leegoddard.net

Maybe it is me, and the people I have worked with, but it seems very hard to find a simple plug-and-play REDM UI.

My thought is to have a generic Ajax interface that pushes and pulls JSON to and from a Spring or Catalyst HTTP REST server, that pushes and pulls data based upon meta information contained within a database, picking up foreign and primary keys as appropriate.

Then non-UI part would take no more than a week from start to finish, but can I be bothered?

It’s shiny, chic, as pretty as a laptop gets — and it is a pain in the arse to use.

Equality of Access

The much lauded user interface may look good, the fonts certainly do, but it is impossible to navigate without a mouse or track pad, which makes use for the blind and partially-sighted (me) very difficult. There is no shortcut available to move the system caret to the menu bar, so one has to find the cursor and direct it and click for every almost menu operation. Certainly, one can CMD+O to initiate the Open File dialogue, but one cannot ALT+E to enter a menu with a shortcut key of E, and then use the cursor keys or further letters to select an option of sub-option. Neither does ALT+SPACE open any menu.

The FN+CTRL+trackpad combination to zoom the cursor area is superb, but why not take it a stage further, and allow me to zoom within a window? Is it because OS X, like Win32, is built on an anciet kernnel, because the multi-national corporation that develops it has refused to spend sufficient funds on developing something new?

Why is there no auto-complete on directory names within the ‘Finder’ application? I have to type in full or use the trackpad/mouse…?

Why can I not select a ‘folder’ and press a key to open it, but instead need to use the trackpad/mouse?

Coding

The main attraction of the Mac was the perceived simplicity of building C/CPP applications – without the need for an expensive development kit, or a touch-and-go Cygwin. Yet the first install of Xcode failed, the second succeeded even though it wouldn’t run, due to a version mismatch – and the install instructions (to run a perl script) simply produce ‘illegal operation’ errors.

This is even worse than Windows 95.

I’m sure I’ve more bile to note later, prior to reporting to Apple.

Cross-platform

Try connecting to a Win NT 4.9 share. Ugh.