Saturday I was sitting in a talk next to PragDave, and had to boot my PowerBook (for some reason it had shut down instead of going to sleep after my talk). I took the opportunity to show him one of my favorite silly OSX features. When you type the wrong password into the login panel, it doesn't give you a message or anything. Instead, the login panel just shakes rapidly from side to side, as though your Mac is vehemently shaking its head at you.

Dave was most amused. :-)

One of the nice things about MacOS X is the way it effortlessly adjusts to new network configurations and locations. Unfortunately, while the operating system does a good job with that, applications are a different story, especially when it comes to proxies.

Internet Explorer and NetNewsWire do a good job of using the system proxy information in the Network preferences panel, but only after stopping and restarting them. Mozilla ignores the system setting, having its own setting. The worst part of that is that it isn't location-sensitive. I'm disappointed that Chimera hasn't yet abandoned the Mozilla-style preference in favor of the system-wide setting, but hopefully that'll come in a future release.

Interface Builder is the first GUI builder I've ever used that I didn't really hate. But it still has its drawbacks.

I have quite a few ideas for improving Blapp. I'd love to help Michael McCracken by adding some of these features myself (that seems better than becoming "that pest who asks me for three new features a day"). But that's going to be difficult, because you can't really send patches against the objects.nib file.

I suppose this is just a special case of the problems inherent in collaborative GUI development, but it's still annoying.