Mac Fan Boy

Recently on Twitterfall, we've been removing certain settings due to lack of use or their expendability. Removing settings also means that we don't have to test as many options as well as support different features. Often when we do this, we get several complaints that someone's favourite feature is missing.

In the next series of updates, more settings have been removed. However, this time we're going to show you numbers to at least give a good idea as to why these specific settings had been removed. These results are based off random sampling and the sample size is 6 figures.

Animation

The animation setting has been completely removed. The setting had turned into a boolean field (containing only two options) and we found that very few people actually used the non-default setting, as shown below.

You may notice that the setting pertaining to the showing of retweets is also a boolean field, and you may ask "Why has that not been removed?". The usage of the retweet setting is very similar to that of the animation setting as seen below. However, we believe that this is a piece of core functionality and therefore should remain.

Speed

In the following chart, smaller numbers refer to a faster speed. We've decided to remove the 3000 option, and have renamed the other options to Default, Fast, and Faster. 3000 refers to a tweet being shown every 3 seconds, therefore it may be more beneficial to use the hover-pause system,

Text Size 

Text size is a setting that requires a lot of testing, due to the layout change when it is reset. Therefore, removing any of the following settings would give us less work to do.

Therefore, we've decided to remove the Small setting, which is only used in 1% of cases. The new settings are Default, Large, Larger, and Largest. 

Fall Size

The fall size setting has been cut down to the following three options: Default, Large, and Larger. If you look at this chart, you'll see the use of different sizes as they're currently distributed:

As you can see, the majority of use is in the default value of 20. The second largest distribution is for 200 and the third seems to be a tie between 50 and 100. The new settings are 20, 75, and 200. While the usage of 75 isn't that high, we believe that 75 offers something to both the users using 50 and users using 100. 

In conclusion, it's plain to see that many of the options we provide aren't greatly used and hence are expendable. This allows us to concentrate on new features without being bogged down in tests and support.

Just a bonus - this is the distribution of languages as used in our sample.

Recently, we've been giving presentations regarding our dissertations. For the most part, this involves writing slides to show what you need them to show.

A friend was trying to highlight some text within OpenOffice Impress but in the Mac version of this software it would appear that this feature has been removed. The slides were originally created in Google Docs and featured the highlighted text. Exporting the slides as a PDF lead to complications with typefaces and exporting as a PowerPoint file meant that highlighted text was no longer highlighted. 

So we tried Keynote. 

In Keynote, you are incapable of highlighting text, the text Inspector shows this:

However, I was sure that this functionality was available in Pages. I opened Pages and wrote some dummy text, selected it and opened the Inspector. This extra functionality was available:

 So the feature exists in Pages but not Keynote. If you then copy the highlighted text into Keynote it remains highlighted, with no way to change the highlight.

It would seem that people don't need to highlight text in presentations.