The best cure for blue balls
Posted by SupSuper on 20th June , 2009Videogames.
If your website uses Corner Peel Ads, I hate you
Posted by SupSuper on 14th October , 2008You know the things. Those folds that pop up on corners of pages just begging for them to give them a touch so they’ll fill your screen with some ad you didn’t really care about. And even if you don’t, you’ll probably hit them by accident anyways given they’re usually on the top-right corner, where window controls are located above. And like all annoying things, it’s suddenly everywhere.
So I decided to look into this and find out there’s not just one site providing this but tons of them, all equally terrible sites in their own right. Not just that but they’re all charging money for it, for something that probably some hobbyist coded in their free time and it’s spread like wild fire. And people are actually buying it. What are you, idiots?!?
In theory, this might sound like a good idea. It’s just sitting there, on the corner of your screen, not bugging anyone. That’s wrong. The fold is designed so that it’s always there moving, swaying with the wind, begging for you to kill your curiosity and check it out. It’s annoying, it’s distracting and it doesn’t go away.
Not only that, the whole thing seems to be made out of a bizarre combination of Flash and Javascript, which I’m sure is right up there with monkey ads on Never Do This Ever What Were You Even Thinking. Not to mention the bulk it adds to the page, or that every different implementation has different bugs like not preloading the ad, not handling the hover properly, stupidly huge hit area, and that people can make ads as cumbersome and intrusive as they want.
In the end, I don’t care how clever you are, an ad is an ad and I’m going to get rid of it any way I can and dislike your site that much more for it.
URGENT: Priority System Update for Windows Vista, Windows Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 systems (x86, x64, IA-64)
Posted by SupSuper on 9th July , 2008
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.