Looks like you hit the tree, Jim
Posted by SupSuper on 22nd September , 2007Ah yes, golf. Sport of… rich bastards and big suits. I’ve always been more of a mini-golf kinda guy. It’s simpler and it’s got crazy obstacles to get around. It relies on timing and angles rather than being able to hit a long one.
Yet, somehow, I got addicted to a golf game. I blame my friend Zeor for this. Albatross18 is one of your traditional asian MMO games. You got your cutesy avatars, you got your purchasable items, and you’ve got huge servers with ranking. But instead of weapons and roleplaying, it’s got… golf. It’s crazy. And it’s fun. And I love it. Maybe it’s all the wacky character animations, the vast plentiful courses, or just the fact that I don’t totally suck at it. That and the zany hats. Gotta love’em.
If you feel like trying it, here’s a trailer of the upcoming Revolution (new swag) for you to enjoy:
Comboboxes are not navigation!
Posted by SupSuper on 20th August , 2007More and more I find people using comboboxes for navigation. It’s silly. It’s ridiculous. It’s probably the only thing abnormally wrong about the Penny Arcade site. In any case, comboboxes aren’t even really comboboxes, they’re just compact listboxes! In any case, comboboxes are meant for forms. They’re meant for selecting one time out of many. Stop using them as archives, indexes, lists, menus and what not. If you use them because the full list takes up too much space, use a freaking frame or iframe, or just use the CSS equivalent of a popup menu or such. Or just put it somewhere where you have space and link to it. Why? I’ll give you three:
1. JavaScript: Well ok I don’t mind JavaScript, but it can hinder users a lot in this case. Here you are using a javascript-based combobox for what’s virtually a list of links. If for some reason your code isn’t cross-browser or people disable it, whoop, there goes half your usability. Not to mention if you have one of those auto-jump comboboxes (that jump to the link as soon as you select it), you’re gonna annoy everyone that accidentally selects an option.
2. It’s a UI component, not a page: For this matter, you can’t view all the items at once, you can’t search through the combobox and you’ll have a hard time getting it to fit both with the website design and the standard UI for whichever OS is being used.
3. No control: Since a combobox doesn’t have links, users can’t click on multiple options. They can’t open links in new windows. They can’t copy the link address straight from the list. And so on. That’s User Usability 101 right there, and you’re making a mockery out of it!
Vista-ready games have no shortcuts!
Posted by SupSuper on 31st July , 2007And this angers me! I mean, I understand they don’t need shortcuts in the Programs folder because they have their dedicated Games Explorer ones. Yet developers still forget to create shortcuts in the Games Explorer! Stuff like the Readme, Launcher, Websites, Extras and other such that we used to have with the good old Programs folder. Come on, get a grip.
I loathe folder types
Posted by SupSuper on 21st July , 2007You know what they are. That thing Microsoft introduced with Windows XP or so. How any folder with at least one image (or audio or video file. You can apply this generalization to all the following times I use this term) is immediatly classified as an “image folder” and gets attached all those useless tasks, special view options and what not.
Don’t get me wrong. I understand that if people have a folder full of images, it’s probably strictly for images, and they might find a thumbnail-view handy, as well as all the extra picture info like size, camera type and what not. But not everything that has an image is an image folder.
I like to keep a simple clean standard view. A Details view with columns for the common info like Name, Type, Size and Date Modified, all sized to make full use of my large resolution. It’s all I need and I like it. I might customize the view for other folders if I need, by myself. But Windows won’t let me have that. It’ll turn any folder into an image folder without my consent, resetting my standard settings and causing me havoc since whenever I open the folder, I have to get used to a completely different view.
To add to that, as handy as extra file info is, it only slows down Windows more as it queries all the extra info just to display the folder’s contents, since Windows only caches thumbnails. Plus, all these folder types are linked. If I try to change the view settings myself in one of these folders, chances are it’ll affect several other completely unrelated folders. Even bigger chances are it’ll quickly forget about them and re-apply it’s default view for “image folders”. Worse even, these view settings now also apply to the smaller Open/Save dialogs in which they mostly don’t even fit in.
This leads to a Little Annoyance. A Little Annoyance is, by my view, worse than a Large Annoyance, because you avoid the latter the minute you run into it. With a Little Annoyance, you cope with it, live with it, slowly dragging you down until it eventually grows into a Large Annoyance anyways and you avoid it completely. Navigating a file system is vital to any user, and the more this is clogged, the worse. I cannot avoid such a vital task without having to resort to something like typing the whole file path myself, and if I wanted to do that I’d switch to Linux.
Disco Case
Posted by SupSuper on 24th June , 2007My computer now has 5 coolers to stop it from exploding, at a grand-total of 7 fans, 2 of which are of different colors.
It’s like there’s a party in there and I’m not invited. 
What’s wrong with open-source and plugins
Posted by SupSuper on 23rd June , 2007Open-source. It’s a great concept. It’s free, it’s open, it’s for everyone. Who wouldn’t like that? But one thing many fail to realize is that open-source, like everything else, isn’t perfect. In fact, it can be a very bad thing. For the sake of not writing “most” in every line, I will now be generalizing. It’s something I do a lot. Get used to it.
So, you have your Average-Joe. He has some coding skills, he has an idea, he puts those two together, sets his goals and starts working on a project of his own. If his idea is good enough (and even if it isn’t), he’ll publish it online and make it open-source. He’ll work on it for the users that start popping about. Releasing new bug fixes, new features, all following his little goals until v1.0 and possibly moving on from that. More people join him in his work, the user community works, and a new successful project is made.
However, many things can happen in open-source. Usually the founder will eventually leave the project once he’s done with it or just doesn’t have time anymore. This leaves the rest of the team free to set up their own goals, their own rules, slowly taking the project away from its original intent to their own scheming. Or maybe the founder himself decides to take another angle on the thing, or take his goals too far. The community that grew with the project will commonly follow wherever the project takes them and blindly obey whatever’s set, creating some kind of locked community, a secluded society.
Open-source projects tend to have very strict goals and rules, which the developers will follow whether it will actually improve them on anything. Unlike commercial projects, open-source abides by the “you’re not paying me for this so deal with it”, leaving developers to do whatever they want with the project no matter how ridiculous. Maybe they’ll just focus on releasing version after version of shinier cleaner code that makes no visible change to users. Maybe they’ll just slowly make the project futile and no longer please as it did originally. Whether the users like it or not is none of their business, the goal is their own and to hell with everyone else. They will quickly dismiss any ideas, suggestions or tips from users, if they don’t abide by their strict plans, and aided by their locked community, the project will slowly become more and more exclusive, with new users and maybe even existing ones being driven off by a no longer wanted and loved project, assisted by a stagnant community, fueled by any slight bit of ignorance and with open ears only for their rulers, the developers.
You may thing I’m making this up, possibly even exaggerating. Perhaps. But there are plenty of examples out there. MAME, a popular arcade emulator went too far with their goal of “historical accuracy”, ruining a once good and easy gaming experience. No matter how or where you get the ROMs for it, there’s a pretty good chance they won’t work in the latest version, or even the next. Or maybe just work horribly bad. In fact I’m not the first to realize this, Stuart has caught on way ahead of me.
In fact, this accuracy thing is pretty common. Many projects remaking some popular / obscure / whatever game strive to reproduce the original by every pixel, or sometimes even by every original bug. This is silly. Just because it was good, doesn’t mean it can’t be better. Fix every bug, correct every flaw, hell, even update it to today’s standards with shiny new graphics or whatever. If you’re worried about the community, make it an option. Of course don’t go filling it with all your own wacky ideas and completely turn the original game around, or otherwise don’t even bother referencing to the original. No I don’t care if you’re just doing a lame attempt of scaring away any evil lawyers and if it’s “your own game and I’ll do with it as I please”, if it pleases nobody else you might as well just keep it, the Interwebs is rubbish enough, thank you.
Another thing there’s a lot of is multi-IM applications. Because with the huge variety and possibility of IMs, and with all your friends deciding to spread over all of them, you don’t want to lug around 6 different IMs. But if you’re gonna implement all the other protocols, implement them properly. If all you’re gonna do is have some plain window with a contact list and a textbox that allows you to send/receive text between them, well, I might as well just go back to e-mail then. The reason there’s lots of different protocols is because they all differ, each having their own unique and cool (or annoying) features. I understand you don’t have to support every single thing and it’s hard to keep up with paid developers, but at least don’t shrug off everyone that points out that Miranda IM still doesn’t support invisible messages even though WLM8 has been out for months. If more and more people keep pointing it out, then it’s because it’s that big a deal. Give us avatars, give us status, give us logs and emoticons and maybe even video and audio. Because if you all you want is plain text, 10 other things have beaten you to it. The fact that Trillian seems to be the only one that provides these options is truly a sad sight, specially because it’s a commercial application yet it’s still broken ten ways to Sunday.
And finally, there’s Firefox. Firefuckingfox. Yes it’s a browser. Ok, a good one. Get over it, it’s still just a browser. They’re not any holier than thou. So quit blabbering about it in every sentence. Quit advertising it. Quit making entire websites about it. Quit plastering it all over your sigs and have it fight it out with other browsers (or, more commonly, eating / biting / chomping and even saber-fighting Internet Explorer), and for crying out loud, quit drawing fuckin’ fanart of it! Next thing you know, people will be talking about making love to it. Oh who am I kidding, this is the Interwebs, I’m sure there’s a Firefox fetish site out there somewhere.
And no, just because it has plugins doesn’t make it the best application EVAR. In fact, that’s another thing common in the open-source world: plugins. Yes I get it, it’s pretty much your “get out of jail free” card for all those feature requests. “Want something? Add it yourself. Heck, feel free to add whatever crazy thing you want, I won’t stop you.”
So what’s wrong with them, you ask? Well, for one thing, people seem to think that an application that supports plugins immediately can do anything possible evar and should be valued as such. Or that developers can get away with implementing an application that does barely nothing but has plugins. And it’d sell. So I could go “this is a plain ol’ box, but it supports plugins, so worship me”. Eventually someone would turn it into a box on wheels with titanium armor, USB 1TB drive, time-travelling support, built-in toaster and a cup holder. But the Average-Joe would still get a plain ol’ box!
Plus as soon as something has plugins, any single feature request is completely brushed off with “make it yourself”. Or sometimes “get someone to make it” (because clearly, random users have nothing better to do than serve other random users). Because clearly, every single person is capable of knowing completely well the language the program was designed with (or the pseudo-language it created for plugins), as well as all the intrinsic knowledge about the program and its properties that are pluggable. And if they do, they might as well put their skills to good use and join the project, since after all, it’s open-source. Ok, so commercial programs do this too. But not a lot.
And then of course, you have the opposite end of the spectrum. People hellbent on adding every possible feature as a plugin, even if it has absolutely no relevance with the program in question. If I’m using a word processor, the last thing I’m looking for is some MMO game to add into it. If I’m using a file browser, I don’t give a rat’s ass that I could have it check my e-mail as well. Not to mention everything these days seems to be capable of checking your e-mail. Even computer viruses.