August 21 2009

Rainbow pies

Before and after comparison of the tip that will save millions from tragic mis-clicks.It is extremely unlikely that you have both Google Chrome and Activity Monitor in Memory Usage mode in your OS X Dock. If you do, though, you’d find the icons hard to distinguish out of the corner of your eye. I moved them to opposite ends of the Dock, but this made it even worse. This is because they clash with the #2 rule of icon usability: keeping icons distinct in shape and colour.1 Activity Monitor made this easy to solve2, but it served as a nice reminder that varying your icons’ shape and colour is worth it, even if your design aesthetic wants them to match.

  1. The #1 rule of icon usability is to make them simple enough to distinguish what the hell they are. [↩]
  2. My new Activity Monitor colour scheme is much better than the default anyway, since I’m only using it to notice when I run out of free memory and am about to enter Swap Hell. [↩]

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9 Comments

  1. Thomas
    Aug 21 2009
    10:13 am

    $50 on newegg: 4GB DDR2 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820145184 you can thank me later.

  2. Allen
    Aug 21 2009
    12:07 pm

    This is on my work desktop, which I wasn’t able to configure myself. If I had, it would have had a lot more gigabytes and a lot less gigahertz. 1:1 is usually my goal, but by that metric this machine needs 18GB more RAM.

    Anyway, more is on its way, although I doubt it’ll be the FB-DIMM that came with the machine. I was looking at the RAM that came with it, and it’s $999 for 4GB more: http://store.apple.com/us/product/MB193G/B?mco=NDY5NzU2Mg I hope it’s diamond encrusted, or something.

  3. Curtis
    Aug 21 2009
    1:54 pm

    I wish Macs did more to avoid Swap Hell. It’s hard to escape – the computer is too busy swapping all over the damn place to quit any apps.

  4. Allen
    Aug 21 2009
    4:50 pm

    Something that seems to help it swap out inactive apps is to Hide them (in the current app’s App menu, choose Hide Others.) The system seems to start considering the hidden apps more inactive. YMMV.

  5. Steven Fisher
    Aug 26 2009
    10:39 pm

    I think your colour scheme might be downplaying the usefulness of Inactive memory.

  6. Allen
    Aug 26 2009
    10:41 pm

    Inactive means disk access is required for it to be available. Disk access means performance hell. It would be nice if I could tell OS X, “If I have inactive memory and less than 10% free, swap out.”

  7. Steven Fisher
    Aug 27 2009
    9:41 am

    Isn’t “inactive” reserved for memory in use that can be swapped out *without needing to write it to disk*?

  8. Steven Fisher
    Aug 27 2009
    9:53 am

    I see I’m wrong: pages are listed in Inactive even if they’re going to have to be written to be swapped out.

    Odd choice. The one is free memory just waiting for use, the other has a high cost.

  9. Allen
    Aug 27 2009
    10:12 am

    Yeah, I had thought that too, but found differently from the performance consequences of running out of free memory.

What do you think?