• The “Check in” item is right below the “Save As” item in the File menu of CS3. If you accidentally hit that item, it changes the Save As dialogue box to the Adobe style. You have to click on the “Use OS Dialogue” button to get it to go back.
• When transferring money out of PayPal, why is the “cancel” button in the lower right corner instead of the “continue” button?
• The five or six seconds after I realize that I’ve accidentally clicked the Time Machine dock icon again are as agonizing as I imagine it would be to realize you just pricked yourself on something in a lab studying infectious disease: it doesn’t react immediately…but you know what’s coming.
• In InDesign’s Links panel options menu, “Link File Info…” and “Link Information…” are  right next to each other. Odds alone would indicate that I would, strictly by accident, pick the one that I need to check which images are RGB at least sometimes, so why do I always hit the wrong first? And while I’m at it, why are they so similarly named and right next to each other in the menu?

I downloaded the Tweetie for Mac client this week. I didn’t know much about it except that I kept hearing about it from a bunch of different twitterers.

It’s a great application with a lot of potential. I love the use of core animation when you switch between the side bar settings, and I think the interface is intuitive and easy to use.

4 Things I’d like to see in the first update

1. A window to tweet right from the interface

Seriously…I have to ask for this?

2. Turn off notifications for multiple Accounts

Let’s say, hypothetically, I managed more then one twitter account (which everyone knows I do not). The reason that I don’t use Tweetdeck is because so many of my lists were parallel lists. I don’t need to read tweets from one account and then read the same tweets in another account. I would like the option of turning the blue “new tweet” notification off for individual accounts instead of globally across all accounts. (For all I know, this is actually possible because there is a setting for this in Preferences, but it didn’t look account specific so I didn’t mess with it).

3. I hate dock icons

(The “3.” in my graphic was as close as I could get without spending the time to create a downward arrow). I hate dock icons, especially when the application falls into the “Menu Bar” category. (Last.fm, Evernote, Growl, Dropbox, etc.). Tweetie clearly falls into this category, and a menu bar icon is there by default. Most applications allow the user the option of turning off the dock icon if they choose as well. I don’t need it. It’s extraneous, and more to the point: it bothers me. Do I speak for every user, clearly no. That’s why I should have a quick yes or no to turn it on or off based on preference. Problem solved.

4. A way to save tweet drafts

You know…for people who put way to much time into crafting the perfect set of 140 characters. (Or less if you’re trying to encourage people to retweet you).

…and a Late Addition:

Since @replies automatically show up in my twitter stream, why can’t the new replies indicator turn off at the same time as the new tweet indicator? I see the value of collecting the @replies in one place, but if they’ve been read in one place they should be marked as read globally.

The image above is an example of what I was talking about in this post from earlier this week.

All four of the placeholder images in the border areas of the mock-up are the same image, placed into Photoshop as Smart Objects instead of pixels. Placing them in this fashion allows me to resize them without losing resolution as long as I don’t try to make the image bigger then the original placed file.

By playing around with the crop of each image, I can imply a final page design with placeholder images in place without having to spend hours hunting for 4 separate images to fill all four empty placeholders. Efficiency-wise, the cost in time to track down images 2, 3 and 4 is not worth the gain. Faking four images by experimenting with the crop of my placeholder images gives the same effect at a fraction of the time.

As you can see, even with a fairly simple image like the one I have used, several different, well-composed crops are available. A more complex image will give you even more options.

Remember: if you’re aware of what I’m doing here, it’s obvious. The goal, however, is to present a mock-up to a client so that he or she can take in the entire design and not get hung up on irrelevant issues that have nothing to do with the design. Placeholders just show where images will go. Their content in the mock-up stage doesn’t matter as long as it doesn’t distract the client from the rest of the design.

My buddy Rosanna Ayrton is going to be a Fashion Designer someday. When she’s rich and famous, she promised she’d use this mark so I can tell people that I branded a rich, famous, generally kick-ass fashion designer.

This is a good example of a logo that makes me nervous. It’s completely my work and my idea, but the concept is so basic and so graphically obvious that I would be shocked if it hasn’t been done and done better by someone else. I don’t really want to know.

You can see the rest of my showpiece logos here if you’re curious.

I don’t usually post any links here (because, lets face it, I don’t actually have a lot of traffic to redirect). Having said that, it would be a shame if anyone missed this extraordinarily well written article at Function about how to spot quality in web design work.

In a sea of design blogs that maddeningly repost the same 50 Photoshop tutorials as a way to escape generating real content, a post that clearly took as much time and effort as this deserves a big hand.

Go read it.