First off, I do think Nintendo HAS historically been at the forefront of meainstreaming new controller design, from D-pads to Shoulder buttons to crosspad-aranged regular buttons to analog sticks and analog triggers.
But the bias here is funny, Atari gets bashed for not being "really analog" (duh) in the first generation and only having 8 directions, but Nintendo gets praised for bringing, which while probably an improvement in comfort and some responsiveness, really has about 4 directions, not even 8...
Nice to see the shoutout to Bionic Commando...it proved that the GB could do super-solid NES ports, and was to the NES what the GBA would later be to the SNES.
It anime'd things up, took out the Hitler, added a few levels and took out the old school Commando, but it played great...much better than the buggy GBC version that came out a bit later. I also missed the prelude and postlude that the NES had, where you find out it was a story told by Super Joe, but still.
Splash screen. Talks about the philisophical definition.
* Click on Enter
Random hexagons, with a weird UI...clicking doesn't do anything, you have to hold and hover. And then all the identical hexagons rearrange themselves, so if by some chance you want to see each splash screen, you have to keep track of all 7 yourself. Artsy, annoying.
Oh look, a final mention of the word Products, with a region dropdown
* Click on USA
Another spashscreen that says NOTHING but "QUALIA" and enter site.
* Click on ente site
Another artsy screen. Music. Nature. Touchy Feely phrases.
* Click on products
FINALLY I have *some* frickin' idea what they're selling. AV stuff. Great.
Man, this whole thing Infiniti started, trying to provoke moods and hide what you're actually doing...it's kind of annoying. Good riddance to Qualia. Though I dig the name.
That Black Covered Player's Guide was even more interesting...its maps of Metroid made me get an NES, I knew that nothing quite like it was going to be coming out for the C=64, even if the latter was a more powerful system.
Actually that map may have helped make me the gaming wuss I am today. It seems like that game with all its hidden stuff would be almost impossible to get through without some kind of outside support...
If at some point we get an AI that the researcher has to have pangs about turning off/shutting down, in terms of having a unique intelligence , then there's gonna be a good chance that a few years later, we have similar moral issues in games....
I, for one, find logo design kind of interesting, I guess because of my interest in the visual qualities of things, and because they can often be a little bit of cleverness packed into a very small, flexible space.
I think a logo tends to be a smallish part of a brand, but a useful hook for it, and if it gets big enough you can start to have fun with it.
Re, your $20 jeans...the fact is how we dress, including brands, is the short story we tell ourselves to the outside world. Whether you like it or not you are sending a message "I am either poor or don't give a damn about this kind of issue".
Me, I tend to wear "Old Navy", which is kind of a non-brand brand, or at least it says "I care a bit about fashion and how I look, but not enough to want to spend a lot of money or time on it, and I like to keep things on the casual/youth-ish side."
The funny thing is, as much as you want to dismiss this kind of shallow, first-impression thinking, it's actually quite powerful and surprisingly accurate. I can't find the reference, but I remember a study where they had students give their gut reaction to a professor after a very short exposure, and then asked them how they felt at the end of the semester, and the results were very similar...and they could even make that "initial expousre" ridiculously small, like less than 30 seconds of reocorded video, and it didn't change the results much. (And whether its self-fufilling prophecy or not is almost immaterial)
So just because you're not into branding, and/or wish people weren't so damn "shallow", well, too bad, it's how the world works, especially one as crowded as this one.
I did like this one line: [On having to cook for his son's new vegetarian diet] "I mean, how hard could it be to cook vegetables? What's the recipe for Broccoli? Oh yeah, right...'Broccoli'!"
Which means, in GTA, to make sure I have the "pedal to the metal" I have always mash mash mash. Very hard on the thumbs. I keep some pre-2 "normal" Dual Shocks around just for that reason.
Until recently I worked at one of the more significant Salestax / VAT software places.
Frankly it's all a bit of a mess. Some place, like Louisana with its Parrishes, are just crazy. These tax companies are hoping to get in on the Streamlined Sales Tax Initiative, where they would act as Service Providers, giving retailers an easy way to cover their bases, but not every state wants to play along, because a lot of the states have different definitions for how to handle locations and what not.
In the 90s, I used to be against online tax just because I wanted to see companies like Amazon etc suceed. Now that online shopping is a pretty well established part of life, I can kind of see the desire to level the playing field a bit more.
I don't know, I think the Boosterism is an important thing, because it influnces was platform choices are made going into the future. You can't always get hired on general smarts and ability to learn, so it's nice if you're reasonably versed in some of the hotter topics.
I dunno, I don't think Perl on Windows is so awful.
I wouldn't neccesarily want to do a server project, and I don't think there's a GUI library for it worth a damn, but for the usual admin-y file crunching and what not it's not much worse than on *Nix.
Re:The real 90s versus outdated 00s software
on
Java Is So 90s
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· Score: 1
Hmm. I think the incompatabilities are sometimes less at the JVM level and more at the "Application Server" level stuff, at least for web server based kind of things. J2EE in general is only so-so at write once, run anywhere.
"As they say in my country, the only thing that separates us from the animals are mindless superstition and pointless ritual." --Latka Gravas in "Taxi"
Glad to see we're keeping this very friendly in tone... and it's a pretty interesting chat.
Open up KeyCaps (or whatever they call it in OS X) and experiment. To type an accented E, you type Option-E E. An accented I, Option-E I, etc.
Hmmm, couldn't find "KeyCaps" or whatever...
*Ctrl- is by far the most commonly used one and maps very well to "Cmd" on Mac.
Except it's in the wrong place, which drives me nuts.:) But yeah.
Are you one of those guys who wants it where most kbds have the caps key?
That's one thing Apple laptops do well...PC wise my laptop at home has ctrl and "fn" swapped from where they are at my one at work. Almost makes up for the one two few touchpad buttons...
One other random gripe....I'm missing a "backspace" key! They ain't the same thing. (And I'm encountering more problems with keymapping, ssh'ing to servers where emacs says delete means what it does on PC, even though it's where the backspace should be on Mac....)
What is the "Command-Q" vs. "Command-W" mixup? As a Mac user, that's my normal way of working and the Windows way is screwy.
They guy who really talked up the "Switch" to me admits that he presses one when he means to hit the other, and I do it sometimes...I mean, they're right frickin' next to each other.
(Case in point: Say I want to close one Word document on Windows and start another. I hit control-W to close my document, and the whole program closes! So now to start a new document, I have to wait for the *whole program* to start back up again! As a Mac user, that strikes me as dumb.)
Counterpoint: I close my last window. Guess I'm done! What the hell is it doing still sitting around taking system resources? You mean I gotta look up at the menu bar, make sure I'm still in the correct app, and THEN hit cmd-Q?
I haven't had much of a "whole program" issue, due to good caching algroithms it seems like opening an app a second time is much faster than the first time.
Command-W = "stop working with this document." Command-Q = "stop working with this application." Documents != Applications. Perfectly sensible, IMO.
Another Counterpoint: it seems like guess work if clicking on a Dock app will open up a new window or not...if you've forgotten if, say, Finder has any windows open, you don't know if clicking will open up a new window or just have focus to the old ones.
I guess you have a point. But you're still talking about using three keys to serve the function Macintosh only needs one for.
I'd argue that it's just that Windows has 2 sets of accelerators that Mac lacks: system wide, and jump-to-menu openers, and each set has a distinct modifier key. In counterpoint, Mac has a key that's good for special characters once you get to know it, and redundancy w. ctrl and cmd (though my other friend points out that he enjoys knowing that ctrl keys are for what he's ssh'd into, and cmd will be used for the desktop only...)
So I think your argument about the inconsistency of Windows' accelerator is a bit week. Sure there are some oddball exceptions, but OSX isn't free of those either.
Hah! You can't just throw that out there without giving an example!
All right, I don't have a strong argument, just my annoyance with option-arrow instead of ctrl-arrow, that old "is the trash the right way to eject a disk", that "will this open up a new window" or not thing, and the whole way my laptop has no 2nd button despite great support for it in the OS. And that cmd-` is a simple cycle instead of the Most-Recent pattern of cmd-tab.
Yeah: Experience supporting 250 Windows computers for five years.
You're a poweruser. 90% of people aren't. That's exactly what that statistic is saying. (Yes I pulled the number out of my ass, but I feel it's pretty close.)
Yeah, but 90 seems high. I mean, I just remember hearing a lot of tutorials saying "right click" and I've seen newbies pick it up pretty easily. In any case, saying "use the left mouse button for everything" isn't too tough.
Command: Performs a command. Yes. And I guess it makes a little more sense than its name on Windows, "Ctrl".
Option: Shows you additional options. (Either alternate menu items, or characters that don't show up on your keyboard, like a Spanish upside-down question mark. I still have no clue how to type international characters in Windows, and I've been using it for half a decade.)
Well, there's the "Character Map" application that's been around for a bit. Kind of clunky. And I guess there's the old "character code typing". So Mac might have the edge here....except I have no idea how to the Option key to type anything except opt-arrow! What do you use it for?
Control: Compatibility.
C'mon, admit it...it's a small bit of "compatability" and a big hunk of "whoops, context menus make a lot of sense and we probably should have included a button for it on the mouse"
Windows on the other hand makes no distinction for its modifiers. Some of the commands use Control, like Control-C for Copy. Some use Alt, like Alt-F4 for Close. Some use Windows, like Windows-L for Lock Workstation. There's no consistency. It gives me the impression that nobody ever sat down and said, "whoa, this is confusing, let's stop and figure this out."
No. *Ctrl- is by far the most commonly used one and maps very well to "Cmd" on Mac. *Alt- : there's the legacy of Alt-F4. A little weird, but at least it avoids the cmd-Q vs cmd-W mixups of Mac! And then it can be used to open up a dropdown menu...(I hate the new default of "hide accelerator underlines until I hit alt" though) That's it, very rarely is it a "do this now" kind of key. *Windows- : As far as I can tell, these are all very consitent, "OS"-wide things. By itself it's the start menu (and a very effecient way of starting a new app), Win-M is minimize all windows, Win-L is lock the whole thing...never any app-specific stuff.
So I think your argument about the inconsistency of Windows' accelerator is a bit week. Sure there are some oddball exceptions, but OSX isn't free of those either.
BTW, 90% or more of users only use one mouse button. Now, given, Apple didn't know that when they decided to use just one button on their original 1984 Macintosh, but we know it now... and knowing that, the decision doesn't look that bad.
Got a cite for that statistic? And as a moderate "poweruser", I'd heartily disagree. It was better than some of the 3-button madness that was around back then on some workstations, but I think they went too far. I'd say the big level of support for cmd-click context menus in OSX as well as things like that "supermouse" supporting it make me think that Apple is grudgingly admitting that one mouse button is one too few...
Well, I'm biased because I've lived with Windows PCs for so long, but I don't see why using the standard of Ctrl-arrow wouldn't work.
I like OSX but I think Macs have one too many modifier keys...namely, the alt/option button. It might be over-compensating for the "one mouse button" thing (which is the one knock against my iBook).
I think Windows handles it better, frankly: alt: usually just open drop down menu (one exception: alt-F4) ctrl: "do some action", much like "cmd" on Mac, ctrl-s, ctrl-v, etc windows: popopen the start menu (plus a few system actions, like win-M minimize all)
On Mac, Cmd- "maps" pretty easily to "Ctrl" functions on Windows. As far as I can tell, the keyboard support on Mac seems to be direct action keys more than making it easy to use arrow and return and what not on the screen menus. (I can start many programs on windows by hitting windows, then the first letter of the program to select it from the start menu, then return) So "ctrl" seems most often to be the "replacement for right click", and a few auxillary functions, not clearly defined from what should be there for "alt/option".
But I'm a bit of a Mac n00b--feel free to tell me what common accelerators or paradigms I'm missing here.
I find it irritating that *-` for switching windows inside the current application doesn't follow the "most recently used" paradigm of Windows...or for that matter, of switching apps via *-tab in OSX!
Also, the alt/option key seems a little gratuitous. I'm not delighted that I have to use it plus arrow to jump words in a text field.
I suppose I could name others, but I agree with you... OS X is beautiful, but it's not ready to answer every user's needs. The UI I'm picturing would be so perfectly tailored to everyone it could be described... almost as organic...
I'm not a big fan of over-customization. If you grow too dependent on this stuff, it makes it hard to sit at someone else's computer. Or if it was really organically grown, it can be hard to replicate somewhere else if you get a new machine but the old one doesn't have an "export" function, or has crashed irretrievably or something...
I've recently started using OS X w/ a delightful cheap old iBook. It took a while but I've started to really groove on it...though part of it might be I'm doing less "serious" work on it so far so it tends to get less cluttered.
In general, I'm trying to become more and more Desktop UI ambivalent, since most of the interesting suff is on the web (or in a shell) anyway.
Blast Corps was a very innovative game they put out.
I thought Diddy Kong Racing was very polished graphically, without the problems you mention. It's a better overall racer than Mario Kart, IMO; the karts aren't quite as good, but the way it's completely "fair" with stackable items is great, and I've never seen a better one player mode in a kart racer.
BattleToads I don't know about. GoldenEye I never got into either, but Perfect Dark definately fits the mold. And Conker was a bit ambitious as well.
As a Nintendo fanboy I was upset that MS grabbed 'em, but we see how well that worked out. And supposedly the Goldeney "team" is now the core of the TimeSplitters franhcise, which I enjoy.
"An influenza pandemic, by definition, occurs only when the influenza virus mutates into something dangerously unfamiliar to our immune systems and yet is able to jump from person to person through a sneeze, cough or touch."
I've always wondered if there was something inherently difficult in having the a virus with long latency like AIDS spread like the flu early in its lifecycle...
>>Chirac will blame this on Bush. >Watch for the Democrat party to sue, claiming Prior Art. Hey, when you have control of both houses and the Presidency for a # of years, you get a certain cranked up level of accountability (9/11 and natural disasters not withstanding) A recent Atlantic mockumentary piece put it well: Republicans can't lead, Democrats can't get elected.
Oh wait, now they have "an activist judiciary" to blame things on. A lot of the founding fathers feared rule by "King Mob" and for good reason.
Clarification for US readers: I believe that in the UK "Asian" usually is what the USA thinks of as "Southeast Asian"; India, Pakistan, etc. (That is, when we think of it as an overall region)
In the US, an unmodified use of "Asian" generally means Japan, Korea, China, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
First off, I do think Nintendo HAS historically been at the forefront of meainstreaming new controller design, from D-pads to Shoulder buttons to crosspad-aranged regular buttons to analog sticks and analog triggers.
But the bias here is funny, Atari gets bashed for not being "really analog" (duh) in the first generation and only having 8 directions, but Nintendo gets praised for bringing, which while probably an improvement in comfort and some responsiveness, really has about 4 directions, not even 8...
Nice to see the shoutout to Bionic Commando...it proved that the GB could do super-solid NES ports, and was to the NES what the GBA would later be to the SNES.
It anime'd things up, took out the Hitler, added a few levels and took out the old school Commando, but it played great...much better than the buggy GBC version that came out a bit later. I also missed the prelude and postlude that the NES had, where you find out it was a story told by Super Joe, but still.
WOW. I guess if you're charging $20K for something like that, you really do have to dazzle 'em with BS.
... I wish I had that kind of money to throw around on luxuries like that...)
(Just jealousy
Google for Qualia.
* Click on first match.
Splash screen. Talks about the philisophical definition.
* Click on Enter
Random hexagons, with a weird UI...clicking doesn't do anything, you have to hold and hover. And then all the identical hexagons rearrange themselves, so if by some chance you want to see each splash screen, you have to keep track of all 7 yourself. Artsy, annoying.
Oh look, a final mention of the word Products, with a region dropdown
* Click on USA
Another spashscreen that says NOTHING but "QUALIA" and enter site.
* Click on ente site
Another artsy screen. Music. Nature. Touchy Feely phrases.
* Click on products
FINALLY I have *some* frickin' idea what they're selling. AV stuff. Great.
Man, this whole thing Infiniti started, trying to provoke moods and hide what you're actually doing...it's kind of annoying. Good riddance to Qualia. Though I dig the name.
That Black Covered Player's Guide was even more interesting...its maps of Metroid made me get an NES, I knew that nothing quite like it was going to be coming out for the C=64, even if the latter was a more powerful system.
Actually that map may have helped make me the gaming wuss I am today. It seems like that game with all its hidden stuff would be almost impossible to get through without some kind of outside support...
If at some point we get an AI that the researcher has to have pangs about turning off/shutting down, in terms of having a unique intelligence , then there's gonna be a good chance that a few years later, we have similar moral issues in games....
I, for one, find logo design kind of interesting, I guess because of my interest in the visual qualities of things, and because they can often be a little bit of cleverness packed into a very small, flexible space.
I think a logo tends to be a smallish part of a brand, but a useful hook for it, and if it gets big enough you can start to have fun with it.
Re, your $20 jeans...the fact is how we dress, including brands, is the short story we tell ourselves to the outside world. Whether you like it or not you are sending a message "I am either poor or don't give a damn about this kind of issue".
Me, I tend to wear "Old Navy", which is kind of a non-brand brand, or at least it says "I care a bit about fashion and how I look, but not enough to want to spend a lot of money or time on it, and I like to keep things on the casual/youth-ish side."
The funny thing is, as much as you want to dismiss this kind of shallow, first-impression thinking, it's actually quite powerful and surprisingly accurate. I can't find the reference, but I remember a study where they had students give their gut reaction to a professor after a very short exposure, and then asked them how they felt at the end of the semester, and the results were very similar...and they could even make that "initial expousre" ridiculously small, like less than 30 seconds of reocorded video, and it didn't change the results much. (And whether its self-fufilling prophecy or not is almost immaterial)
So just because you're not into branding, and/or wish people weren't so damn "shallow", well, too bad, it's how the world works, especially one as crowded as this one.
At the risk of 'causing some head 'splosion...
I did like this one line:
[On having to cook for his son's new vegetarian diet] "I mean, how hard could it be to cook vegetables? What's the recipe for Broccoli? Oh yeah, right...'Broccoli'!"
Which means, in GTA, to make sure I have the "pedal to the metal" I have always mash mash mash. Very hard on the thumbs. I keep some pre-2 "normal" Dual Shocks around just for that reason.
Until recently I worked at one of the more significant Salestax / VAT software places.
Frankly it's all a bit of a mess. Some place, like Louisana with its Parrishes, are just crazy. These tax companies are hoping to get in on the Streamlined Sales Tax Initiative, where they would act as Service Providers, giving retailers an easy way to cover their bases, but not every state wants to play along, because a lot of the states have different definitions for how to handle locations and what not.
In the 90s, I used to be against online tax just because I wanted to see companies like Amazon etc suceed. Now that online shopping is a pretty well established part of life, I can kind of see the desire to level the playing field a bit more.
I don't know, I think the Boosterism is an important thing, because it influnces was platform choices are made going into the future. You can't always get hired on general smarts and ability to learn, so it's nice if you're reasonably versed in some of the hotter topics.
I dunno, I don't think Perl on Windows is so awful.
I wouldn't neccesarily want to do a server project, and I don't think there's a GUI library for it worth a damn, but for the usual admin-y file crunching and what not it's not much worse than on *Nix.
Hmm. I think the incompatabilities are sometimes less at the JVM level and more at the "Application Server" level stuff, at least for web server based kind of things. J2EE in general is only so-so at write once, run anywhere.
"As they say in my country, the only thing that separates us from the animals are mindless superstition and pointless ritual."
--Latka Gravas in "Taxi"
Glad to see we're keeping this very friendly in tone... and it's a pretty interesting chat.
:) But yeah.
Open up KeyCaps (or whatever they call it in OS X) and experiment. To type an accented E, you type Option-E E. An accented I, Option-E I, etc.
Hmmm, couldn't find "KeyCaps" or whatever...
*Ctrl- is by far the most commonly used one and maps very well to "Cmd" on Mac.
Except it's in the wrong place, which drives me nuts.
Are you one of those guys who wants it where most kbds have the caps key?
That's one thing Apple laptops do well...PC wise my laptop at home has ctrl and "fn" swapped from where they are at my one at work. Almost makes up for the one two few touchpad buttons...
One other random gripe....I'm missing a "backspace" key! They ain't the same thing. (And I'm encountering more problems with keymapping, ssh'ing to servers where emacs says delete means what it does on PC, even though it's where the backspace should be on Mac....)
What is the "Command-Q" vs. "Command-W" mixup? As a Mac user, that's my normal way of working and the Windows way is screwy.
They guy who really talked up the "Switch" to me admits that he presses one when he means to hit the other, and I do it sometimes...I mean, they're right frickin' next to each other.
(Case in point: Say I want to close one Word document on Windows and start another. I hit control-W to close my document, and the whole program closes! So now to start a new document, I have to wait for the *whole program* to start back up again! As a Mac user, that strikes me as dumb.)
Counterpoint: I close my last window. Guess I'm done! What the hell is it doing still sitting around taking system resources? You mean I gotta look up at the menu bar, make sure I'm still in the correct app, and THEN hit cmd-Q?
I haven't had much of a "whole program" issue, due to good caching algroithms it seems like opening an app a second time is much faster than the first time.
Command-W = "stop working with this document." Command-Q = "stop working with this application." Documents != Applications. Perfectly sensible, IMO.
Another Counterpoint: it seems like guess work if clicking on a Dock app will open up a new window or not...if you've forgotten if, say, Finder has any windows open, you don't know if clicking will open up a new window or just have focus to the old ones.
I guess you have a point. But you're still talking about using three keys to serve the function Macintosh only needs one for.
I'd argue that it's just that Windows has 2 sets of accelerators that Mac lacks: system wide, and jump-to-menu openers, and each set has a distinct modifier key. In counterpoint, Mac has a key that's good for special characters once you get to know it, and redundancy w. ctrl and cmd (though my other friend points out that he enjoys knowing that ctrl keys are for what he's ssh'd into, and cmd will be used for the desktop only...)
So I think your argument about the inconsistency of Windows' accelerator is a bit week. Sure there are some oddball exceptions, but OSX isn't free of those either.
Hah! You can't just throw that out there without giving an example!
All right, I don't have a strong argument, just my annoyance with option-arrow instead of ctrl-arrow, that old "is the trash the right way to eject a disk", that "will this open up a new window" or not thing, and the whole way my laptop has no 2nd button despite great support for it in the OS. And that cmd-` is a simple cycle instead of the Most-Recent pattern of cmd-tab.
Yeah: Experience supporting 250 Windows computers for five years.
You're a poweruser. 90% of people aren't. That's exactly what that statistic is saying. (Yes I pulled the number out of my ass, but I feel it's pretty close.)
Yeah, but 90 seems high. I mean, I just remember hearing a lot of tutorials saying "right click" and I've seen newbies pick it up pretty easily. In any case, saying "use the left mouse button for everything" isn't too tough.
Command: Performs a command.
Yes. And I guess it makes a little more sense than its name on Windows, "Ctrl".
Option: Shows you additional options. (Either alternate menu items, or characters that don't show up on your keyboard, like a Spanish upside-down question mark. I still have no clue how to type international characters in Windows, and I've been using it for half a decade.)
Well, there's the "Character Map" application that's been around for a bit. Kind of clunky. And I guess there's the old "character code typing". So Mac might have the edge here....except I have no idea how to the Option key to type anything except opt-arrow! What do you use it for?
Control: Compatibility.
C'mon, admit it...it's a small bit of "compatability" and a big hunk of "whoops, context menus make a lot of sense and we probably should have included a button for it on the mouse"
Windows on the other hand makes no distinction for its modifiers. Some of the commands use Control, like Control-C for Copy. Some use Alt, like Alt-F4 for Close. Some use Windows, like Windows-L for Lock Workstation. There's no consistency. It gives me the impression that nobody ever sat down and said, "whoa, this is confusing, let's stop and figure this out."
No.
*Ctrl- is by far the most commonly used one and maps very well to "Cmd" on Mac.
*Alt- : there's the legacy of Alt-F4. A little weird, but at least it avoids the cmd-Q vs cmd-W mixups of Mac! And then it can be used to open up a dropdown menu...(I hate the new default of "hide accelerator underlines until I hit alt" though) That's it, very rarely is it a "do this now" kind of key.
*Windows- : As far as I can tell, these are all very consitent, "OS"-wide things. By itself it's the start menu (and a very effecient way of starting a new app), Win-M is minimize all windows, Win-L is lock the whole thing...never any app-specific stuff.
So I think your argument about the inconsistency of Windows' accelerator is a bit week. Sure there are some oddball exceptions, but OSX isn't free of those either.
BTW, 90% or more of users only use one mouse button. Now, given, Apple didn't know that when they decided to use just one button on their original 1984 Macintosh, but we know it now... and knowing that, the decision doesn't look that bad.
Got a cite for that statistic? And as a moderate "poweruser", I'd heartily disagree. It was better than some of the 3-button madness that was around back then on some workstations, but I think they went too far. I'd say the big level of support for cmd-click context menus in OSX as well as things like that "supermouse" supporting it make me think that Apple is grudgingly admitting that one mouse button is one too few...
Well, I'm biased because I've lived with Windows PCs for so long, but I don't see why using the standard of Ctrl-arrow wouldn't work.
I like OSX but I think Macs have one too many modifier keys...namely, the alt/option button. It might be over-compensating for the "one mouse button" thing (which is the one knock against my iBook).
I think Windows handles it better, frankly:
alt: usually just open drop down menu (one exception: alt-F4)
ctrl: "do some action", much like "cmd" on Mac, ctrl-s, ctrl-v, etc
windows: popopen the start menu (plus a few system actions, like win-M minimize all)
On Mac, Cmd- "maps" pretty easily to "Ctrl" functions on Windows. As far as I can tell, the keyboard support on Mac seems to be direct action keys more than making it easy to use arrow and return and what not on the screen menus. (I can start many programs on windows by hitting windows, then the first letter of the program to select it from the start menu, then return) So "ctrl" seems most often to be the "replacement for right click", and a few auxillary functions, not clearly defined from what should be there for "alt/option".
But I'm a bit of a Mac n00b--feel free to tell me what common accelerators or paradigms I'm missing here.
I find it irritating that *-` for switching windows inside the current application doesn't follow the "most recently used" paradigm of Windows...or for that matter, of switching apps via *-tab in OSX!
Also, the alt/option key seems a little gratuitous. I'm not delighted that I have to use it plus arrow to jump words in a text field.
I suppose I could name others, but I agree with you... OS X is beautiful, but it's not ready to answer every user's needs. The UI I'm picturing would be so perfectly tailored to everyone it could be described... almost as organic...
I'm not a big fan of over-customization. If you grow too dependent on this stuff, it makes it hard to sit at someone else's computer. Or if it was really organically grown, it can be hard to replicate somewhere else if you get a new machine but the old one doesn't have an "export" function, or has crashed irretrievably or something...
I've recently started using OS X w/ a delightful cheap old iBook. It took a while but I've started to really groove on it...though part of it might be I'm doing less "serious" work on it so far so it tends to get less cluttered.
In general, I'm trying to become more and more Desktop UI ambivalent, since most of the interesting suff is on the web (or in a shell) anyway.
Easy...
Oral Sex Linked To Cancer.
human papilloma virus...more prevelant than bullets!
(this is mostly in jest)
Blast Corps was a very innovative game they put out.
I thought Diddy Kong Racing was very polished graphically, without the problems you mention. It's a better overall racer than Mario Kart, IMO; the karts aren't quite as good, but the way it's completely "fair" with stackable items is great, and I've never seen a better one player mode in a kart racer.
BattleToads I don't know about. GoldenEye I never got into either, but Perfect Dark definately fits the mold. And Conker was a bit ambitious as well.
As a Nintendo fanboy I was upset that MS grabbed 'em, but we see how well that worked out. And supposedly the Goldeney "team" is now the core of the TimeSplitters franhcise, which I enjoy.
Huh, when did Trench Coats get associated with shotguns?
Besides the way that the latter can conceal the former.
Was it the Terminator movies?
I think you wouldn't see this presentation made post-Columbine...
"An influenza pandemic, by definition, occurs only when the influenza virus mutates into something dangerously unfamiliar to our immune systems and yet is able to jump from person to person through a sneeze, cough or touch."
I've always wondered if there was something inherently difficult in having the a virus with long latency like AIDS spread like the flu early in its lifecycle...
>>Chirac will blame this on Bush.
>Watch for the Democrat party to sue, claiming Prior Art.
Hey, when you have control of both houses and the Presidency for a # of years, you get a certain cranked up level of accountability (9/11 and natural disasters not withstanding) A recent Atlantic mockumentary piece put it well: Republicans can't lead, Democrats can't get elected.
Oh wait, now they have "an activist judiciary" to blame things on. A lot of the founding fathers feared rule by "King Mob" and for good reason.
Clarification for US readers: I believe that in the UK "Asian" usually is what the USA thinks of as "Southeast Asian"; India, Pakistan, etc. (That is, when we think of it as an overall region)
In the US, an unmodified use of "Asian" generally means Japan, Korea, China, etc.