Ever been to uWink, his latest idea? It's godawful. Imagine the most tired, re-tread, uninspired, and dull fare you could get from the unholy collision of an Applebees, California Pizza Kitchen, and PF Chang's. The hook? You get to use a touch screen to order your food! Wow, touch screens! You know, like you use at the airport, your ATM, the occasional gas station, and about 500,000 other places. Plus they've got incredibly dull table games... Oh, and for kicks, the touch sensors on the screen are so comically inaccurate -- so make sure to double check that you're getting what you've ordered.
The decor is kind of like chromey mid-90s meets that bar in Star Trek 3, only people look like they're having a lot less fun. Basically, imagine any "futuristic" concept hacked out by any of a dozen subpar ad agencies or architecture firms around 1997. The Century City food court is 10x more self-consciously "futuristic" in its design and seems less ridiculous.
And the last bit of fun: Anything that's actually edible on the menu will be sold out. Ditto for any beers worth drinking. So enjoy that exotic pepperoni pizza and bud light...
Nope, sorry, give me Mario Kart, Guitar Hero, GTA, Final Fantasy 4, Katamari Damacy, Civilization, X-Com, Star Control, or any other of about six dozen games that are brilliant or brilliantly fun. If I wanted to go someplace and be bored while surrounded by awful overpriced food and where touch screens pass as a killer app, I'd hang out at the airport.
Instead of opening up Photosho.. err, GIMP and cranking out a bunch of comps that are just mashups of existing UI concepts, why not talk to your users and design around their workflow and needs? Good UI is not born in a vacuum, good user experience doesn't happen without talking to users. For an app that seems to have the Rodney Dangerfield complaint, the team around it seems to do little to counter that. (You think Adobe doesn't test the hell out of its apps?)
So, I'll throw one out there, in the interest of PRACTICAL feedback: Single window mode is a bad idea because it makes a photo retoucher's life much more difficult.
Here's an example why, an actual segment of a workflow and/or task, done in Photoshop to show the ease of this and why multi-window works well.
Grab a picture of a friend, ideally if they are drunk or have blotchy skin in the photo -- make it as unflattering as possible. Wedding pictures are ideal. Needs to be color.
Open it in Photoshop. Now, since I don't have another copy in front of me, this is the CS2 method: Window>Arrange>Open New Window for [foo.jpg] Window>Arrange>Tile Vertically
Now center both windows on the same area, ideally, said blotchy skin.
On ONE window, go to the layers/channels/paths palette. Switch to the Channels palette. Turn off all channels except green. Odds are, it looks pretty much like the color photo, just in B&W.
Now take the Clone tool and massage out some of the blotchiness in the green channel ("B&W") version. Ta-da, fixed in both. And you can see its effect immediately.
This is one way that your favorite babes are airbrushed to laughable non-human perfection for magazines. It's quick, it's got incredible feedback, and it's not possible in a tabbed or single window method.
Talking to your users, as opposed to a comp-off (or the cardinal sin, the designer assuming he knows everything), gives you all kinds of useful information like that.
Aimless brainstorming, bad. Brainstorming with a direction, productive.
After dealing with IE7 in a lot more hands-on basis, it seems like some of the more obvious bugs have been fixed. And yet, some of the far more annoying ones (bizarre li padding -- either the whitespace bug or too much padding in a LI despite padding/margining to 0 (and yes, I've got a valid doctype)) still are around. Of course, MS "fixed" the !important hack, which would have made the situation reasonable.
I know, hacks are bad, but IE conditional comments feel far more offensive than the !important hack.
It's very simple: People who deal with content creation (that is, content created for commercial consumption), especially print, don't like JPGs or other lossy formats. PNG, being an indexed-color format, is not the end-all of graphics formats, slashdot ranting aside. Most designers want TIFF files (and PCD wil do, in a pinch). JPGs, no matter the quality, tend to have a nasty habit of exhibiting some noise in their output. That's totally unacceptable for print.
And, again, PNG is totally the wrong format for this. You'd be taking a huge hit upfront in terms of indexing -- or your images would be outrageously huge.
How DNG differs from TIFF, I don't know. I would have thought TIFF would be the obvious answer. (TIFF, for those who don't know, aren't compressed but can be losslessly compressed)
If you add some wolves, you've got yourself a go picture.
I. Cannes Pander
20th Century Fox
Re:Photo and PIN on Cash Card / Credit Card??
on
RFID MasterCard
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· Score: 1
In Los Angeles, a number of places (gas stations most frequently) require you to enter your zip/postal code as a form of identification. It works well in LA since there are so many zip codes; it wouldn't work as well elsewhere. (Even if someone took my card and tried to use it, they'd have to guess what zip code I'm from, which would be a real trick.)
"Crossfade" to zero isn't the same as gapless playback -- even on a Mac, never mind the iPod. A cursory listen to classical music, Sgt. Pepper's or even an unedited live disc (i.e., no fades after songs, just crowd noise -- or even better, segues between songs) shows how it's still not there.
It shouldn't be that hard, and yet people (myself included) have been screaming for it since version 2 at least.
You were able to get any sound out of those? Every time I've been to the Grove, all of their minis are either locked up and not responding or, more recently, completely inaudible.
California will also take the opportunity to smack you with a "use fee" if you've moved to the state and purchased a car in your home state three months prior to moving.
After getting hit with that, I always chuckle at the people who I see with the temp tags and a brand-new registration sticker on their home state's plates. The system wins again, and bad.
Yeah, I've gotta second the vote for Hard Boiled. Great movie. But watch it with subs; the dub I've heard for HB was heinous and really impaired understanding. (Moreso than any dub I've ever seen.)
You can. It's called, depending on exactly what you are buying and under what circumstances, the grey or black market.
Don't like how much Nikon USA charges for an FM3A? Buy an imported Nikon of Japan FM3A. You'll save a considerable sum and it's still the same. You don't necessarily get the warranty consideration, though. But in these cases, you're pretty much waiving warranty for a lower cost.
Don't like that new DVDs cost too much? Go to Chinatown (if you live in a big city) and buy the bootleg for two or three bucks. Same for CDs. Go to New York and you can buy a nice Panasoanic stereo. Or a Folex watch. Or you can just use the internet.
It's there if you're so inclined. But when you buy bootleg/knock-off stuff, don't expect to be able to complain when it doesn't work as well or isn't what you asked for in the first place.
This sort of software isn't targeted at Joe Hobbyist. They can demand a premium because the audience is smaller. And the people who need it can a) afford it and b) don't mind paying the money because it pays for itself in such a miniscule amount of time.
It's basically the same reason why Photoshop is 600 dollars. The people who need to use Pantone colors, etc. is a very small subset of computer users and they can bear the cost. Everyone else is taken care of by the $99 Elements package.
Noone out on the street is talking about the G5 or OS/X. They are talking about the iPod and iTunes.
This proves only one thing: That you are out of touch with the average consumer (you know, where 90% of the business is). An operating system is not exciting. It's not something to talk about, unless you're a nerd. A G5 is cool, but the iPod is cooler. The iPod mini? Maybe even cooler still.
But no one wants to be the wheezing dude at the street corner proudly talking the ears off everyone around him, explaining how great it is that his computer's operating system fuses the flexibility of unix with the ease-of-use of a mac. Nope, they'd rather be the one coolly standing there with the white earbuds, listening to something really hip.
I'm not saying this as a personal attack -- hell, OS X is why I switched -- just trying to illustrate the reality outside of the geek world.
Any one of those is possible, except for QuarkXPress. Quark is a notorious heel-dragger and were so late to the OS X game it wasn't even funny. Plus they have a nasty habit of charging absurd money for upgrades that, lately, have been a complete joke.
The world would be a better place if Quark just threw in the towel on XPress. It used to be great but InDesign has shown how little actual progress Quark has made in the last several years.
(disclaimer: I switched to InDesign when I switched to Mac, and in both cases I've never looked back.)
Here's a crazy idea: Move out of southern California, where overinflated cost-of-living is the rule. Plop yourself near a Midwestern city, enjoy a lower cost of living and a more friendly business climate. You'll be near an airport and can use technology to your advantage for other situations.
Cold does affect the ipod's battery life (much like most batteries you'll encounter). I have a 10GB touchwheel iPod that I got for Christmas in 2002. I used it all the time when I drove to work and on a couple of occasions left it in the car (but turned it off by holding the play button and then moving the hold switch). When I'd leave it in the car I'd invariably get only a few minutes of battery life. If I warmed it up by holding it in my hands, I'd get a little more battery life. (usually not much, though). When I'd return indoors and let it heat back up, it'd still have a respectable charge.
So I think it's more the cold than the age -- in that case my iPod was only a few weeks old.
Legal or not, the name was indeed choose to be phonetically similar to Windows.
People often confuse similar sounding names, and tend to associate them together. My guess is, any average Windows user, would be much more comfortable with a suggestion such as Lindows, rather than say something like Knoppix.
Here's the problem, though. It's not like that among parity products -- or products that are intended to go after the same market. After all, in the detergent aisle, I don't see Tide, Hide, Slide, and Ride brands of detergent -- everything's very different. Or in the electronics department of, say, Target, I notice Sony, Panasonic, Zenith, and Philips.
You also say that people confuse similar sounding names -- so why do you want your product to be lost to confusion? You don't. You need to stake out some territory in the mind with a good name, not a knock-off. "Lindows" is the territory of "Panasoanic" stereos and "Folex" watches -- cheap knock-offs that are only fooling the owner (and probably not very well).
Lindows is too much like Killustrator -- the kind of shabby, lame-jokey thought that people give to naming their software (if any). Here's a hint for those who want Linux to succeed on the desktop for joe sixpack or grandma: Drop the idiotic names for software. Otherwise it'll just be perceived as Windows for those who can't afford Windows.
I know the hardcore geeks who don't want Linux on the desktop don't care, so you guys, keep naming your stuff with recursive acronyms and stuff.;)
(speaking as a resident of LA) -- yes, LA is wide and sprawling, but compared to St. Louis, it's extremely densely populated. The St. Louis area covers a huge swath of land, but unlike LA, it's not packed to the gills -- very much the McMansion kind of vision of suburbia with enormous lawns, spreading out for miles. I was mainly asking the original poster where in the hell you would attempt this in St. Louis, because there are few areas that would be densely populated enough to make it worthwhile, but not in a crummy neighborhood.
The problem with St. Louis is population density -- it's so spread out. Around LA, you've got a fairly decent population density so it's kind of practical.
Where in St. Louis would you even start? Around Clayton? (that's an actual question, I used to be from St. Louis and can't imagine where you'd do it... can't say that Cerritos is my first thought for out here, but that's just me.)
This stuff has been readily available for a while -- also condensed at theforce.net.
Being a former spoiler hound for episodes 1 & 2, I found that they sounded much better on paper than they were on screen. This one doesn't really even sound appealing on paper, beyond The Duel, which either means it's going to rock, finally (unlikely) or that it will be so mindblowingly bad that The Phantom Menace will look like Citizen Kane in comparison.
Slashdot Mirror
So, great, he's a father of the industry.
Ever been to uWink, his latest idea? It's godawful. Imagine the most tired, re-tread, uninspired, and dull fare you could get from the unholy collision of an Applebees, California Pizza Kitchen, and PF Chang's. The hook? You get to use a touch screen to order your food! Wow, touch screens! You know, like you use at the airport, your ATM, the occasional gas station, and about 500,000 other places. Plus they've got incredibly dull table games... Oh, and for kicks, the touch sensors on the screen are so comically inaccurate -- so make sure to double check that you're getting what you've ordered.
The decor is kind of like chromey mid-90s meets that bar in Star Trek 3, only people look like they're having a lot less fun. Basically, imagine any "futuristic" concept hacked out by any of a dozen subpar ad agencies or architecture firms around 1997. The Century City food court is 10x more self-consciously "futuristic" in its design and seems less ridiculous.
And the last bit of fun: Anything that's actually edible on the menu will be sold out. Ditto for any beers worth drinking. So enjoy that exotic pepperoni pizza and bud light...
Nope, sorry, give me Mario Kart, Guitar Hero, GTA, Final Fantasy 4, Katamari Damacy, Civilization, X-Com, Star Control, or any other of about six dozen games that are brilliant or brilliantly fun. If I wanted to go someplace and be bored while surrounded by awful overpriced food and where touch screens pass as a killer app, I'd hang out at the airport.
Instead of opening up Photosho.. err, GIMP and cranking out a bunch of comps that are just mashups of existing UI concepts, why not talk to your users and design around their workflow and needs? Good UI is not born in a vacuum, good user experience doesn't happen without talking to users. For an app that seems to have the Rodney Dangerfield complaint, the team around it seems to do little to counter that. (You think Adobe doesn't test the hell out of its apps?)
So, I'll throw one out there, in the interest of PRACTICAL feedback:
Single window mode is a bad idea because it makes a photo retoucher's life much more difficult.
Here's an example why, an actual segment of a workflow and/or task, done in Photoshop to show the ease of this and why multi-window works well.
Grab a picture of a friend, ideally if they are drunk or have blotchy skin in the photo -- make it as unflattering as possible. Wedding pictures are ideal. Needs to be color.
Open it in Photoshop. Now, since I don't have another copy in front of me, this is the CS2 method:
Window>Arrange>Open New Window for [foo.jpg]
Window>Arrange>Tile Vertically
Now center both windows on the same area, ideally, said blotchy skin.
On ONE window, go to the layers/channels/paths palette. Switch to the Channels palette. Turn off all channels except green. Odds are, it looks pretty much like the color photo, just in B&W.
Now take the Clone tool and massage out some of the blotchiness in the green channel ("B&W") version. Ta-da, fixed in both. And you can see its effect immediately.
This is one way that your favorite babes are airbrushed to laughable non-human perfection for magazines. It's quick, it's got incredible feedback, and it's not possible in a tabbed or single window method.
Talking to your users, as opposed to a comp-off (or the cardinal sin, the designer assuming he knows everything), gives you all kinds of useful information like that.
Aimless brainstorming, bad. Brainstorming with a direction, productive.
After dealing with IE7 in a lot more hands-on basis, it seems like some of the more obvious bugs have been fixed. And yet, some of the far more annoying ones (bizarre li padding -- either the whitespace bug or too much padding in a LI despite padding/margining to 0 (and yes, I've got a valid doctype)) still are around. Of course, MS "fixed" the !important hack, which would have made the situation reasonable. I know, hacks are bad, but IE conditional comments feel far more offensive than the !important hack.
It's very simple: People who deal with content creation (that is, content created for commercial consumption), especially print, don't like JPGs or other lossy formats. PNG, being an indexed-color format, is not the end-all of graphics formats, slashdot ranting aside. Most designers want TIFF files (and PCD wil do, in a pinch). JPGs, no matter the quality, tend to have a nasty habit of exhibiting some noise in their output. That's totally unacceptable for print.
And, again, PNG is totally the wrong format for this. You'd be taking a huge hit upfront in terms of indexing -- or your images would be outrageously huge.
How DNG differs from TIFF, I don't know. I would have thought TIFF would be the obvious answer. (TIFF, for those who don't know, aren't compressed but can be losslessly compressed)
If you add some wolves, you've got yourself a go picture.
I. Cannes Pander
20th Century Fox
In Los Angeles, a number of places (gas stations most frequently) require you to enter your zip/postal code as a form of identification. It works well in LA since there are so many zip codes; it wouldn't work as well elsewhere. (Even if someone took my card and tried to use it, they'd have to guess what zip code I'm from, which would be a real trick.)
Every version release, yes. Just sent the same feedback on 4.5 today. Maybe 5.0.
"Crossfade" to zero isn't the same as gapless playback -- even on a Mac, never mind the iPod. A cursory listen to classical music, Sgt. Pepper's or even an unedited live disc (i.e., no fades after songs, just crowd noise -- or even better, segues between songs) shows how it's still not there.
It shouldn't be that hard, and yet people (myself included) have been screaming for it since version 2 at least.
You were able to get any sound out of those? Every time I've been to the Grove, all of their minis are either locked up and not responding or, more recently, completely inaudible.
California will also take the opportunity to smack you with a "use fee" if you've moved to the state and purchased a car in your home state three months prior to moving. After getting hit with that, I always chuckle at the people who I see with the temp tags and a brand-new registration sticker on their home state's plates. The system wins again, and bad.
Yeah, I've gotta second the vote for Hard Boiled. Great movie. But watch it with subs; the dub I've heard for HB was heinous and really impaired understanding. (Moreso than any dub I've ever seen.)
I would mod this into the stratosphere if I had points.
You can. It's called, depending on exactly what you are buying and under what circumstances, the grey or black market.
Don't like how much Nikon USA charges for an FM3A? Buy an imported Nikon of Japan FM3A. You'll save a considerable sum and it's still the same. You don't necessarily get the warranty consideration, though. But in these cases, you're pretty much waiving warranty for a lower cost.
Don't like that new DVDs cost too much? Go to Chinatown (if you live in a big city) and buy the bootleg for two or three bucks. Same for CDs. Go to New York and you can buy a nice Panasoanic stereo. Or a Folex watch. Or you can just use the internet.
It's there if you're so inclined. But when you buy bootleg/knock-off stuff, don't expect to be able to complain when it doesn't work as well or isn't what you asked for in the first place.
This sort of software isn't targeted at Joe Hobbyist. They can demand a premium because the audience is smaller. And the people who need it can a) afford it and b) don't mind paying the money because it pays for itself in such a miniscule amount of time.
It's basically the same reason why Photoshop is 600 dollars. The people who need to use Pantone colors, etc. is a very small subset of computer users and they can bear the cost. Everyone else is taken care of by the $99 Elements package.
Noone out on the street is talking about the G5 or OS/X. They are talking about the iPod and iTunes.
This proves only one thing: That you are out of touch with the average consumer (you know, where 90% of the business is). An operating system is not exciting. It's not something to talk about, unless you're a nerd. A G5 is cool, but the iPod is cooler. The iPod mini? Maybe even cooler still.
But no one wants to be the wheezing dude at the street corner proudly talking the ears off everyone around him, explaining how great it is that his computer's operating system fuses the flexibility of unix with the ease-of-use of a mac. Nope, they'd rather be the one coolly standing there with the white earbuds, listening to something really hip.
I'm not saying this as a personal attack -- hell, OS X is why I switched -- just trying to illustrate the reality outside of the geek world.
Any one of those is possible, except for QuarkXPress. Quark is a notorious heel-dragger and were so late to the OS X game it wasn't even funny. Plus they have a nasty habit of charging absurd money for upgrades that, lately, have been a complete joke.
The world would be a better place if Quark just threw in the towel on XPress. It used to be great but InDesign has shown how little actual progress Quark has made in the last several years.
(disclaimer: I switched to InDesign when I switched to Mac, and in both cases I've never looked back.)
Nah, an NFL minute is three times as long as a standard minute, plus or minus a bit. MS-Minutes are at least 10:1.
Here's a crazy idea: Move out of southern California, where overinflated cost-of-living is the rule. Plop yourself near a Midwestern city, enjoy a lower cost of living and a more friendly business climate. You'll be near an airport and can use technology to your advantage for other situations.
Cold does affect the ipod's battery life (much like most batteries you'll encounter). I have a 10GB touchwheel iPod that I got for Christmas in 2002. I used it all the time when I drove to work and on a couple of occasions left it in the car (but turned it off by holding the play button and then moving the hold switch). When I'd leave it in the car I'd invariably get only a few minutes of battery life. If I warmed it up by holding it in my hands, I'd get a little more battery life. (usually not much, though). When I'd return indoors and let it heat back up, it'd still have a respectable charge.
So I think it's more the cold than the age -- in that case my iPod was only a few weeks old.
The guy is from California. The lawsuit was filed in Denver, and the distributor is from Greely (CO).
Quality submission.
Actually, this one is being shot in Hollywood, I think. They've had Hollywood Blvd. closed down at Highland all week.
To a geek may be, not to average joe.
;)
Legal or not, the name was indeed choose to be phonetically similar to Windows.
People often confuse similar sounding names, and tend to associate them together. My guess is, any average Windows user, would be much more comfortable with a suggestion such as Lindows, rather than say something like Knoppix. Here's the problem, though. It's not like that among parity products -- or products that are intended to go after the same market. After all, in the detergent aisle, I don't see Tide, Hide, Slide, and Ride brands of detergent -- everything's very different. Or in the electronics department of, say, Target, I notice Sony, Panasonic, Zenith, and Philips.
You also say that people confuse similar sounding names -- so why do you want your product to be lost to confusion? You don't. You need to stake out some territory in the mind with a good name, not a knock-off. "Lindows" is the territory of "Panasoanic" stereos and "Folex" watches -- cheap knock-offs that are only fooling the owner (and probably not very well).
Lindows is too much like Killustrator -- the kind of shabby, lame-jokey thought that people give to naming their software (if any). Here's a hint for those who want Linux to succeed on the desktop for joe sixpack or grandma: Drop the idiotic names for software. Otherwise it'll just be perceived as Windows for those who can't afford Windows.
I know the hardcore geeks who don't want Linux on the desktop don't care, so you guys, keep naming your stuff with recursive acronyms and stuff.
(speaking as a resident of LA) -- yes, LA is wide and sprawling, but compared to St. Louis, it's extremely densely populated. The St. Louis area covers a huge swath of land, but unlike LA, it's not packed to the gills -- very much the McMansion kind of vision of suburbia with enormous lawns, spreading out for miles. I was mainly asking the original poster where in the hell you would attempt this in St. Louis, because there are few areas that would be densely populated enough to make it worthwhile, but not in a crummy neighborhood.
The problem with St. Louis is population density -- it's so spread out. Around LA, you've got a fairly decent population density so it's kind of practical.
Where in St. Louis would you even start? Around Clayton? (that's an actual question, I used to be from St. Louis and can't imagine where you'd do it... can't say that Cerritos is my first thought for out here, but that's just me.)
This stuff has been readily available for a while -- also condensed at theforce.net.
Being a former spoiler hound for episodes 1 & 2, I found that they sounded much better on paper than they were on screen. This one doesn't really even sound appealing on paper, beyond The Duel, which either means it's going to rock, finally (unlikely) or that it will be so mindblowingly bad that The Phantom Menace will look like Citizen Kane in comparison.