we cheered. There were just five of us and it worked out perfectly for everyone.

Finally, around 8:30, I got the Wii. With extra controller and Zelda in hand, I was stoked to simply get home and try it out.

Here are my thoughts on the original games so far:

Wii Sports
Bundled with the Wii. Although more of a tech demo than a full featured game, it is still very fun and gets you introduced to the intuitiveness of the Wii. With Tennis, Baseball, Bowling, Golf, and Boxing modes, there are sports for everyone. Nintendo did a great job making this game very friendly and easy to understand. There are few situations in which you need to actually press buttons on the controller.

Red Steel
I didn't initially get Red Steel, due to mixed reviews and not being sure if it was going to be a good game or not. But I picked it up today at EB and I'm not disappointed one bit. Although the main menu UI is a disaster, the game itself is really fun. The graphics are great, and gameplay is always action-packed. Swordplay works out better than you'd imagine, even though its not technically "real time". Those with a guilty pleasure for Asian gangster flicks will love this one.

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
Ah, the biggest game of the year. With near perfect reviews on nearly every game site, some wondered if the new game would live up to its expectations.

As a Zelda fan, I can safely say that Twilight Princess is way beyond my expectations after 6 hours of playing. The amount of detail and polish is simply amazing for a game this size. This game also brings a number of new Zelda innovations, as well as classic Zelda gameplay. Many areas from past Zelda games return. The music is great too, as usual. It simply all adds up to an unmatched game experience. I can't wait to play more.

That's about it. The Wii is definitely going to deprive me of a week or two of productivity. Here is my Wii code if you want to add me. Post your code in the comments if you want to.

The Nintendo Wii comes out next week.

It's great to see all of the excitement around this console lately. It started out as a laughable entry into the next-generation console market. Everyone scoffed at the non-HD capabilities and the ridiculous "remote" concept. And then the name was revealed, the "Wii". I'll save you from the humor behind that because I'm sure you've heard enough of it yourself.

But now the Wii is finally arriving and the hype couldn't be greater. 4 million units shipped and two South Park episodes later, demand is still expected to exceed supply.

Is this an example of innovation winning once again? I think it is. Over a year ago I wrote about the pure awesomeness of the controller that was unveiled at that time. One of the most important parts about playing a video game is feeling like you're actually there. Microsoft and Sony had assured themselves they had nothing to worry about, as they felt improving graphics were the most important way to do this. Nintendo thought differently though, and utilized the full potential of the controller interface to achieve virtual immersion.

Even the games, which are usually the deciding point for a successful console, look amazing for the Wii. Wii Sports will be a great starting game to check out the innovative capabilities of the controller. And as for The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, it's shaping up to possibly be one of the best (and biggest) games of all time, even larger than Ocarina of Time.

I'm kicking myself right now for not pre-ordering the Wii. It looks like I'll be camping out at Best Buy next weekend. :(

So Paul Kafasis of Rogue Ameoba wrote an interesting article about something that has been bugging me for a long time. The new so-called "generation" of developers valuing form-over-function, who are creating gimmicky apps instead of useful apps.

Let me be the first to say that this behavior was indeed inspired from Delicious Library, but Delicious Library is definitely not one of these apps.

It's pretty simple. Style over function is a bad thing. Function over style is equally atrocious. It's the balance of both that creates a great application. Calling these new developers the Delicious Generation is an insult to Delicious Library - which currently has perfect balance.

Take Disco. An example of everything that is wrong with Mac software. It's a disc burner. Plenty of other applications burn discs, namely Disk Utility and the Finder. It even uses Apple's own framework for burning discs. But the lack of innovation didn't stop the developers. What does this application bring to the table? Let's go over a few of the amazingly great features.

• Transparent windows Ah, the best way to create a usable application. Not. Transparent windows only affect readability, the most important part in app that is simply a mass of dialogs.



• The custom GUI Is it great? No, it's awful. Not only is it ugly (something that this decision was supposed to solve, not create?), but the actual dialog UI smartly dubbed "Crossroads" is just that - a maze of decisions and paths that is completely unintuitive and confusing.



• And finally, the smoke, which is nothing more than a gimmick to help sell the application. It doesn't even work on half of Apple's lineup of Macs. And this is by far the most important feature of Disco - Smoke. Something's wrong here.

This is not an example of a new generation of developers. It's an example of developers not knowing what they're doing. I truly believe that these developers only value money, and not creating awesome software. Because really, who sets out to create a great innovative application, and ends up writing a disc burner with smoke?

I am writing this article because I've witnessed first-hand what is going on. The projects mentioned by Paul are all run by a select network of people. I won't deny it, their marketing is flawless. Taking advantage of vulnerable systems like Digg was an excellent way to constantly attract traffic to their projects. Am I bitter? Maybe. But this is what goes on, whether you like it or not.

I believe that there still are some great developers out there making cool stuff. And long as they stick to their roots they'll continue to make great apps.

Our new application won't be part of the new generation, it will be part of the right generation. A perfect balance of style and functionality. This is the only way to write great software. I wouldn't write an app any other way.