In the mail!
Lets see…
My what a large package! It’s not terribly heavy though. Lets see if we can find more information.
UPS? A tracking number? Lets track it!
What a trip! Honolulu, Hawaii! Woah! Awesome!1
Disclaimer: Blah Blah Pretentious BS ahead!
Over the past few years I’ve started to grow a dependence on google. I’ve started using gmail, google reader, even gCal! It’s been terrific so far with a stable and focused experience, but lately I’ve started to grow tired of it. Everything is together but it isn’t necessarily attention grabbing enough. I’m sure it’s just because I priorities e-mail over everything else but I feel that each product is still very much separated and needs to be together so I can jump between services with a tab.
Now, Mozilla seems to be the next applicant vying for my attention. It doesn’t provide the services on the web but rather provides portals to access them. Great! Lets see…Browser, mail, calender. Check! Cohesive? Nope! Wait… What’s this? Seamonkey? Lets check this out!
Web-browser, advanced e-mail, newsgroup and feed client, IRC chat, and HTML editing made simple — all your Internet needs in one application.
Too good to be true? Lets try! (side note Miro is made by mozilla? Holy carps!)
Dated.
That somes it up. It feels firefox 1, with the tab system unpolished. The calender, irc seem like the’ve been just tacked on. Seamonkey needs polishing. In theory it’s great! but to be honest it’s just a dated version of firefox with a few addons tacked on. In contrast to mozillas separate products, this lacks the polish that makes mozilla products seem so good.
For now, I’ll just live with having 4 seperate programs open for browsing, mail, scheduling.
Ps. Trillian is shaping up to a great IM aggregating client.
I’ve been wanting to do one of these for ages and have not *found* the time.1 But now, at 11:40pm it’s time 
Design is a finicky subject. It is the polish on a product, the thing that upgrades good to great, great to fantastic and fantastic to mind blowing. As an end user, one expects to be able to learn the “landscape” quickly and begin using it as soon as possible. It should *idealy* not require a 5Kg manual to startup yet also should not bombard a user with a slew of intrusive “tips”. As you can see, design is a very delicate… dare I say equilibrium? between holding the users hands but not doing it *intrusively*.
Now, I’m deliberately being very vague here since I’m going to be detailing design with software (Games/Content creation tools), hardware and landscaping and will give examples of both good and bad design. However I will be focusing on software as that’s *what I do*! What qualifies me to judge? The fact that I am a end user of course!
OH SCREW IT. I’ve written this rant 3 times, and they’ve all been structured like the this:
Instead, lets talk about a Design standard.
Or rather what should be THE design standard.
Keyboard shortcuts:
Occasionally, we find the need to use keyboard shortcuts, and I usually can *intuitively* guess which ones I need. For example, “shift+Enter” for a new line instead of submitting, “ctrl+y” for undo, “ctrl+shit+s” for save as. BUT I always do this in fear of something kind loss on my part. Shift enter might just submit the message anyway, ctrl y might…well do nothing, and ctrl/shift/s might just save my work which I might not want. Please, we need a standard for this kind of the, we need to be able to think:”Right, I need to do command X, which is a modification of command Y, So If I hold ctrl/alt while pressing Y I should get X.” I shouldn’t have to fear for my work every time I use a new program!
Essential shortlist:
Enter-new line
Shift-enter Submit
Ctrl-tab Next tab (right)
Ctrl-Shit-tab Previous tab (left)
ctrl-z/y Undo/Redo
Ctrl-S Save
Ctrl-Shift-S Save AS
I could go on… but thats another post.
Unified menu layouts:
This is more of a personal nitpick. Please put “preferances” under tools or options. NOT EDIT. Edit is for undo/redo, manipulation of the document that I am currently on! This isn’t a trouble for me, but I can see how it’d confuse a new user, especially if english is not their first language. (Help>About == Good!
Status bars and tooltips:
I think as a society we have moved away from popups. Modal (Attention seeking, un-unfocusable popups) are good for urgent alerts, not for tips or hints. We have tool-TIPS for a reason! People should also get used to looking at the status bar for more info, the reason they’re not? It’s not standard.
Splash screens:
Don’t use em unless you’re program takes FOREVER to load. IE. ADOBE READER2. Please be courteous, if you’re program is something very light weight, pdf readers, image viewers, video players, don’t make the user wait! It just makes your program seem inferior!
Trojan horse/Crapware syndrome:
Just because you can make a few dollars from doing this, DON’T. You are simply throwing your name down the trash. See Digsby. I hate you ask.com!
Gradients:
Does not always look good. Case: Trillian. Gradients between similiar colours look pleasant and objects appear to have a sheen. Extreme gradients seem like your designer went crazy with a block of ice and a chainsaw. Please, be subtle.
Choices:
Believe it or not? We aren’t all mindless zombies. Some of us like a little customization, and I’m not talking about themes. If I want to open my PDF’s behind a link then I’ll click on ‘em. If I don’t I should be able to change that. If I uninstall the Freaking program and you don’t do anything at all, I’ve think you’ve failed somewhere. *coughchromecough*
That’s it for now, I’ve spent a good hour and a half rewriting this many times and have thus lost many brilliant points, will see what I can come up with later.
I wanted to show a demo in a more polished state, but since I have worked on this for a few months now…
Here it is:
As you can see, it’s rather ugly and unoptimised. If you would like to give feed back please do!
Best way to learn web design ever, On the fly, free testing in the clouds! YES!
Sidenote: had to delete firefox profile. Lost all passwords, addons and whatnots. Coulda backed up but it’s 1:30 for petes sake, who could be bothered?
I have been enjoying my 2 week break by *some* games 1
Team Fortress 2:
For those who don’t know, I play tf2 (YagerX obviously is my handle on steam) and have been playing the crap out of it since the start of the holidays. Started to get bored with playing my usual classes (Heavy, Pyro, Medic and Soldier) and started to refine my spy skills. Being a spy is tough. For those who haven’t played before, it essentially boils down to how well you know the maps and how well you can predict the enemy movements (oh and a great deal of luck). I got better…kinda… Then I found this random server which played some AWESOME maps; Ricklers Engineer Jump, Funky slidy race maps and zombie survival maps. Yea overplayed those too…
Garry’s Mod:
First played this over a year ago, have just recently started playing it again. Had to learn wiremod again…(Orb’s tutorials help) and started messing with space build. Is still fun, starting to make an E2 (Expression gate – Funky programming wire module) autopilot kinda thing. Will be lotsa fun
Love Alpha:
This should really be in it’s own post, but will sum up main points. Art style looks great in stills, but really annoying when you’re actually playing. Takes a while to learn and get used to the controls. Servers were kinda empty when i started playing. Desperately needs a tutorial.
That basically summed what I’ve played in the past 2 weeks and a slew of posts *should* follow on the holiday projects.
RESCUE-TIME TIME!
By goodness this is some serious productivity tool!
It not only watches EVERYTHING you do, it also gives you goals and ranks you against the world! this thing is fantastic!
The graphs it generates are informative and help motivate me but I think this has to be the best feature:
It LOCKS programs and websites to encourage enforce productivity, something that I’ve been needing for a long time.
If you find that you need some discipline while working, this is the ultimate tool1.
I’m sitting here thinking, with this pong thing, will I achieve anything with it?
Short answer: YES; Long answer: NO;1
Why not? I’m programming to get experience no? making a game that combines both 2d and 3d perspectives will be of great experience to me and provide some solid understanding to 3d programming.
Why so? What drives the world? Monay. We all want money!2 By making an artsy fartsy game, I might get some 15 minutes of fame because of some lucky positive feedback from some of the big blogs. Unfortunately the things that make cash are things like canabalt. Short. Addictive and replayable. Non of which makes up an art game3.
So what now? I need to finish space defenders. Or rather, I need to remake/refine Space defenders. Give a kick up the back side and actually finish something. Space defenders will fit perfectly with Kongregate and the whole level sharing API, and after a while I might attempt to put it on face book where hopefully it’ll go viral.
Ambitious I know for my first project but I think if I can refine the style and spend some time properly planning this,it’ll work.
PS. I will however make a cpu vs cpu version of pong just for shits and giggles.4
Yeap. It’s not really fabulicious.
I had this strange craving for random foods for the past two weeks now (No I’m NOT pregnant!) Eg. Pizza, beef, CHICKEN etc…
Today I wanted some REALLY sour confectionary and this popped into my mind. It something that I ate frequently as a child, No idea why as it has the consistency of plastic.
The packaging looks crap, the thing is half melted together and looks like somebody sat on it. Not very appealing at all.
But ooh did it hit the spot… seriously the sourness hit the exact spot that I was was craving which sounds weird but true!
Oh and this thing is probably give me liver cancer or something.
