"I love Jakob for a lot of reasons, but most of all because he sides with the user, the customer, the human being who wants to just find the damn information."Yes, Jakob has occasionally blurted out some arguably good points. And I'll even concede the fact that he is probably one of more usable usability experts around. But I find Doc's above statement rather obtuse. I'm sure that I'm not the only person who has had a whopping hard time finding "the damn information" on Jakob's own site. And what is it with usability experts and their hair? Physical appearance is ultimately a person's very own user interface, and other people need to interact with your interface. I mean, can't these guys find a comb? You beta, you beta, you bet. AppleInsider has an in depth look at the next full version revs of Adobe's workhorse image applications, Photoshop and ImageReady. The Photoshop 6.0 feature list is impressively massive, including such gems as on-screen text entry a la ImageReady 2.0, OpenType support (now all we need is for Adobe to starting shipping some OpenType fonts), removal of the 99 layer limit (yes, this has been a peeve of mine for quite a while), much improved layer and palette management, some snarky looking layer styles, and woo hoo!, print preview.
A questionable addition to the mix is a context sensitive toolbar that docks to either the top or bottom of the screen. A toolbar theoretically takes up less vertical real estate, but since you can logically only display a subset of the controls that a full palette could contain, you're probably going to have both the toolbar and a palette visible at the same time anyway. I must be missing something here. Organizing and grouping huge numbers of controls and options was why Adobe went to great pains to develop its groovy palette architecture in the first place, wasn't it?
"Removed meaningless entry of 27 May."Now that's editing without guilt. Albert is a spiffy little Mac utility that can execute AppleScripts remotely via email. It operates by parsing the subject line for the names of scripts, and other specific commands. Via MacNN I'm working on a photographic piece for a charity art auction being held at our office. From its conception it was going to be a Polaroid composite of some sort. A couple of weeks ago I started thinking about visual themes and the type of substrate to mount the images onto. Then I had a revelation. Instead of using one of my trusty SX-70 cameras, I bought a Polaroid iZone. Totally low-res, self-adhesive instant photography in lime green plastic. I'm not stopping after the auction either. Forget the Post-It note reminders plastered on the monitor, we're going completely image-based from now on.
Self portrait using the iZone. I shaved off my beard and moustache last August. Maybe I should get off the pot and update the moderately self-aggrandizing icon at the top of the page.
Once Adobe finally got the bigger picture and bought GoLive, it basically nailed PageMill's coffin shut. Given that there are hundreds of thousands of copies of PageMill out in the world, there's still an ample amount of support information available on the Adobe site. Grab it while you can. An interesting thing to note, the domain name of PageMill's original developer, Ceneca Communications, is currently available. Ars Technica has posted another episode of their boundless and evenhanded review of Mac OS X. This time they put the screws to changes in the DP4 release, get all niggly with the details of code bundles and application packages, and wax poetic on the user experience.
"Aside from the reclaimed pixels and small concession towards Dock organization, my previous complaints about the Dock still stand. It's still one-dimensional, it still presents moving targets of finite height, it still lacks text labels without a mouse-over, it still takes up too much screen real estate, it still tries to fill too many roles, and it's still a very poor substitute for the functionality missing in DP4."A couple of the more interesting tidbits mentioned in this article include the probably use of vector graphics in the new QuickTime player GUI, and Apple's guidelines for creating Mac OS X icons.
Just getting this screen dump was an adventure in itself. First of all, the files on the Applefritter site are images of 400KB MFS (Macintosh File System) formatted floppies. Unfortunately, backwards compatibility in any OS only goes so far and current versions of Mac OS cannot read MFS disks. I downloaded DiskCopy 4.2, which will read MFS images and create a new disk, but this only did me so good because my Mac can't mount 400KB floppies. I ended up popping the newly formatted disk into my nine year old PowerBook 170, took a screen dump, turned on file sharing, and copied the file over to the Power Mac. Now relaxed and scrolling through the listing one more time, memories of simpler days are coming back to me. Just a boy, his Mac II, a 40MB hard drive, and a Talking Moose. The magic monopolistic corporate question of the day seems to be whether Microsoft should be split into two parts or three? Hell, let's just run the whole works through a Veg-o-matic and make us some software salsa. No, it's not the end of the world as we know it. It's just a Flash player detection script that works across multiple browser versions and platforms. More stuff from too cool moock. Via Metafilter
"At this stage in the game, Classic Menu is being made freely available in unrestricted form to give a helping hand to other developers trying to get a day's work done on Apple's newly-emasculated interface."Of course the drawback is that Classic Menu's apple icon appears on the right hand side of the menu bar, where the application menu should be. But that's only because Apple decided that the application-specific menu would be on the left hand side of the menu bar where the Apple menu was once located. Simple, no? Now if we could just get rid of that insipid, unclickable blue icon in the middle on the menu bar... Creating machines that interact more effectively with humans may require the use of natural methods of communication such as speech and vision. Designers need to shift away from the idea that simplification of the user interface and the automation of tasks allow users to learn and interact more effectively. Technology should begin to use commonplace means of exchanging information such as seeing, speaking, and listening, the same ways that humans have been interacting for millennia. A group calling themselves the Marlin Project have taken the open source QuickTime Streaming Server and gosh darn it all, ported it to Mac OS 9. An interesting side note to this is that they list BIAP Systems as one of their partners. BIAP is the brainchild of the staggeringly quaint Chuck Shotton, who was the original developer of the WebStar web server. Hmmm. I'm sensing a theme here. How about at least one post without any mention of Adobe? Kodak is licensing QuickTime to stuff into their next-generation of sweet, mega-pixelly consumer devices.
"QuickTime is established, broadly used and, most important, easy to use. These are key characteristics when you want to make technology broadly useful and fun for consumers."Broadly speaking, Kodak may be onto something here. These "key characteristics" are the same that you would find in fun consumer products like alcohol and handguns. And as we all know, consumers just can't seem to get enough of them can they? Adobe vs. Macromedia: Tale of the Tape puts the two software heavyweights under the fly-sizzling beam of the corporate magnifying glass. This time it's all about cash flow and spreadsheets, instead of text flow and style sheets. I am so sick of people referring to LiveMotion as a "Flash killer". Yes, it has a bunch of features not offered by Macromedia's own dynamic gizmo builder. Yes, it is extremely well integrated with other Adobe apps. Yes, it has a totally non-lame timeline window. Yes, it's a Flash "compatible" authoring tool. No, it's not a Flash "killer". I mean, this release doesn't even support Adobe's next best shot, the W3C-blessed scalable vector graphics format. By the way, Adobe shipped it yesterday. Could QuarkXPress 5 actually ship by the end of the year? Stranger things have happened. Quark is showing off the latest beta at Drupa this week. Idling in neutral on the feature-soaked what's new list is one item dear to heart of modern prepress warriors - direct application support for creating PDFs. Who cares who is to blame. If Adobe and Quark could just put down the boxing gloves for a little while, and stop pelting each other with technology integration pot-shots, they may be able to pull the PDF rabbit out of the hat after all. Personally, even with a few aggravating usability holdovers from the Aldus days, I'm still using PageMaker mainly because of its solid PDF support and a consistent, Adobe-preened interface. Yesterday was a holiday in Canada, so I spent much of the obviously extended weekend planting veggies and installing a new screen door on the back of the house. Honestly, there is nothing quite like the smell of freshly sawn aluminum. Why am I telling you this? Because I figured it would be polite to let you know that it's taking me a bit more time than planned to get back into the blog this week. Right now, I'm deduping and validating 110,000 email addresses so I can send out our monthly product newsletter. Rest assured that as soon as this puppy is put to bed, some new postings will be on their way. Really.
"My fundamental problem with the Internet industry today is that a huge percentage of the "dot coms" are companies based on stupid ideas that are executing on those stupid ideas very poorly."Thanks, Rafe. I have been trying to put a similar revelation into plain English for months. There are too many startups out there who seem to confuse burn rate scars and venture capital drool with useful concepts and marketable services. A Kaleidoscope scheme that was "identical or confusingly similar to Apple's Aqua theme for its Mac OS X system" has been pulled from circulation by its author. I understand the need for protection of certain types of intellectual property and industrial design concepts, but wouldn't it make more sense for Apple to encourage the adoption of Aqua prior to the release of OS X, than to squash an obvious grassroots interest in it? Oh, I guess I answered my own question there didn't it?
"You can use the new Finder almost exactly like the old Finder if you like, but you won't want to. This is high praise indeed."The transition to OS X is looking like it will be a lot smoother than many people imagined. There are still a lot of compatibility and usability issues, specifically with apps in the Classic environment. This is where the majority of transitioned and new users of OS X will experience confusion. Nice job so far though. A bug that was swashed in Internet Explorer over three years ago has appeared once again in IE 5. Files are exposed. The Java runtime is implicated. No word on a fix. Yadda, yadda, yadda.
"With each new task, the look of a polymorphic robot is impossible to predict, because each design is "evolved" using a genetic algorithm. The physical structure, and the neural network that will be the brains of the proposed robot, are treated like genetic information that can be combined and mutated in simulation to produce entirely new designs."The goal of these robots seems to be service and task related, but imagine if this kind of technology could be miniaturized enough to be applied to makeup or fashion. You could purchase self-regulated, temporary plastic surgery kits. Or perhaps morphing jewelery that changed shape based the amount of ambient light. Toys could be programmed to rebuild themselves in a stronger, more durable form by learning from damage sustained during play time. A story of woe update. I'm cheering up. It looks like I won't have to reimport a mass of email messages after all. I rebuilt the email database file using Emailer's built-in utility (You can access it by holding down the option key on launch). Rebuilding ignores all of the permanently deleted messages, indexing only the active ones.
But wait! You would think that these high-tech twins would stop there, but no. The duplicitous fun continues when you discover that both companies offer internet-based e-business applications. Coincidence? I think not. And people think I'm obsessive because I still insist on using a Newton rather than moving over to a Palm. (Please note that I didn't say "move up to a Palm".) Just get a load of this bunch. Here's the real reason why those Microsofties still have a job. A fully carbonized version of Internet Explorer for Mac OS X is coming down the pipe. So it's not really that big of deal to take a properly written app that runs under OS 9 and make it jiggy to OS X, but I still find this encouraging.
"The amount of new development that's taking place right now inside of Microsoft for the Mac platform is probably more than has happened at any point in our history. It's a very exciting time to be developing for the platform."How much of this is pure corporate public relations pap? Who knows. But, as long as they're still talking about it, they're probably still working on it. Forget the rumors. There's tons of real-live skinny pouring out of Apple's Worldwide Developer conference in San Jose. Some of the highlights:
No new hardware announcements yet, but the week is still young. Everybody is going to feel so good after this conference, that they're all going to go straight out and order some long overdue upgrades...Final API specs available in Mac OS X DP4
"It becomes imperative that the individual designing Web pages understand how this environment offers organizational structures that are both like and unlike those with which we are most familiar."It's just too bad that we need to remind the people responsible for developing sites of this sort of thing. It's the basis of the web itself. I am sure that many people would agree that 90% of designers only use 10% of the functionality built into Photoshop. Sure, it's comforting to know it's there, but really, when was the last time you used the Channel Mixer in monochrome mode, or applied an interpolated De-interlace filter? If you spend most of your waking hours creating nothing but drop shadowed text banners for your uncle's taxidermy site, maybe it's time to put away the dockable tabbed-palettes and take a peek at text2graphic. This natty little image processor, chock full of German software engineering, can spit out five different styles of the same graphic from a list of text items faster than you can "Revert to saved..." It even has a rollover state preview window. It's Mac only, but isn't that the way all useful things should be?
Date: 05/11/2000 1:49 PMOn a related note, I've had this plastic wrapped slice of soy cheese sitting unrefrigerated on a book shelf in my office for over a year. Looking back, I wish I had inked a starting date on the thing. I came in the other morning and Howie had mounted it in a shadow box frame.
Received: 05/11/2000 1:53 PM
From: Reech Sixto, reech@home.com
To: Grant Hutchinson, grant@splorp.com
I think we should do a Canadian version in January.
It would probably go something like this.
A rightly deserved tribute to processed soy food products don't you think?
Besides shopping cart and shopping basket, I've run across a shopping bag at the Canadian online bookmonger, Chapters.ca, but what else is out there? Have you ever had a client insist on calling it a product bucket or a digital asset collector? Let me know and I'll post the fun here. Please have your coupons ready. I wish I had stumbled across the Best Practices for Designing Shopping Cart and Checkout Interfaces white paper on dack.com before slogging through user-testing on a couple of iterations of my company's site. I can't say that I agree with everything mentioned in this piece, but some key points triggered more than a few latent synapses. I'm sure this bit of web design wisdom has been blogged to death already, but after reading it I figured it would be worth a few more bytes. The once mighty battle cry of the Quark Killer has been rather faint of late. It's been a constant battle with uncooperative service bureaus, complaints of a marginally complete feature set, and a hard-headed Quark user base with heels firmly dug into the desktop mud. However, Adobe is slowly, but surely gaining users of InDesign, its über-layout engine.
"One of the most-criticized elements of Aqua was the Dock, a catch-all area at the bottom of the screen that contains icons representing minimized files and windows, active applications, favorite applications that have not been launched, the trash and other elements. Critics complained that the Dock tried to replace too many disparate functions, such as a launcher, application switcher and window manager."File and folder dragging behaviors have also been revisited. I'm happy to see this level of user interaction and control adjustment this late in the development stage. Apple is actually listening to the people who are going to be developing for and using this OS. It's not surprising, given how Apple sprung the whole Aqua thing on us in the first place. Kodak goes back to the future and figures if they rerelease basically the same technology enough times, people may actually start using it. When will imaging companies learn that people just don't want to look at their photos on their television. Even though a Kodak spokesperson says:
"...the PC is not where most people want to share photos. We want to bring it back to the living room, where it belongs."I'm having trouble imagining this happening anytime soon. Maybe all the people I know are in some sort of luddite bubble, but none of them want to share photos over the net or sit in front of glowing phosphor dots when reliving their summer vacation. It's time to limber up your digits for some advanced three finger keyboarding. Forget that archaic ctrl-alt-del move your cube-neighbor has been practicing on his Pentium. You need fancier manoeuvres. You need to push modifier key combinations to the limit. You don't need to simply reboot your box, you need to modify the entire startup sequence on your Mac. Of all the examples, my personal favorite is Command-X-O, which will get a Macintosh Classic to boot using a minimal ROM-based System 6 disk image. That reminds me, I should probably rebuild my desktop. What Font Is This? outlines tips, techniques, and resources for identifying typefaces. I've spent a fair portion of the last dozen years performing font identification for customers and designer friends alike. It can be very satisfying to nail a design on the head without even peeking at a specimen book. Modern display type is generally straight-forward, but the influx of sixties and seventies influenced retro-faces has made the chore a bit more challenging. Text faces are another animal altogether. Sometimes being able to tell one transitional serif face from another reminds me of a story about this guy who could recognize individual movements of music by simply looking at the groove patterns on a vinyl record album. It all too subtle.
"For instance, the shading is very sensitive to the size it is used in. Too big and the effect is lost, the lines are too rough. Too small and the lines clog up. This is remedied by a range of optical sizes for the shading."A massive range of textural and coloring effects can be created using these various font layers. I've seen layered type families before, but this is a truly fascinating application. So, you think that your favorite computing platform is going to protect you like a Bondi blue condom from the amorous advances of some coworker? Here's a little reminder that everybody can be infected by a digital STD. Non-stop technology entertainment. Amidst all of the virii chasing and Microsoft-focused "I told you so's" that echoed down the halls of our office last week, our information services department also took delivery of ten (count'em ten) top-end G4's.
The easy part of getting these delicious, graphite-bejeweled lovelies in-house was justifying their purchase instead of the corporate favorite - a bunch of black-like-a-miner's-lung Dell machines. The hard part? Keeping people from drooling all over the boxes. Bummer. Array, one of my favorite design related blogs to grok, has apparently ceased to be. The circulating word is that the proprietor shut it down due to an issue with the Pike and Manila Express graphics that had been "modified" on the WinerLog site. As much as I like to see Dave get his butt paddled in public, I think the loss of Array outweighs anything that could possibly be added to the blogging community by WinerLog.
Subject: ethics or guidelines for weblogs?And another opinion...
Date: 04/05/2000 02:21 AM
From: Jeffrey Zeldman, jeffrey@zeldman.com
To: Grant Hutchinson, grant@splorp.com
i go back and edit stuff all the time.
it's my site. it's your site.
especially if something i wrote was incorrect, i reserve the right to fix it. perhaps it was even something potentially libelous. i look at it hours later, smack myself on the head, and change it. should i leave mistakes dangling forever in cyberspace, merely because i was foolish enough to post them the first time?
it's really no different than correcting an html or javascript error that you missed. or replacing a lame graphic with a better one, a few days later, when you have the time to do it right.
thank god we CAN edit our work - as often as needed.
that's my take on it, anyway.
jeffrey
Subject: blog question discussionTo paraphrase one of my replies, we are the creators and owners of our content, therefore we are responsible for it. We are fortunate that we have the capability to update, edit, recompose, adjust, noodle, and otherwise futz around with our work after the fact. At some point, we do need to leave it alone and move on to other things. The difficulty is knowing when to stop. I'm stopping now. If I could arrange that every piece of obsolete computer equipment could be spruced up and given to a good home, I'd be one happy guy. There's nothing I hate to see more than someone tossing out a perfectly good piece of hardware. My home and office are both growing, physical testaments to this fact. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, if you were to ask my wife) reality and common sense does set in and some poor machine must get left at the curb. More and more frequently, junked computers are ending up at the recyclers rather than the landfill, but it's requiring the recyclers to adapt to the new material.
Date: 04/05/2000 03:23 PM
From: Miles Baskett, info@winterbeach.com
To: Grant Hutchinson, grant@splorp.com
Anal? maybe not, I have _deleted_ stuff that I was embarrassed about, but even if on re-reading content it sounds "lame", that was a valid thought at the time. That's where the flavor of any given site comes from. I find it hard to come up with content every day and would rather let it slide than just throw something up and see what sticks. Ha, this may be hard to believe when I go back over some of the stuff I write, but that is that.
As far as correcting content by re-editing, I would add a later update (but thats just me). Link corrections are another matter, assuming you archive your previous posts. You don't want someone trying to get at an out of date url. Or if a site is gone (whatever) cut it.
Anyway, I like you site. Haven't had a chance to look at back posts, so don't change them for a couple of days.
Miles
"So where do the recycled computers go? A Massachusetts company has developed a pothole filler that can be made with the plastic recovered from discarded computers."I love this! Rather than being left on the curb, they get turned into the road. I wonder if you could start specifying the computer platform used for the pothole filler through feedback via your municipal tax payments?
"In the short term though, it is going to cause even more of a headache because you can no longer be certain that type on a Mac is going to be one size and on a PC, another - not that you ever could! A great many Mac-oriented sites are now going to display larger fonts than originally intended, making them look crude and schoolbookish."When the browsers all followed their own set of standards, you could bet that at least one of them would display portions of your site reasonably close to how you intended. However, as browsers get closer to sanctioned standards compliance across the board, we'll get mostly consistent, nearly cross-platform display of content. Maybe. Someone has got to be pulling my leg, because this is way too intelligent a product to exist. Imagine if you will, a USB adapter cable with a built in SCSI controller that allows you to connect up to seven SCSI devices via a single USB port on either a Mac or Windows computer. Wah! And these guys make USB to ATA/ATAPI and FireWire to SCSI adapters too. The bad news? There's no information on the SCM site on where to purchase these products. And to top it all off, they've got some goofy-footed JavaScript navigation that keeps locking me onto the products page while using Mac Navigator. Crap! Don't people test their sites with anything other than Windows MSIE?
I couldn't want for anything else. And the best part? No mention of a toolbar in sight. Still, it's not even beta yet. Things can change. All the QuickTime technology and digital content delivery news you could possibly digest in a single sitting can be found at qt.dk One gem from today's catch is mention of a new QuickTime-based slide show editing tool from Totally Hip Software that looks like it could butt heads with Real Networks' frustratingly lame and intercap-plagued RealSlideShow Plus. Are multiprocessor Macs finally on the way? Well, if you can lend any credence to the sporadically published skinny over at AppleInsider, we might just start seeing graphite-clad dual and quad G4 boxes by the middle of May. Sound too good to be true? Well, a timely announcement could coincide with Apple's mondo geekfest, the World Wide Developer Conference starting May 14th. And while we're on the topic of people needing more exposure to natural light, I found this little nugget on the main conference information page:
Also at WWDC 2000, we're pleased to announce that five AppleMasters - Sinbad, Herbie Hancock, James Woods, Gregory Hines, and Bryan Adams - will give captivating presentations. These infectious devotees will speak at 8:00 p.m. on Monday, May 15.Infectious devotees? A word to the wise if you're thinking of attending any of the "captivating presentations" - make sure you've had your shots.
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