Tag Archive for 'Software'

Adobe Photoshop’s little infamy

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on January 23, 2009
in Bad design
. 2 Comments

It’s hard to speak ill of Adobe Photoshop. Even its painful price tag is well justified by this application’s incredible power, which I’ve been barely scratching in my many years as a faithful user. Still, there is one inexplicable sin its designers have committed.

Tastes vary, which is why Microsoft have included in their Windows OS the ability to customize the GUI’s elements. For my part, I do three things whenever I install Windows for my use: get rid of that incongruous green hill on the desktop, revert to the more businesslike classic (“Windows 95″) look, and make the menu font easier on the eyes by turning it Bold and, on high-res screens, enlarging it by a point. Since the whole idea is that this font tweak affects all programs running under Windows, I’m all set.

So what happens when I upgraded from Photoshop CS to version CS2? The menus are a tiny, skinny Normal font. The good folks at Adobe decided to violate the basic guideline that all apps must comply with the Windows UI preferences. The user’s preferences. My preferences. “So why do we care”, they say, “if you get a headache from peering at a tiny font? That’s none of our concern!”

Photoshop CS and CS4 Menus

But that’s not the end of the story; because in CS2 they also added the option, in Photoshop’s Preferences, to choose the UI Font Size! What Adobe hath taken away, Adobe now giveth back! Hallelujah! I select Large, restart the application as directed, and… various elements of the UI – Palette captions, for instance – are indeed larger. Except the menus. They remain tiny. Looks like they applied this “UI Font Size” setting to only part of the UI but not to the one they initially messed with.

And now I moved ahead to CS4, and I was hoping they’d seen the error of their ways and given us back control over our menus, one way or another. So I was hoping… but of course they hadn’t.

Take note, Adobe… that is bad, bad programming practice.

No, I don’t know anyone in the Ashmore Islands!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on January 12, 2009
in Bad design and Improvement
. 1 Comment

Two of the least pleasant-to-use GUI controls are the scrollable list box and its cousin the drop-down list, especially when they have many items listed. Of course, that’s exactly when they are indispensable… you can’t use radio buttons for 50 choices, so if you need to let the user choose a state of the union, a drop down list is inevitable. Likewise for countries of the world, or for their currencies.

But the way these geographic-oriented controls are implemented in software and web sites is really annoying.

Drop-down List of countriesTake the image at right, the list you have to go through to select a country for a new contact in Outlook and other applications: it opens on a list of ten countries, of which one – Argentina – may be even remotely likely to be inhabited by business contacts of yours. You can scroll down, of course… and in the next ten you find even greater concentrations of business partners, like the entry for the Ashmore and Cartier Islands, which are a group of small uninhabited tropical islands in the Indian Ocean!

Not that I have anything against the inhabitants of Ocean islands, or of Angola, Antigua, or Anguilla, but given the statistics, why should I have to scroll past them – and past Cook Islands, and Namibia, and Nauru, and Palmyra Atoll, for that matter – on my way to find the US, or the UK, where I really have many more contacts and affairs?

Or look at the next screen grab, from a web site for computing currency exchange rates. Do I really need to have Equatorial Guinea’s CFA Franc, the Eritrean Nakfa, and the Ethiopian Birr pushing down the Euro and the US Dollar farther away from the British Pound, just because of the accident of alphabetic order?

List Box of currencies

Obviously, the people of Estonia do care about the Kroon (and I care about the Israeli Shekel, also far from the heart of global finances). But what is needed is a list that gives the most common choices – the Dollar, the Pound, the Euro – by default at the top of the list, where 99% of users will benefit. And then we need personalization, so each of us in the rest of the world can put their country, or those they deal with, at the very top.

This can be done in many ways. One’s home country can be extracted from Windows Regional settings and put up front. Web sites may use cookies to remember which currencies you converted last time. Local software tools can keep my choices in the Windows registry. Smarter tools may learn from your past choices and bump them up the list in future. The techniques exist; it’s just that someone should step out of the silly box and dump the alphabetic order in favor of what makes users more productive and less annoyed!

CardScan continues to amaze!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on November 25, 2008
in Good design
. 0 Comments

A few months ago I wrote about the surprisingly good customer service I received when my CardScan business card scanner died. Well, this was no accident, it seems.

The other day I installed the CardScan software on another computer and I noticed on the welcome dialog during installation the following fine print:

CardScan welcome dialog

I was impressed. I install many software products, and most never go beyond offering a customer service pointer in case of trouble. Mr. Weyman’s invitation is much more positive and proactive, and I may take him up on it one day…

And on the same dialog they also say that you can return the product in the first 30 days for a no-questions-asked refund. These guys really understand customer orientation!

Plug and Gag: hardware that thinks it’s software?

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on October 20, 2008
in Bad design
. 3 Comments

These days nobody is surprised to see a software product expect tens or even hundreds of free Megabytes on the disk – a far cry from the frugal eighties, when entire operating systems would fit on a floppy or two, but this is life and we accept it philosophically. But when a piece of Hardware makes similar expectations, I begin to be annoyed. And increasingly, they do.

For example, I recently installed for a friend a new printer, the Hewlett Packard Deskjet HP-F2280 printer/scanner/copier. I put the CD-ROM that came with it into the drive, and then had to stick around for more than 15 minutes, and interact with a zillion dialogs, while the product installed an endless stream of stuff on the hard drive. Fifteen minutes for what ought to be the installation of a device driver?!?!!

Leaving aside the question of speed – this computer was running at over 2 GHz, so I’d expect it to need 15 minutes to solve massive mathematical problems, not to copy some silly software from a CD – there is the question of manners. It is not good manners to sell someone a printer, and then to blast hundreds of megabytes of software onto their hard disk, without so much as a pretty please. And HP has the nerve to claim in the System Requirements that you need “450 MB available hard disk space” to install the printer under Windows XP. For Vista, you need 700MB.

Think about it: 700 Megabytes? 700 MB is enough to store all the text of the Britannica; it’s the sort of space you’d expect for a complete development environment, or for a powerful video editing program. But a printer?!

Sheer Chutzpah, that’s what it is.

Snagit 9 vs. FastStone 6: Simpler is better!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on October 13, 2008
in Bad design, Design principles, Good design and Uncategorized
. 2 Comments
I needed a screen grabber, and based on recommendations from a friend downloaded the trial version of Snagit 9. I was impressed and disappointed.Impressed, because this is one potent package. It can do everything you may ever want to do about image grabbing. I particularly liked the “Scrolling window” option, for capturing a web page longer than one screenful. BUT… this program has an extremely complex and ornate user interface, giving you access to countless possibilities; and these are presented in the most colorful UI I’ve seen since my kids graduated from Fisher-Price. Take a look :

Snagit 9 User Interface

Compare this to Photoshop: powerful and feature rich, but its UI is simple, with minimalist icons in monochrome…

FastStone user interfaceI found this so distracting that I went and downloaded another shareware product, FastStone Capture (Ver. 6). Check the utterly simple UI to the right:

Note that 99% of the time, these few icons (including “Scrolling window”) cover all you need; the rest is accessible but unobtrusive in a drop down menu at the right, where it can’t distract you. Click a button on this tiny floating toolbar and the capture begins. The same icons exist in the Snagit window, but actually, once you click one there you then need to click the big red round button – which may make you feel powerful, but is a redundant action. Of course it’s a single extra click, but it’s also double the number of clicks required  in FastStone.

Interestingly, the development team at Snagit have a blog where they share their thoughts (commendable!) and there I read that “… we felt that the interface shouldn’t be competing for attention, but should fade away and allow people to focus on their content”. Sorry… good thought, but I can’t endorse the execution on it. Nothing about the baroque UI they built brings the word “Fade” to mind. Just compare it to the tiny toolbar of the FastStone tool.

Simpler is better, nowhere more so than in tools you use daily.

The importance of Exuberance in User Experience

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on August 18, 2008
in Design principles and Good design
. 1 Comment

Photoshop rules, and gets more powerful and more useful with every new release… but it will never recreate the joy of using Deluxe Paint.

Now, Electronic Arts’ Deluxe Paint was a raster graphics paint program released for the Commodore Amiga in 1985,King Tut, the iconic image of DeluxePaint which fast became the standard on that venerable 16-bit platform. It would typically handle 32-color images at up to 640×400 resolution. Sure, you could do things in it that no other personal computer could do at the time – like the King Tut image that became the hallmark of this program – yet in today’s terms it was utterly weak and primitive. So what’s the big deal?

The big deal, IMHO, was the Exuberant feel of its usage, the kind of joy one might feel when grounding the gas pedal in a powerful sports car… In DPaint you could mark a rectangle anywhere on your image, cut it (with one click) to become a brush, then drag and spray it across the screen in wide sweeps to create swatches of colorful shapes, in real time, under your immediate command. The village below was created in seconds from the single house at top left… And then you could set the program for mirror or tile modes that would reflect this action in a kaleidoscopic riot of visual joy. You could create colorful abstract images fast – click! click! click!…

Brush effects in Deluxe Paint

You may still say, what’s the big deal? You can do all that in Photoshop! Well, yes and no. You can achieve the same results (and lots more that was unthinkable in 1985) but you do this by going through a long sequence of steps, as if you’re performing delicate brain surgery. I mean, in DPaint you drew a circle by clicking a button and drawing the circle with one mouse motion. In Photoshop, the instructions for drawing a circle have 7 steps, and step 5 says “In the Stroke dialog box, type a value for Width, and then click the color swatch to display the Adobe Color Picker“. This certainly works, but it does not bring the words joy, or Real time, or Immediate to mind…

The same difference can be seen in comparing an iPhone to a Nokia. The iPhone’s UI is definitely exuberant; the joy of dragging stuff around with your finger and having it respond is very real. On a Nokia, you have to cope with all those teeny buttons… it works, but it just isn’t fun!

Hear that, designers? We need more products with an Exuberant user experience!

A crash on the U-bahn: Windows and Non-PC applications

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on August 4, 2008
in Bad design and Improvement
. 0 Comments

I was in Berlin, where they have a subway system that, though it dates back to 1902, is as effective as it is pleasant (part of this last may have to do with the fact that the tunnels are close to the surface, so there is less of the “going down to the bowels of the earth” feeling you get in systems like that in London; you descend a few steps down – or, in some cases, up, as some areas have the train above street level – and you are ready to travel).

Berlin U-bahn Monitor

Anyway, on the carriages they have ceiling-mounted screens that show a variety of local news and entertainment. Good idea. And then, one day, I look at the screen and I see that most recognizable of computer entities: the Windows error message dialog box. It stayed there for the entire trip, informing the fascinated travelers that it was “Unable to locate DLL”.

This of course elicited a few sniggers from the crowd, but there is a Berlin U-bahn Monitor with Windows error messagemore serious lesson here. If they figured Windows was the best tool to use on a public transport system, they’re welcome to use it; though Windows is, by definition, a system for the PC, and that stands for Personal Computer, not for Public Conveyance. However, when a dialog like this appears on my Personal Computer, as it does on occasion, I can take action, if only to hit the Vulcan Nerve Pinch key combination. But on a train there is no keyboard with Ctrl-Alt-Del, nor a Reset button. So why show us this useless gobbledygook? The system in this case ought NOT to show the dialog about the DLL; it should instead erase the screen and display a humorous image related to the situation and a message such as “We’re sorry, there is a malfunction. This is being addressed. Thank you for your patience”. Alternatively, the screen might simply switch itself off on program malfunction. Anything but the incongruous error message box.

Using Windows for non-PC applications may or may not be a good move, but it is happening in many places; at least there should be a version of Windows optimized for such non-interactive situations!

Don’t you miss Borland’s no-nonsense EULA? (sigh)

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on May 30, 2008
in Odds and Ends
. 0 Comments

Every commercial piece of software we use comes with an End User License Agreement (EULA), which we all merrily accept without reading. After all, who has time to read a rambling document of barely decipherable legalese that we can’t do anything about anyway? Sometime I do glance through them, and my blood pressure shoots up (the part I like best is where it says “Some states do not allow the exclusion of [bla bla], so the above exclusion may not apply to you”, which essentially says “we will abuse you all the way, but if your state prohibits this we will abuse you a little less”). :-(

So, I sometimes remember fondly the old (1980’s) Borland No-Nonsense License, which said:

You must treat this software just like a book …

…By saying “just like a book,” Borland means, for example, that this software may be used by any number of people, and may be freely moved from one computer location to another, so long as there is no possibility of it being used at one location while it’s being used at another or on a computer network by more than one user at one location. Just like a book can’t be read by two different people in two different places at the same time, neither can the software be used by two different people in two different places at the same time. [you can find the full text here].

Sensible, isn’t it? And fair, too. An agreement decent people might freely enter, and have respect for (check the sentiment expressed here). Our world needs more of this sort of thing!

Incidentally, the distinction between the Borland style and the one prevalent today – what I call People language vs. Lawyer language – is what inspired my own legal blurb on Possibly Interesting.