1 post tagged “new car smell”

Two in one:

1.

On Thursday I stopped by an ice cream shoppe (yes, it was a shoppe) to get a milkshake after lunch. It was great - the people were friendly, the ice cream was tasty, and the milkshake was equally tasty. A curious thing happened when I was paying though: the woman ringing up my order asked, "Liquid lunch?"

"I'm sorry?"

"Liquid lunch?"

"No, no, this is dessert."

I thought it was a little odd. I guess given the time of day it was all right though; it was about noon, as I had taken an early lunch. But still, a milkshake for lunch?

2.

Sometimes it's the little things.

My MacBook, like all modern Apple laptops, includes the handy "put two fingers and flick your trackpad" scrolling mechanism. This, I love. It is a brilliant way to scroll versus having a dedicated scroll wheel (still fantastic). It works just about perfectly: put down two fingers, glide, scroll. There you go.

My work PC, an hp laptop, includes a scroll area on its trackpad. Originally when I got it I thought, "Huh, same thing!" so I just did the same two-finger scroll. That didn't work quite right. Turns out that within the scroll area (designated by white parallel horizontal lines), one just needs one finger. Okay. Fine. Still handy. Oh, and the pointer on screen changes into a little pointer working within a little scrollbar. Over the top. Unnecessary ("gee, I'm scrolling?!")

Oh, but it's finicky. If my finger falls out of the scroll area on the trackpad (possible, I am klutzy) then I stop scrolling. Worse - much much worse - is that the thing I want to scroll must have focus on the screen first. This is insane. The fracking OS knows where my mouse is pointed - why doesn't it just scroll the thing? And yes, the Mac implementation requires that the window has focus - that makes sense - but not the control itself.

So if I want to scroll my message list in Outlook, I can't just hover over the list and scroll. I have to move to the list, click it (selecting a message in the process, something I don't want to do), and then scroll. This extra step might seem small but it is, in fact, an enormous inconvenience.

It makes perfect sense from a programming standpoint, but just about zero sense from a usability standpoint. Awesome.

3. (a bonus)

I'm pleased that my rental car still has new car smell.