Re:Horrible colors in the text editor screenshot
on
Gnome 2.10 Sneak Peek
·
· Score: 1
It's not about patches. For all I know, the person who took the screenshot configured it that way because he thinks vast expanses of garish pink text look cool. Patches won't help that.
It's about understanding that screenshots are about marketing and advertising.
If you want to promote some new Linux software, make sure it looks *good*. It does you no good if the screenshots make your product look ugly and amateurish - in any way.
Compare that text editor screenshot to this one from Apple showing XCode's editor.
Whatever you think about Apple, they have a good design sense, and they make their products look good when they create marketing materials for them. Their screenshot makes Xcode look far more attractive than the screenshot of the gnome editor, which looks rather unpleasant to use, purely because of the painful text colors.
The colors used in a text editor screenshot might seem like a minor issue, but if they look bad, I think to some degree they cast a shadow on the rest of the software. It's likely to raise doubts in some people's minds as to the design sense of the developers, or their attention to detail. It might be only a niggling doubt, but that might be all it takes to get someone to write off Gnome, for this version, or for good. (Obviously, a current Gnome user won't care, because they know the software and aren't going just by screenshots.)
Little aesthetic details like this can make quite a disproportionate difference in acceptance.
It's so easy to avoid such things, by giving a moment's thought and tweaking some settings. Why *not* take a few minutes to tune the appearance before you make the screenshots.
Putting up unflattering screenshots of something you develop or just promote is like putting up an online personal ad, with a photo of your face where you have a big booger showing in your nostril. It would have taken just a moment to fix that, but that booger's going to make sure nobody bothers reading the rest of your ad.
(Ranked from most crackable to least crackable) Linux>Solaris> "Sugar Glass">Windows
Sugar glass being the fake glass used for special effects. It breaks easy, and is less likely to cut the poor sod who has to jump through it.
Sugar glass doesn't last long (warps or goes sticky) so make it close to the time when you plan to use it. Keep it out of moist areas and direct sun. The same as a lolipop it will melt or go gooey. The sugar can attract ants and other bugs so keep it packaged in plastic, etc. until you use it. Though only sugar, the glass can have sharp edges/points when broken, so be careful when handling
Well, reading that, sugar glass really is pretty close to Windows. Best keep it in the plastic, so as not to run into any bugs.
Horrible colors in the text editor screenshot
on
Gnome 2.10 Sneak Peek
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I know it's not *that* important, and represents something that the user could (I hope) change, but the nasty garish colors used for syntax coloring in that text editor screenshot have got to go.
A more muted palette would look more attractive. Drop the saturation a bit, use darker colors than hot pink and neon purple. Muted blues and greens like the ones in slashdot's Developers section and Main section. Those would look nice. Using the bright colors also makes it look primitive, like it's limited to using a Windows 16-color palette.
You don't need to dress up the text editor like a $5 ho just to get the point across that it can do text in color. Pink text doesn't make the point any better than a muted blue would.
Creative has a zillion brands for their MP3 players, seemingly combined at random.
Look at the product list here: http://www.nomadworld.com/products/
That's a product list only a crooked bookkeeper could love.
They can't seem to decide what they want to focus on.
Worse, their large number of product names hinders cross-promotion. Promotion of a "Creative Zen Micro" probably doesn't aid sales of a "MuVo Slim".
By contrast, promoting the iPod Shuffle promotes the iPod brand as a whole. If the iPod Shuffle isn't quite what a person wants, they're more likely to look at other items in the iPod line.
If a "MuVo Slim" isn't quite what a person wants, what's to lead them to, say, a "Creative Zen Touch"?
Further, the number of brands Creative uses probably makes their share of the MP3 market look lower than it really is.
I mean, good lord, they even have an "Interactive Decision Maker" to help you decide which model is right for you. Damn thing might as well say "Get an iPod."
Creative's situation is so bad, there isn't even a single name you can use which encompasses all their MP3 players. You can talk about "iPods", but with Creative, all you can refer to is "Creative's MP3 players", which doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. Yet you can't say "a Creative", because that sounds dumb, and Creative makes more than just MP3 players.
Apple's competition can't seem to settle on a design. Their product lines vary in UI and appearance quite a bit.
That makes it hard to distinguish Creative's players from anyone else's, which IMHO hurts their effort to build brand recognition.
There's been some variation among Apple's iPods, but the designs hang together pretty well. Apple could have just thrown some randomly positioned buttons on the Shuffle, but they opted instead to configure the UI to at least resemble the click-wheels on the full-size iPods.
"OpenOffice is one of those "business" applications that engineers need."
Er, no. OpenOffice is a member of a class of business applications that engineers need. There's nothing special about OpenOffice that makes engineers "need" it, specifically. It is easily replaced with another office product, or separate applications that do the same thing.
"IBM has exited the PowerPC workstation market. "
Er, no they haven't. They exited the Intel PC market.
They're still going to make POWER RISC-based workstations. It's kind of a natural, since they're going to be making POWER RISC computers in other segments, and making chips for Apple.
Back in 1994, I hung out a lot at a Chicago coffee house. I asked the owner for, and received, permission to do something super geeky.
I bought a NeXTStation mono, and stored it in the basement office of the shop. I'd bring in an external SCSI drive, haul the slab and its 17" monitor out of the basement, and set up on a wee little cafe table that was just big enough for the slab, keyboard, mouse, the hard drive, and a mug of coffee.
Didn't have any cool Delicious Monster apps to work on, though...
CueCat was about reading stupid little faux-barcodes, which were specific to the CueCat, and would be printed in magazine ads (and ads posing as articles, as you find in Wired and similar consumer goods whore magazines).
Kinda different.
The use of the CueCat to scan generic barcodes was a hack, and not the intended purpose of the device.
"I guess you missed my point. I found the software to be well designed (a pretty application, as you say) and functional, just a waste of my time after all. I do not regret spending the money, just the time. Others may find it to be very useful to them."
It doesn't take a whole lot of foresight to realize - before buying - that all the work of scanning in your DVD collection isn't really going to accomplish much. Even if it is a nicely designed app.
But then, you're a collector, and collectors are not known for making good rational decisions.
Guy Kawasaki started Garage.com, aka Garage Technology Ventures, a venture capital firm which proudly claims Claria, aka Gator, as part of their investment portfolio.
My impression of the book/method was that it was really focused on executives who delegate virtually all the work they're responsible for, and whose tasks tend to involve phone calls, reviewing documents and signing them, and other executive tasks.
The way it was presented, it didn't seem to be very relevant for someone whose work involves things like spending lots of time actually *working* on things, like writing code, or designing software, or writing a book.
The longest task he ever addresses in the book is the task of getting started with GTD - he advises blocking out a few days of uninterrupted time. Everything else is little bitty things like making calls.
Perhaps my impression is incorrect. But I think Allen would do himself a favor if he rewrote his book for working stiffs, rather than for executives.
"More like, it was a reaction to England's persecution of minorities who didn't follow the Anglican schism from the Roman Catholic church. The English who didn't want to play along with the established religion had the choice of being harassed at home, or going elsewhere. Many of them went to America."
And probably, to some extent, a reaction to France's persecution of Protestants, who were pretty much expelled less than 100 years before our revolution (ie, recent enough that grandparents could have been involved.)
Also, pretty much nobody liked those damned Quakers and Anabaptists.
The founders would, most likely, have been aware of the Wars of Religion, too.
Aside:
These days, too many "anti-separation" people seem to think "Christian" meant the same thing in 1776 as it does today. Whereas today the various denominations get along pretty easily, it was not so in 1776.
Many Anglicans would probably have considered the Catholics to be "papists", not Christians. And many Catholics would have considered the Protestants to be heretics. And either group would not have had any qualms about insisting that these distinctions be codified into law. (Unlike today, where you pretty much have to read a Jack Chick pamphlet to see a Protestant calling the Pope the Anti-Christ.)
Heck, in England, Roman Catholics couldn't even own property until 1778. An attempt in 1780 to give Catholics (gasp) the right to vote resulted in violent anti-Catholic riots in which 500 people died.
I have to wonder - why do anti-Separation people, who think the US was founded as a Christian nation, believe the founders neglected to write that into the Constitution? What was stopping them, if they were a bunch of "Christians"? Today's evangelicals and fundamentalists and hardliners certainly wouldn't be so circumspect - it'd be right there in 720-point copperplate at the top. Elaborations of this as God's Own Country would have taken the place of the Bill of Rights.
The best they can do is point to uses of "creator" or "god", though even thorough pagans like the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius used such terms (or, at least, they are used in modern translations of his Meditations).
"I reckon the politicians claiming figures like these are the same ones trying to institute sales tax on all internet transactions."
No, it was Cheney responding to questions about job losses in the US, suggesting EBay sales as a rising new industry that would replace lost manufacturing jobs or some such bullshit.
From September '04:
"Indicators measure the nation's unemployment rate, consumer spending and other economic milestones, but Vice President Dick Cheney says they miss the hundreds of thousands who make money selling on eBay.
``That's a source that didn't even exist 10 years ago,'' Cheney told an audience in Cincinnati on Thursday. ``Four hundred thousand people make some money trading on eBay.''"
"Where is FairPlay/AAC on that list? Speaking of a free press, click here to see the latest Apple stories on Slashdot. 2 or 3 on the first page alone are about Apple censoring users and closing communications. Definitely more Kim Jong Il than Johnny Appleseed here."
Um, even enlightened leftist democracies will do things in self-defense that might not be very nice, and sometimes might seem to be on thin ice, legally.
FairPlay/AAC isn't exactly up there with North Korea's greatest hits.
It's more like export restrictions on powerful hardware. Not terribly constraining, really, and not that hard to get around.
Or laws preventing the importation of fruit into California.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not about patches. For all I know, the person who took the screenshot configured it that way because he thinks vast expanses of garish pink text look cool. Patches won't help that.
It's about understanding that screenshots are about marketing and advertising.
If you want to promote some new Linux software, make sure it looks *good*. It does you no good if the screenshots make your product look ugly and amateurish - in any way.
Compare that text editor screenshot to this one from Apple showing XCode's editor.
Whatever you think about Apple, they have a good design sense, and they make their products look good when they create marketing materials for them. Their screenshot makes Xcode look far more attractive than the screenshot of the gnome editor, which looks rather unpleasant to use, purely because of the painful text colors.
The colors used in a text editor screenshot might seem like a minor issue, but if they look bad, I think to some degree they cast a shadow on the rest of the software. It's likely to raise doubts in some people's minds as to the design sense of the developers, or their attention to detail. It might be only a niggling doubt, but that might be all it takes to get someone to write off Gnome, for this version, or for good. (Obviously, a current Gnome user won't care, because they know the software and aren't going just by screenshots.)
Little aesthetic details like this can make quite a disproportionate difference in acceptance.
It's so easy to avoid such things, by giving a moment's thought and tweaking some settings. Why *not* take a few minutes to tune the appearance before you make the screenshots.
Putting up unflattering screenshots of something you develop or just promote is like putting up an online personal ad, with a photo of your face where you have a big booger showing in your nostril. It would have taken just a moment to fix that, but that booger's going to make sure nobody bothers reading the rest of your ad.
I think you mean:
(Ranked from most crackable to least crackable)
Linux>Solaris> "Sugar Glass">Windows
Sugar glass being the fake glass used for special effects. It breaks easy, and is less likely to cut the poor sod who has to jump through it.
Sugar glass doesn't last long (warps or goes sticky) so make it close to the time when you plan to use it.
Keep it out of moist areas and direct sun. The same as a lolipop it will melt or go gooey.
The sugar can attract ants and other bugs so keep it packaged in plastic, etc. until you use it.
Though only sugar, the glass can have sharp edges/points when broken, so be careful when handling
(From: here)
Well, reading that, sugar glass really is pretty close to Windows. Best keep it in the plastic, so as not to run into any bugs.
I know it's not *that* important, and represents something that the user could (I hope) change, but the nasty garish colors used for syntax coloring in that text editor screenshot have got to go.
A more muted palette would look more attractive. Drop the saturation a bit, use darker colors than hot pink and neon purple. Muted blues and greens like the ones in slashdot's Developers section and Main section. Those would look nice.
Using the bright colors also makes it look primitive, like it's limited to using a Windows 16-color palette.
You don't need to dress up the text editor like a $5 ho just to get the point across that it can do text in color. Pink text doesn't make the point any better than a muted blue would.
I'd be impressed if he wrote an ActiveX control which reformatted your PC's hard drive as an OS X HFS+ Volume.
Creative has a zillion brands for their MP3 players, seemingly combined at random.
Look at the product list here: http://www.nomadworld.com/products/
That's a product list only a crooked bookkeeper could love.
They can't seem to decide what they want to focus on.
Worse, their large number of product names hinders cross-promotion. Promotion of a "Creative Zen Micro" probably doesn't aid sales of a "MuVo Slim".
By contrast, promoting the iPod Shuffle promotes the iPod brand as a whole. If the iPod Shuffle isn't quite what a person wants, they're more likely to look at other items in the iPod line.
If a "MuVo Slim" isn't quite what a person wants, what's to lead them to, say, a "Creative Zen Touch"?
Further, the number of brands Creative uses probably makes their share of the MP3 market look lower than it really is.
I mean, good lord, they even have an "Interactive Decision Maker" to help you decide which model is right for you. Damn thing might as well say "Get an iPod."
Creative's situation is so bad, there isn't even a single name you can use which encompasses all their MP3 players. You can talk about "iPods", but with Creative, all you can refer to is "Creative's MP3 players", which doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. Yet you can't say "a Creative", because that sounds dumb, and Creative makes more than just MP3 players.
Apple's competition can't seem to settle on a design. Their product lines vary in UI and appearance quite a bit.
That makes it hard to distinguish Creative's players from anyone else's, which IMHO hurts their effort to build brand recognition.
There's been some variation among Apple's iPods, but the designs hang together pretty well. Apple could have just thrown some randomly positioned buttons on the Shuffle, but they opted instead to configure the UI to at least resemble the click-wheels on the full-size iPods.
When looking at the templates of resumes and letters, ask yourself: "Would I hire someone who used these templates for their resume and cover letter?"
With Microsoft's templates, the answer is a definite, resounding, NO.
How about with Apple's?
If you're looking for a spreadsheet, you could try Mesa, a Cocoa spreadsheet which costs $34.
A free trial version is available on your iDisk if you have
Mesa is a native Aqua spreadsheet, that has roots going back to the NeXT days.
It's selling price these days is only $34. Even added onto iWork's price, the combination price is still far less than Microsoft Office.
http://www.plsys.co.uk/mesa.htm
A trial download is available on your iDisk's Applications folder.
"OpenOffice is one of those "business" applications that engineers need."
Er, no. OpenOffice is a member of a class of business applications that engineers need. There's nothing special about OpenOffice that makes engineers "need" it, specifically. It is easily replaced with another office product, or separate applications that do the same thing.
"IBM has exited the PowerPC workstation market. "
Er, no they haven't. They exited the Intel PC market.
They're still going to make POWER RISC-based workstations. It's kind of a natural, since they're going to be making POWER RISC computers in other segments, and making chips for Apple.
If I'm remembering correctly, Richard Feynman used to hang out at a strip club and think.
Is to have someone riding shotgun to watch your laptop while you hit the bathroom and vent some of that coffee.
It looks dorky (at best) and perverted (at worst) to be walking into a public bathroom carrying a laptop.
Back in 1994, I hung out a lot at a Chicago coffee house. I asked the owner for, and received, permission to do something super geeky.
I bought a NeXTStation mono, and stored it in the basement office of the shop. I'd bring in an external SCSI drive, haul the slab and its 17" monitor out of the basement, and set up on a wee little cafe table that was just big enough for the slab, keyboard, mouse, the hard drive, and a mug of coffee.
Didn't have any cool Delicious Monster apps to work on, though...
Uh, no.
CueCat was about reading stupid little faux-barcodes, which were specific to the CueCat, and would be printed in magazine ads (and ads posing as articles, as you find in Wired and similar consumer goods whore magazines).
Kinda different.
The use of the CueCat to scan generic barcodes was a hack, and not the intended purpose of the device.
"I guess you missed my point. I found the software to be well designed (a pretty application, as you say) and functional, just a waste of my time after all. I do not regret spending the money, just the time. Others may find it to be very useful to them."
It doesn't take a whole lot of foresight to realize - before buying - that all the work of scanning in your DVD collection isn't really going to accomplish much. Even if it is a nicely designed app.
But then, you're a collector, and collectors are not known for making good rational decisions.
"Don't you worry, as soon as they have serious money in the bank, they'll feel compelled to set up shop in a regular office building,"
Maybe they'll start by moving up to office space at a strip club.
Guy Kawasaki started Garage.com, aka Garage Technology Ventures, a venture capital firm which proudly claims Claria, aka Gator, as part of their investment portfolio.
That's one thing he shouldn't have started.
My impression of the book/method was that it was really focused on executives who delegate virtually all the work they're responsible for, and whose tasks tend to involve phone calls, reviewing documents and signing them, and other executive tasks.
The way it was presented, it didn't seem to be very relevant for someone whose work involves things like spending lots of time actually *working* on things, like writing code, or designing software, or writing a book.
The longest task he ever addresses in the book is the task of getting started with GTD - he advises blocking out a few days of uninterrupted time. Everything else is little bitty things like making calls.
Perhaps my impression is incorrect. But I think Allen would do himself a favor if he rewrote his book for working stiffs, rather than for executives.
"More like, it was a reaction to England's persecution of minorities who didn't follow the Anglican schism from the Roman Catholic church. The English who didn't want to play along with the established religion had the choice of being harassed at home, or going elsewhere. Many of them went to America."
And probably, to some extent, a reaction to France's persecution of Protestants, who were pretty much expelled less than 100 years before our revolution (ie, recent enough that grandparents could have been involved.)
Also, pretty much nobody liked those damned Quakers and Anabaptists.
The founders would, most likely, have been aware of the Wars of Religion, too.
Aside:
These days, too many "anti-separation" people seem to think "Christian" meant the same thing in 1776 as it does today. Whereas today the various denominations get along pretty easily, it was not so in 1776.
Many Anglicans would probably have considered the Catholics to be "papists", not Christians. And many Catholics would have considered the Protestants to be heretics. And either group would not have had any qualms about insisting that these distinctions be codified into law. (Unlike today, where you pretty much have to read a Jack Chick pamphlet to see a Protestant calling the Pope the Anti-Christ.)
Heck, in England, Roman Catholics couldn't even own property until 1778. An attempt in 1780 to give Catholics (gasp) the right to vote resulted in violent anti-Catholic riots in which 500 people died.
I have to wonder - why do anti-Separation people, who think the US was founded as a Christian nation, believe the founders neglected to write that into the Constitution? What was stopping them, if they were a bunch of "Christians"? Today's evangelicals and fundamentalists and hardliners certainly wouldn't be so circumspect - it'd be right there in 720-point copperplate at the top. Elaborations of this as God's Own Country would have taken the place of the Bill of Rights.
The best they can do is point to uses of "creator" or "god", though even thorough pagans like the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius used such terms (or, at least, they are used in modern translations of his Meditations).
"I reckon the politicians claiming figures like these are the same ones trying to institute sales tax on all internet transactions."
No, it was Cheney responding to questions about job losses in the US, suggesting EBay sales as a rising new industry that would replace lost manufacturing jobs or some such bullshit.
From September '04:
"Indicators measure the nation's unemployment rate, consumer spending and other economic milestones, but Vice President Dick Cheney says they miss the hundreds of thousands who make money selling on eBay.
``That's a source that didn't even exist 10 years ago,'' Cheney told an audience in Cincinnati on Thursday. ``Four hundred thousand people make some money trading on eBay.''"
" I'm curious where you read the politicians claiming "millions.""
Dunno about millions, but Cheney, in a campaign appearance, definitely implied that lots of people were making loads of money on EBay.
The context was talking about "new jobs" that replace the ones that have gone away forever.
He might well have said millions.
Maybe that asshat should have stopped at one H2, and then he wouldn't have to work 70 hours a week and could spend some time with his family.
Of course, the H2 is a girlie truck anyway. I swear I only ever see fat middle-aged broads driving those things.
It's not even a real Hummer. It's a pickup in quasi-military drag.
I was expecting a new line of Lindsey Lohan iMplants.
"Where is FairPlay/AAC on that list? Speaking of a free press, click here to see the latest Apple stories on Slashdot. 2 or 3 on the first page alone are about Apple censoring users and closing communications. Definitely more Kim Jong Il than Johnny Appleseed here."
Um, even enlightened leftist democracies will do things in self-defense that might not be very nice, and sometimes might seem to be on thin ice, legally.
FairPlay/AAC isn't exactly up there with North Korea's greatest hits.
It's more like export restrictions on powerful hardware. Not terribly constraining, really, and not that hard to get around.
Or laws preventing the importation of fruit into California.
"I own two HDTVs, an Hitachi rear projection CRT set and a Sony HS-20 front project or for my living room."
That doesn't make HDTV a significant development.
It means you're kind of a freak.