You thought you had me baffled

[austin_dern]

Now and then I have a day of belated realizations or accidental discoveries. One of them is about the Macintosh, at least the laptop line of things: if you (at least if I) hold down the control button (not the Apple button), and then put two fingers not next to one another on the trackpad and slide them both up, the screen zooms in on wherever the mouse is. And the zoomed-in screen tracks with the mouse. It goes pretty far in, too, to the point that the mouse fills half the screen. Holding control down and sliding two not-quite-adjacent fingers down zooms back out again, although only to normal size. The screen tracks the mouse movements, so it stays roughly centered until you reach the edge of the screen. This could be perfect for people who want to figure out exactly how far they could shrink and still use a mouse-driven computer application without going crazy. Can someone make it to ... I suppose the limit would be about two-thirds of an inch? I was giddy enough on discovering this I slid several of the computers in the Apple Store up to maximum magnification while I thought I wasn't watched.

Still no idea why web browsers don't let ``undo'' work to un-close tabs or windows you've shut too soon, though.

Something else I'd never recognized before was that the Saturn car logo actually represents something. In my defense, it's not enough to see something to understand it; you need some kind of mental model of what it represents. There's the same thing where it's hard to remember or understand lyrics if you don't at least think you know what they are. I had figured it was just silly abstract line art, of the kind every corporation jumped at for its logo in the 1990s, maybe with a vague notion of picking out a sailing ship, which doesn't make sense but then what corporate logos in the 1990s did make sense? Only suddenly, as if a light switched on, I realized what it is: it's a representation of the planet Saturn and a ring, drawn with enough of a minimum of lines that I needed only, what, fifteen years to recognize it. And I suppose that makes their logo retroactively a 1990s corporate logo which makes sense.

Trivia: Lewis and Clark first met Shoshone people on 13 August 1805. Source: Undaunted Courage, Stephen E Ambrose.

Currently Reading: Five Galaxy Short Novels, Editor, H L Gold.

Comments

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

The logo which somewhat did so for me was the Milwaukee brwers glove: http://www.onmilwaukee.com/sports/articles/oldlogoreturn.html many a year I've seen it and not noticed the 'm' and the 'b'. I'm just nose seeing the niceness of the cross of the Under Armour logo, thoguh that's maybe 4 years.

http://www.cartype.com/page.cfm?id=216 for some report on the Saturn logo. (which, I, er. picked up readily upon launch.)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, huh. I hadn't noticed the letters in the old Brewers logo, but then I live pretty far away from where anyone has ever cared about the Brewers. (Also, really, once you do see the letters they look more like ``B M'', which they probably don't mean. They need to have the top of the M be a touch taller to avoid the ambiguous rendering.)

You know, the fattening of the 'ring' on the bottom of the Saturn logo violates perspective on the planet-and-ring outline.

[tracerj.livejournal.com]

Still no idea why web browsers don't let ``undo'' work to un-close tabs or windows you've shut too soon, though.

Opera does. You can hit the usual undo key to bring back the most recently closed windows, and you can keep going backward in the histoy. Also, there's a nice little icon on the tab-bar to list all the windows you've closed so you can yank one right back out without stepping through.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I hear about Opera now and then, but I've already burdened myself with three web browsers for different roles and I don't want to drag in a fourth without extremely good reason. Undoing tab closes is nice but just not quite enough.

I admit some of the features I insist on are trivial -- I use iCab as my default, for example, partly because if I drag an image off of the web page onto my desktop, not only does it save the image but in the Info panel is the URL where the image was originally found -- but then isn't that what really distinguishes the different browsers anymore? The trivial features of implementation?

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Undo of closing a document is kind of tricky -- the documents have to be able to deal with living on the undo stack. It's definately possible, though, especially if you plan for it from the start.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I'm sure it needs some preplanning in web browser design. I'm just surprised that it didn't become a common feature around the height of web browser wars, or alongside big projects like the Windows XP Transformation or the OS X reformation. They seem like natural times to fit in a feature like that.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

OMG, I didn't know it did that!!

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Isn't that amazing? And isn't that hard to keep from zooming in and out like you were bouncing?

I'm wondering what else they're keeping secret in there.