$HOME, Library, Preferences etc

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...

I was recently talking with a friend who is thinking of replacing his beloved but aging eMac 700 with something modern, and was trying to help him work out what the smart buy for his usage would be. His current complaint was that he gets the spinning beachball in Safari an awful lot and the entire system seemed sluggish when he had several browser windows open. I got him to run Activity Monitor to examine whether Safari’s cache problems were contributing to the slowness. One of the things he mentioned that startled me was that iTunes on his machine was taking a steady 25% of the CPU time. I was surprised because on my daily machine, I’ve never seen its usage vary much from around 10-11%. Then I compared my machine’s CPU (a 1.67 GHz G4) with his (a 700 MHz G4) and realized that the amount of work being done by both machines was similar, and because his CPU was about half as fast as mine, it was having to do twice as much work as mine in the same time to play back the MP3 file. iTunes ...