Archive for February, 2006
Grease
The Mac Mini with an Intel chip is hardly a surprise. But increasing the price? Idiots. Why has it gone up, there’s no reason for it. The whole machine is meant to be the cheap Mac, and now they’ve made it less so.
The iPod Hi-Fi also has this problem, it’s a silly price. $349 for a big white box? That’s what it is, a big white box with an iPod perched on top, and easily the worst designed Apple product in years. Did they sack Jonathan Ive? And what’s with Steve calling it the iLounge? Have they sacked the people who come up with the good names too?
And finally, just when you think it couldn’t get any more ridiculous, $99 leather iPod cases. They may as well bend you over and ask you to grease up.
But despite all this, one thing I want to touch on is the hype machine that surrounded these announcements. People have been blaming Apple for it, but the reality is that it’s entirely created by the press and other members of the blogosphere. All they did was send an invitation to some journalists to come see some products, and from that the rest of the press/rumour mill/analyst community turned it into them announcing a cure for cancer. Complaining afterwards that they didn’t meet the hype is hypocritical, when Apple did nothing to fuel such thoughts. It’s not as if the invitation said “come and watch us change the world”.
Suckr
It amazes me whenever a website becomes popular even when what it offers isn’t particularly good. The website I’m talking about here particularly, is Flickr.
Now there’s no doubt Flickr has been the master of the web 2.0 style of doing business, with it’s very open stance towards developers, RSS feeds, it’s use of tags and tag clouds (one of the early adopters of such a system) and it’s clean design. All of these things, I don’t have much of a problem with, what I don’t like is how it’s held up high as the standard of photo sharing sites when in fact it fails at it’s main purpose, being a good place to browse photos.
Let’s look at this from the perspective that I want to browse through my brothers photos, of which he has 200. I log in and the homepage shows me some samplings from my contacts. So I click on his name, and get his photo homepage. Already the interface is failing me, I can’t see the photos he’s uploaded since my last visit, and I can only see his last ten photos, all without any context of what they might be attached to.
But the biggest problem with Flickr is how many clicks things are apart. If I click on a Set down the left then I get a reasonably good page containing thumbnails of all the pictures in that set, but they’re all far too small. And once I’m on a picture page, it feels like I’m stuck. I can only see two other photos to goto from there, with absolutely ridiculous light grey on light background links to move back and forth or browse on the right (stick that in front of a newbie user and nobody is going to find those links). The reality is that most people take more photos than I’m actually going to be interested in, so the overview page is exactly what is needed most of the time, as you hen peck the photos you actually want to see, based on the thumbnail. Flickr makes you go back and forth from the main photo page to the Browse page, instead of simply placing more of the thumbnails down the right hand side of a photo.
On the Browse page (or Set Detail page) more Sets are listed underneath, but only three of them, with another link to get to a full listing of them. There’s no quick jump link or dropdown. On the photo detail page I can’t easily jump to another set, nor even jump to another one of my contacts, as Flickr offers neither a dropdown of my top friends or a system wide tag search at the top of every page.
One of the best views for viewing is the List view of the Archive, but again you’ll find this a lot of pages away. When you click the Archive link and it lists the months and years, clicking on a year gives you a calendar by default, showing all the months in that year. I would think that since I clicked on a year and not a month, I wanted to see all the photos in that year. If I wanted it by month, I’d have clicked a month. And even if I had clicked a month, it’d have shown me a calendar of that month, showing me what days a photo had been posted on. Clearly showing me the actual photos that had been posted in a month would be a much better default, and save me having to click the List link at the top. I’m far more interested in seeing what photos my brother has posted in January than I am knowing that he posted them on the 14th and 27th.
I could go on, but this post has already gotten too long. Needless to say, I won’t be uploading a regular stream of photos to Flickr.
Fakery
As always, Apple announcements start the rumour mills buzzing, usually with plenty of fakes. MacShrine posted this earlier in the week. The best way to enjoy this is to first visit that link and get a sense for some of the comments.
Then you can enjoy the follow up video even more, as the fakery is revealed.
Good Photoshop tutorial too.
Unrelated, I want to make it clear that the Alertbear screenshot I posted the other day, the work is entirely Deathwish’s. I just grabbed a shot, he actually wrote it. Just in case anybody got the impression I’d suddenly become a shit hot Windows developer or something.
Motivated
I turned off the instant messenger, put on the headphones, and dived into Chatbear v3 development head on. This thing is coming out in May one way or another, so I need more long sessions like this to get the whole thing kickstarted. There’s a good solid base there already (thousands of lines of code), but it’s scattered and needs pulled together, and that’s where I am at the moment.
Got a lot of stuff done, but there’s a lot left to do. It does feel good to break ground sometimes, I just need more sessions like this, stop coming home at night and languishing.
Silence
Swaying against the popular belief that it would be another six weeks before I bothered to put it in, my new fanless graphics card turned up today and I’ve added it to the machine already. I also took the time to re-seat the processor with some fresh thermal material, and unplug the three case fans. That leaves me four fans down from where I was before and oh, what a difference. The sweet, sweet sound of silence is upon me.
Well, almost. It’s still nowhere near as quiet as the Mac, there’s still a distinct audible hum there, but it’s still a huge improvement on where I was before. The card itself is pretty good too, I loaded up WoW and it was smooth as silk without having to change any settings. No issues getting the dual monitors working again either.
Now that I’ll be willing to put on the machine for longer than five minutes without wanting to cut off my ears, maybe I’ll get some work done.
Defcon
Since one of my top 5 favourite films is WarGames (hence the name of the blog, if you didn’t know), you can understand my excitement at the prospect of somebody creating a game based on Global Thermonuclear War. What I want to know is why did it take them so long?
Defcon should be out in the next couple of months, be cheap, available via Steam, and if the previews are anything to go by, be insanely cool. It’s impossible not to read this and not get excited at the prospect of day long, real time office based nuclear devestation. My only worry is that it doesn’t live up to the description and I’ll be forced to play a nice game of chess instead.
Wallace
I bought the Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were Rabbit on DVD, I’ve seen the film before, but wanted to see it again and check out the special features. Like the first time around, even though I enjoy it, I can’t help but be slightly disappointed. The film just seems to lack some of the genius of the shorts, especially The Wrong Trousers. Nothing comes close to the brilliance of the penguin, or the train sequence at the end - one of the best endings to any film, animated or otherwise.
The special features aren’t that in-depth, mostly the usual TV fare that ITV sticks on at random times of the day, while the commentary track has the two directors spending an awful lot of time talking about the parts they’re unhappy or not sure about.
Don’t take this the wrong way though, it’s still a great bit of animation, and a simple 80 minutes of entertainment, but the three shorts are such a high standard to sit up against.
Doubled
Dual monitors on the Mac, that makes me happy.
I ordered the cable again from Apple (the original one was eventually returned to them by TNT and they refunded me) on Saturday afternoon and it turned up this morning. Plugged it in, second screen came on, done. If you’re a regular computer user who is still stuck in one screen, trust me, it’ll change the way you use your machine.
Alert
Normally white, but cream because they’re new. Colours user-definable to indicate category.
Spectrum
The family came together today for my dads birthday, the first time I think we’ve all been in the same room since the last family funeral about 10 years ago. There was actually sixty years between the youngest and oldest people in the room, but both ends of the spectrum seemed to get on well. The whole thing was a surprise for my dad, who wasn’t aware his broher and sister were going to turn up.
Meal wise, I had both fish and carrot cake. Two things I wouldn’t normally eat. I think my taste buds are growing up too.
Silent
I’m completely sick of the noise my PC makes so I ordered a graphics card today with no fan, an Nvidia 6600. It’s a slower card than the X800 that’s in the machine at the moment, but while I’m hardly a big PC games player, I am a hater of loud comptuers, so I figure it makes sense.
It’ll be another horrible process taking the PC out of the corner and making the switch, but I’ll also re-seat the processor while I do so and maybe fix the overheating and crashing too.
See, this is why I use the Mac. Silent, cool, stylish.
Curve
Every site I ever create has little success, but give it a year or two, and somebody will make a huge success out of a similar site.
Digg is similar to an earlier version of the The Links Effect, the whole RSS thing is like QBS/Webdog used to be, telling you of webpage updates, Newsvine is like Planet Groovy used to be and now there’s Campfire. It’s like that live-chat I wrote a couple of months ago (in a few hours), except they’re charging $12-$49 a month for it.
I hate being ahead of the curve, but having no marketing budget or buzz to ride on.
Watchable
Finally, a watchable episode of Lost. It’s the first episode in a couple of weeks that I didn’t find myself skipping parts of, which is probably just as well, otherwise I wouldn’t have been watching it all anymore.
Despite this, I still can’t help but be disappointed in where this show is heading. Week after week the plot isn’t actually advanced much, instead it’s more flashbacks to show us how screwed up all these characters were before the crash, most of which are incredibly dull. The most potentially exciting moment in last nights episode, the counter hitting zero, was ruined for me by the symbols that appeared before he reset it. I’ve no longer got the faith that they know where this thing is going and are instead throwing these “clues” in there with the same kind of wanton abondon that The X-Files displayed.
The great writing that the second half of the first season showed is the real thing that’s been lost.
Sixtieth
The only thing I can say today is Happy 60th Birthday to my dad.
It has to be said that reaching that age myself seems oh so far away. 2039 here I come.
Seven
Finished my second compilation CD today, much harder than the last one.
Again, lots of different artists, hopefully none of them too obvious, and still doing well to avoid the favourites like Ben Folds, Jellyfish, etc. Still looking for suggestions for the next one if anybody would like to post them in the comments. Graham scored a classic by suggesting the Moneybrother track, off the wall choices like that are required.
And the transition between 10 - Eggstone - Still All Stands Still and 11 - The Merrymakers - A Fine Line, thanks to no gap between tracks went burnt from iTunes, is sublime.
Late
Why, when I arrive at work in the morning, do I find it difficult to get started coding? In fact, it’s usually late at night, around 10pm, when I finally get the urge to do some work. And then I can do loads, the fingers working as fast as they can to keep up with the brain which is already ten steps ahead. The only problem with this system is that come midnight, I really need to goto bed and sleep, because otherwise I know I’ll never wake up in time for work again.
Anybody got any tips to solve this problem? How do you get yourself revved up before it’s got dark outside again?
Simple
I’m trying to focus on making Chatbear simple, realising that’s all it needs to be a better service, but I have such a hard time doing it. I try and think simple, and I’m actually a pretty good UI designer, but my problem is that I just think too big.
I spent today writing a full file management system for the admin, so you could create directories, copy files, upload pages/images/whatever, all so you could add content around your boards or blog. It was later before I realised what a pointless waste of time and energy this was. It’s not a hosting service. It’s not meant to replace a proper webhost, it’s a simple community and blog builder. But I can’t get this through my thick head, that simplciity is king, and that I don’t have to have a feature list six pages long, I simply have to be fast, simple and look good doing it.
If you’re wondering why things are taking so long, this is why. Thousands of lines of code implementing features that only six people would actually be interested in, rather than focussing on the sixty thousand that just want something that works.
Got None
There’s a depressing reality when you realise you’re never going to see somebody again, it’s a feeling that grows over time until you find yourself unable to shake off the sense of utter despair. Then you just lie on the couch all day and watch Scrubs episodes, pretending you can actually function.
When it’s the only person you’d stop a bullet for, because they placed you in the “least important” column when a decision had to be made, you wonder what it is you did wrong. And you worry for them too, because you know there’s nobody else in their life that’s going to stop the figurative, or literal, bullet when it does come along.
The two choruses of Robert Post’s Got None sum it up.
I’ve tried to be the unpredictable one
I’ve tried to be the friend that they could rely on
I’ve still got none
Got nothing at all
I’ve tried to be the mean mysterious one
I’ve tried to be the sweetest candy you’d suck on
I’ve still got none
Got nothing at all
Fidelity
I hurt my leg walking last night, twisted my ankle slightly. It was dark, I was freezing, and I was lost for an hour. It was a mistake to be there, but in some weird fucked up way, slightly comforting in hindsight.
Anyway, when I got home and went to bed, I dreamt that it was the next morning (that would be today fact fans), and that I was back in the same place. Except this time I was inside, and was being offered pancakes for breakfast. I accepted and went into the kitchen only to find that it was a huge big room, filled with cookers, other people on the other side of the room milling around, and a kid cooking chicken pieces in a big frying pan. Talking with the person I had gone to see, I had no memory of how I ended up there, my last memory was being there in the dark the night before.
What the hell does all that mean? I have no idea. But when I got up this morning and was in the shower I was having a really hard time seperating what I’d actually done and what I’d dreamt. It all seemed so unreal.
Tonight I watched High Fidelity. It seemed… appropriate.
Boring
What the hell has happened to Lost? In the space of a few weeks it’s become one of the most boring shows on television. And when it’s not being boring, it’s slaughtering characters for no reason, making them do things that go against what has come before.
I got 25 minutes into this weeks show and could barely find the will to keep on going, it just seemed so pointless. How about telling us something about the actual mystery on the island instead of dicking around with rubbish stories about Sawyer’s past.
