Apple screwed up.

What’s important here is that they knew it, were smart enough to acknowledge it, and actually fixed (some) of it.

By this, of course, I mean the translucent menu bar that Apple has been mandating… I mean including… since the 10.5 upgrade in late October. Some marketing genius (not to be confused with a Genius Bar genius… I think the the Genius Bar types are actually smarter than the Marketing types, but that’s a different story) decided that the menu bar should be translucent. I don’t think a designer was consulted. “Better” is not a word that I would use… “Visually distracting” is more accurate. But with 10.5.2 they fixed it… or they did what they should have done in the first place, given their users the chance to get rid of the translucent nonsense in the first place.

Before:

After:

I downloaded the update, restarted (what the… I thought I was running a Mac here…), checked the little box marked “Translucent Menu Bar” and said “Well, see, that just looks good. Why couldn’t they do that in the first place?”

In my book, choice is good.

The upgrade to Time Machine is another positive example. It appears in the menu bar by default now, but — get this — I can click a little check box, and voila, it isn’t there anymore. Why can’t I do this with sync? Never synced to a .Mac account — really? Maybe because I have never had a .Mac account? If I agree to never get a .Mac account (which is looking more and more likely the more I look at that message), will you finally turn the icon in my menu bar off? Okay sure, I can go into the iSync application itself, go to properties there, and switch it off. The issue there is that it isn’t intuitive. Unlike the other items there, where we can then just look at the properties of the menu bar item, and that almost always controls whether the item appears there, or you can’t take it off at all (like MacFusion, for example). The .Mac item breaks the pattern that we’ve all gotten used to. It broke it so much that I didn’t find the solution until someone told me explicitly what it was.

One thing that I keep hoping they’ll fix is how Bluetooth works, especially for known devices. I don’t take my Bluetooth mouse home with me, so it disconnects once a day. If I don’t manually disconnect the two, I find that the trackpad doesn’t work as advertised (locks up the mouse quite often). When I come in in the morning, I have to open Bluetooth preferences then find the little gear icon at the bottom, and connect via that interface. Why can I not just connect on the big drop down, right below “Open Mouse Preferences”?

There’s been a lot of talk about usability lately (see here, here, and in a more general sense, here). Apple has, in the past been great for usability, but they make mistakes. It’s good to know that sometimes, you can recover from some really bad mistakes… Unlike a lot of other companies out there, though,

1. Apple has a patient and tolerant user base; they didn’t all jettison the company (and their products) when Apple made the first big mistake.
2. Apple responded quickly to the almost unanimous outcry from that patient and tolerant user base, when that base exclaimed, “Hey, knock it off already.”
3. Apple made rational choices about those issues.

There are a lot of reasons why these things don’t happen in software companies. Bruce Schneier has a particularly compelling example today in his blog, and even discusses some of Apple’s shortcomings, but the point is that Apple has a pretty good thing going (see point #1, above), and that all but the first situation applies to every software/hardware/flatware/silverware/glassware business out there. Oddly enough, when the second two points apply to a company, the first will as well.