I tend to like a movie to be playing while I'm working, preferably one I know well so I can ignore it. Today Alien was up on Netflix Instant. While going to make more tea I noticed the early scene where the Nostromo 's captain goes into the command area to commune with Mother. What the hell were the designers thinking when concocting the fake system user interface that is depicted in that scene? There's a million tiny status lights , all white, set into a white background. None of them has a readable label. The whole surface of the pod is encrusted with incomprehensible but significant miniature beacons. It's been frequently pointed out that some errors on our limited space missions so far have been tied back to ambiguous or confusing information displays in spacecraft cockpits. What evolutions did Ridley Scott expect to have happened in a few decades that would allow a standard human pilot to instantly discriminate one white light from ten thousand others and act on ...
I finally got around to posting this as an error in iTunes: When calendars are synced between iCal and iPhone via iTunes, iTunes assigns arbitrary colors to the calendars on iPhone. These colors cannot be changed, and do not match the colors chosen in iCal. On occasion, iTunes will assign two calendars the same arbitrarily-chosen color, making them functionally indistinguishable on iPhone. This is terrible user interface design because users become accustomed to the 'meaning' of the color of the calendar and use it in recognition of the calendar layout. The mental 'wrench' involved in translating color recognition between two instances of the same calendar data imposes a unnecessary cognitive load on the user. Solution Allow the user to set the color of iPhone calendars. If the intention is not to allow the user control of the calendar color, for simplicity of implementation on iPhone, then the logical solution is to use the same color as specified in iCal. If the syn...