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You remind me of an idiot I had to work with once (I'm not saying you're an idiot, just that you remind me of one).

Working on a fairly vanilla stock control app, we were arguing over whether to use mysql or the Zope database (the system was written in Zope - don't get me started). From my side, I favoured mysql as a known quantity, I had run tests/queries with data representing the accumulation of orders etc over number of years, and was happy it worked/performed well. The other guy just wanted to use Zope's DB because it was Zope, and had not done any tests at all (I was later to learn this was his MO).

At one stage, having run out of arguments, he pronounced "But...Innovation is the key!"

I'm fairly proud of the fact that I resisted the temptation to shout in his face "We're writing a fucking Stock Control system - get over yourself."

Great days.

(Bloody kids! Get off my lawn! etc)

An expensive keyboard doesn't typically provide the same value as "the hottest CPU or latest video card".

About ten years ago (or thereabouts) I started to get slight pains in my wrists from typing (I'm a professional programmer). It worried me, and at the time, Microsoft had just launched their ergonomic keyboard. At 100ukp, it was expensive, but I liked the sound of the idea, and thought it might help, and considered my hands were probably worth it.

After about 2 weeks, the pain was completely gone. Of course, you can argue (as with Qwerty to Dvorak change) that it was just because I was using different habits/muscles. However, since then, I've always used Microsoft ergonomic keyboards (along with a few friends, I've built up a small stockpile for when Microsoft totally fuck up the keyboard layout and stop selling decent keyboards), and the pain has never come back.

I'd say saving me from pain/RSI/compulsory career change is pretty good value. Certainly better than being able to run Half Life 2 at a slightly higher resolution, anyway.

I have similar views on mice - I generally buy good ergonomic mice, and am prepared to spend more than 15ukp on them, unlike some people. It just seems worth it for something I'm going to use for 8 hours a day.

However, I have no doubt that this keyboard will suck big time from an ergonomics point of view (even though they're just renders, they look nasty - flat, limited key travel, not split, etc) so I'd have to agree that this is really a gimmick and doesn't provide "a $300 value" as they say these days. They might make it a good ergonomic keyboard, but it seems unlikely.

A good keyboard can provide good value, but I don't see it in this one yet. It's a nice feature, and I can think of lots of nice uses for such a keyboard, but for $300? No.

But in general, most people who use computers a lot should spend more than they do on keyboards, mice and chairs. (And for Cliff's sake, stop using the laptop's built-in keyboard!)

I've tried products like Enfish, but they just wanted to be this huge bloated interface to 'how I work', when what I wanted was a fast search interface. Google Desktop's interface is small and fast. It's what I and I suspect a lot of other people want.

I once read an MSDN article by the guys who started the Windows indexing service - it is a very old product, and does some very clever things, to allow you to search while the index is being updated, etc. However, this never translated into actually being useful - I was always being told I couldn't search because the index was being updated, etc. and the UI was just freaking appalling. It looked like an internal hacked up project that had got shipped by accident.

In short, I think desktop search is popular because people want to find stuff, and they don't want to dick about with bloated and misdirected or poorly designed apps to do it.

When I search, I want to type what I want, see the results, and then the search facility should just get the hell out of my way.

I got so fed up of the Windows file search that I wrote my own indexer. I used to find that with that bloody Microsoft animated dog, in the time it took it to finish animating and start responding to me typing, my own program had run, done the search, and shown me the results.

(To paraphrase a friend of mine, when Google became popular, everyone agreed that, yes, this was how search engines should work and how they should look, etc - everyone that is, apparently, except all the other companies that produce search engines.)

"A good game is only late until it ships. A bad game sucks forever."

Or, to quote Sid Meier:

"Great game. On time. Pick one."

Being a games developer myself, one thing that winds me up is hearing the poor quality of games being blamed on 'lazy developers'. Now, it's true that many games developers may not have the best engineering skills in the world, or be any good at planning/project management, but trust me, having seen so many people work late nights/weekends for long stretches of time, the problem is not that they are 'lazy', or that they don't care about the quality of the product. Lay that particular blame at the doors of other people, where it rightfully belongs.

As for dates - that usually comes down to publishers, rather than developers, as has been pointed out. The publishers push for a date related to their selling peaks (i.e. Thanksgiving), and usually refuse to consider any other date, even though they'll be going up against almost every other game that is released that year. Developers are pretty much powerless to prevent this - unless you're Valve or Bungie or Blizzard, then the publishers have all the money, and they dictate the terms. (Speaking personally, I loved the fact that when Valve demo'd Half-Life 2 at E3 and blew everyone away, they responded to questions about publishers with "We don't have a publisher yet." Unless you've worked in game development, you've probably no idea how good it felt to hear that.)

Publishers also need stuff to give their marketing guys to take around and show buyers to build interest in the game. This usually comes in the form of some shoddy demo/progress build that the developers are harrassed into producing. The same goes for game demos - ever wonder why most game demos don't actually seem to do a good job of demo'ing the game, and have lots of problems that 'will be fixed in the final game'? It's because the publishers demand a demo before the game is finished.

On a game I worked on previously, we tried to avoid building up lots of hype for the game when it wasn't ready, and focussed on quality, because that's what we thought people would be interested in. Hell, no, the publisher didn't seem to care about that. They wanted screenshots, and they wanted them now! Never mind that the game wasn't even a game yet. The most important thing to them seemed to be when the profits would show up on their books. For example, they wouldn't accept a 3 month delay because then the income would slip through to the next financial year. I mean, the profits would be the same (actually, they would probably be significantly larger); they would just be appearing 3 months later. Now, I don't know much about accountancy/finance, but it seems to me that something somewhere is broken if that's how things are run. The best part was, in the trade mags, all we ever heard from games publishers was how developers were useless at business and couldn't see the bigger picture.

If your focus is always on the next quarter's results, at the expense of everything else, I think that's a good way of not having a long term plan.

As another game developer, I'd like to second that. I'd mod it up if I had any mod points :)

Clueless comments in this story like "games fail because the programmers/artists/designers just don't care" just make me grind my teeth in frustration, especially when I usually come up against lots of other people in the industry who are the ones who really don't care.

Sure, it's sometimes the case, but it's pretty damn rare. Games developers are well known for working long hours. If they didn't care, I don't think they'd bother with that. If you think they get paid overtime, dream on.

Tim

Well, apart from this document being for developers, and not for the 'layman', I have a couple of issues with it, and they're mainly due to Apple's "Don't do as I do, do as I say" attitude.

For example: #4 Avoid Custom Controls, and #7 Aqua Is In, Grey Is Out.

Go try out iTunes, QuickTime, etc to see how much Apple thinks "Grey is out" (the window background is non-standard, and grey). iTunes and Quicktime also have custom title bars, and custom resizing gadgets. All of these things are already implemented perfectly well by the standard GUI, so why doesn't Apple use them? It's like when Bill Gates exhorted developers to use the common dialogs to keep the user experience consistent, while MS Office didn't use them.

And #5 - Use A Single Menubar is particularly ironic - I doubt very much that anyone porting a Windows app to MacOS would add a menu to their main window (mainly because it's probably quite hard), while Apple should really read and inwardly digest the main points of this article - i.e. when in Rome, do as the Romans do. Anyone remember QuickTime 4? It had a single menu bar on MacOS - and on Windows too! Of course, Windows doesn't have a 'menu bar', so in one of the most impressive displays of pigheadedness and 'not getting it', Apple decided that QuickTime for Windows should create a floating window whose sole purpose was the have a menu on it. Genius - they managed to get all the disadvantages of both systems, and none of the advantages (the menu wasn't attached to the player window).

And #10 - Reconsider Toolbars still has me puzzled. I never have worked out why Mac users are so insistent that palettes are superior to Toolbars. I always find floating palettes to be a pain in the neck to maintain (as a user) and they're always getting in the way of what I'm trying to do. However, I appreciate that both forms of UI are useful, and wouldn't really be able to honestly state that one is better than the other. Besides, run MS Word, drag a toolbar into the middle of the screen, resize it - looks kinda like a floating palette doesn't it? That said, I can understand why they say not to use toolbars - they're not really a part of the MacOS feel, so they tend to stick out. On the other hand, it is interesting the way half the windows in OSX/Finder use toolbars all over the place. I guess if you make the toolbar icons R-E-A-L-L-Y B-I-G then it's ok for some reason.

Don't get me wrong - this is a useful document, if a little preachy and arrogant ("well, clearly, our UI is better than the crap you poor Windows developers have had to put up with, you sad losers..."), but I just wish Apple would follow their own edicts a bit more closely.

However, the best thing to come out of this slashdot article is that I found out that Mr MacKido (the master of reasoned and unbiased argument) doesn't like MacOS X. The thought of him gnashing his teeth about OSX had me chuckling away for ages :)

Tim

PS. For the record, and to pre-empt some formulaic replies to this posting, I mostly use Windows, but also use a Mac, and I don't always have good things to say about Windows.

Well, apart from this document being for developers, and not for the 'layman', I have a couple of issues with it, and they're mainly due to Apple's "Don't do as I do, do as I say" attitude.

For example: #4 Avoid Custom Controls, and #7 Aqua Is In, Grey Is Out.

Go try out iTunes, QuickTime, etc to see how much Apple thinks "Grey is out" (the window background is non-standard, and grey). iTunes and Quicktime also have custom title bars, and custom resizing gadgets. All of these things are already implemented perfectly well by the standard GUI, so why doesn't Apple use them? It's like when Bill Gates exhorted developers to use the common dialogs to keep the user experience consistent, while MS Office didn't use them.

And #5 - Use A Single Menubar is particularly ironic - I doubt very much that anyone porting a Windows app to MacOS would add a menu to their main window (mainly because it's probably quite hard), while Apple should really read and inwardly digest the main points of this article - i.e. when in Rome, do as the Romans do. Anyone remember QuickTime 4? It had a single menu bar on MacOS - and on Windows too! Of course, Windows doesn't have a 'menu bar', so in one of the most impressive displays of pigheadedness and 'not getting it', Apple decided that QuickTime for Windows should create a floating window whose sole purpose was the have a menu on it. Genius - they managed to get all the disadvantages of both systems, and none of the advantages (the menu wasn't attached to the player window).

And #10 - Reconsider Toolbars still has me puzzled. I never have worked out why Mac users are so insistent that palettes are superior to Toolbars. I always find floating palettes to be a pain in the neck to maintain (as a user) and they're always getting in the way of what I'm trying to do. However, I appreciate that both forms of UI are useful, and wouldn't really be able to honestly state that one is better than the other. Besides, run MS Word, drag a toolbar into the middle of the screen, resize it - looks kinda like a floating palette doesn't it? That said, I can understand why they say not to use toolbars - they're not really a part of the MacOS feel, so they tend to stick out. On the other hand, it is interesting the way half the windows in OSX/Finder use toolbars all over the place. I guess if you make the toolbar icons R-E-A-L-L-Y B-I-G then it's ok for some reason.

Don't get me wrong - this is a useful document, if a little preachy and arrogant ("well, clearly, our UI is better than the crap you poor Windows developers have had to put up with, you sad losers..."), but I just wish Apple would follow their own edicts a bit more closely.

However, the best thing to come out of this slashdot article is that I found out that Mr MacKido (the master of reasoned and unbiased argument) doesn't like MacOS X. The thought of him gnashing his teeth about OSX had me chuckling away for ages :)

Tim

PS. For the record, and to pre-empt some formulaic replies to this posting, I mostly use Windows, but also use a Mac, and I don't always have good things to say about Windows.