CC: flickr, "Lightning and Stars" By Bill Liao http://flickr.com/photos/liao/

I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with sleep. I can remember being so upset I couldn’t sleep because I had to go to bed. Maybe this has bled into the present.

The funny part of it all, is I’d much rather not be asleep most of the time. My wife has always confused me with her desire, pretty continuously, to be unconscious. There is so much to think about, to read, to play, to discuss—why sleep?

So, now, it’s 2:15. I know that tomorrow I will feel wretched, and that can’t help. It started by me so very nearly falling asleep around 11:00. It’s been boiling, and I don’t really get on well with hot weather—especially when it’s so humid. I thought I had it tonight, though, with a nice cool bath, then In bed at a reasonable time to watch My Family with Wendy on iPlayer. That ended, so I switched on “Just a Minute” and turned down the screen until it was dark. I dozed off towards the end, only to be woken by something beeping somewhere. It stopped, but the damage had been done.

Next I switched on “Quote, Unquote” and walked downstairs for a glass of water, and had a bottle of lager instead, hoping the little alcohol might help a bit. It’s so much cooler down stairs, so I decided to remove myself to the sofa, still with “Quote, Unquote”. I had just settled when my phone dinged. It had finally delivered a message to Wendy, I’d sent before dinner.

Image by . SantiMB . (too busy) via Flickr

I grew up in a Mac family. My dad used to programme accounts recievable applications on an old, black and white Macintosh, and that was my first encounter with any sort of GUI. Since then, I’ve used both Mac’s and PC’s and have a MacBook for work and a poorly-running, but still brand-new Vista box in my home study. I’ve even dabbled with Linux several times.

However, I’m starting to realise something: an aweful lot of applications (on every platform) get aesthetics completely wrong.

There’s a balance between looking nice, feeling comfortable, and aiding use. I think that the appearance of an application is as important a part of the design as the application itself. It’s a part of the usability, it’s not ‘eye candy’ slapped on for gratuitous reasons.

This is something Mac’s understand, and their GUI is gorgeous. Vista’s pretty good-looking itself, but that’s it’s problem: that’s all it is. The operating system is huge, heavy, slow and unpredictible. It crashes, hangs, and takes minutes to load. I bought a brand new (though admittedly budget-conscious PC) from a manufacturer who shall remain nameless (cough! Dell! cough…) which barely runs just the OS. I’ve had to triple the RAM and will be re-installing this weekend.

So, what Can I do about it? I can switch Aero off… leaving me with a huge, heavy, unpredictable and slightly-less-slow OS which is now ugly. So there’s Vista, tipping in the balance with an “eye candy” approach at aesthetic design.

I see the visual layout, graphics, and overall presence of an application as part of it’s feature-set.