Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

interface niceties

I’ve noticed an interesting bug with Google Calendar when entering new events. When I create an event, Google Calendar tries to take what I’ve typed and turn it into a new calendar item. Usually, it’s pretty smart.

However, when an event has a time-based word / parameter as part of the actual event name, things get a little wonky. For example, “8 p.m. Music: Stars at 9:30 Club” gets turned into a 9:30 p.m. event titled “Music: Stars at Club.” I’ve learned to get around this by entering “930Club” instead of “9:30 Club.”

For next week, I recently added a calendar event for Super Tuesday to remind my husband (and, to some extent, myself) that I’ll probably be working late that night. But Google Calendar turns “Work - Super Tuesday” into the slightly sarcastic-sounding “Work - Super.” (I can go into the event description and change it back once the event has been created, but it’s an extra step.)

On the “unqualified exuberance” side of the equation, I’m ridiculously thrilled with one tiny little new feature in the latest version of Apple’s Safari Web browser:

In previous versions of Safari, I didn’t get any kind of warning message when I was about to quit the application with multiple tabs open. And given my tendency to hit “cmd+q” instead of “cmd+w” to close a tab (“q” and “w” are right next to each other!), I found myself cursing at my computer fairly often. (Yes, I could remap the “quit” command to another keystroke combination — and I did that once — but it’s kind of a pain to do and I shouldn’t have to hack my Web browser to fix a usability problem like this.) So, yay.

Now if only they’d add this kind of thing to iChat and Adium, too, where I’m also a chronic accidental cmd-quitter. I feel like even more of a dork accidentally quitting out of an active conversation than I did accidentally quitting out of Safari because this time someone else knows what I’ve done. (Maybe iChat and Adium have already added little “We see you’re in the middle of something; do you really want to quit?” dialog boxes; I haven’t upgraded to the most recent versions yet.)