Rands on slides

Rands has written some really great articles on how to give and prepare for seminar presentations (too lazy for links; use Google). Here’s another gem of his via Twitter:

If you can’t practice the hell out of your slides, you can, at least, care the hell out of your slides.

I believe the point here is that with carefully-done slides, half of your problem is solved already. When your slides don’t help to pull you along in your train of thought, it’s easy to lose momentum and lose the coherency of your overall “message”.

Oh god, my eyes

A little while ago I complained about the “Podcast Information” window in iTunes.

Well, there’s now been an iTunes update, and I’m sad to say things are now much, much worse. On the plus side they fixed my bug.

It’s a pity they had to hit the damn window with an ugly stick at the same time.

Come on, guys. It’s not that hard. At least the old one had some padding in there:

And that new shadow looks ridiculous. Really.

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They also didn’t paid any attention to improving its behaviour. That’s okay. The other new features in iTunes 8 are rather nice.

But this window now floats above all others even when iTunes is not frontmost. This is the least appropriate behaviour this window could possibly have. I guess I’ll have to file another bug report…

iTunes’ “Genius” logo

This logo, for iTunes’ new “Genius” feature, is only going to look good once we have displays capable of 200 dpi:

Too many jaggies in the lower half of that centre orbit.

Google Earth and running

Let me just say that one of the few actual uses I’ve found for Google Earth is utterly indispensable to me right now. Path distance measuring:

With only eleven days to go before the 12km City to Bay run, I’ve got some training to do…