What I Am Doing Taking So Many Screenshots in the First Place

See previous post.

Software that No Longer Does the Little Things

I would like to take a screenshot and know the number of the Picture X.png file that results.

When you have a string of them and then delete a few, OS X fills in the gap in file numbers rather than going one higher than the highest number. So you can have Picture 3.png - Picture 4.png - Picture 7.png - Picture 8.png - Picture 12.png on your desktop wherein Picture 4.png is the most recent one you took.

Workaround of the Week

Instead of using Photoshop's Save for Web function, which makes everything look pale (and I am pale enough, thank you), I am taking screenshots of the .psd versions and cropping those for use on the web. Lovely.

They're Not Listening to Me

http://dearadobe.com/

Let's hope they're listening to everyone.

Holdouts Punished Once Again

Want to watch the Olympics online on a Macintosh? Make sure you buy an expensive new (and not all that much better) Intel Mac! Olympics will no play on my machine.

The obvious question: Are the Chinese censoring me?

Great

Has anyone ever had InDesign CS3 insert weird stuff? I was just flipping through a book I'm typesetting and there is: orange double triangles. WHAT THE HELL IS THAT? I didn't put it there. I have never created those shapes in Illustrator. IT JUST APPEARED. And it's not a weird invisible or a marker or a highlighted warning thing -- I deleted it with the text cursor. When selected, the font palette does not change--it's the same font as the text. I hate this.

Here's another look, and selected.

This Is A Bug, Right?

Every time I zoom in or out in InDesign, the page that comes up on my monitor is the middle of the document. For example, I'm working on something on page 54 of a 400-page document. I even have an item selected, so clearly that's the page I want to be on. Then, zoom and--zoom!--I'm on page 200.

This happens with command-hyphen and command-equals only, not the magnifying glass, so it has to be a bug, right? It is no help at all!

And guess what? If I hit the arrow keys or type something (to force InD to bring me back to page 54 where I'm working), it doesn't bring me back. But it does make the changes. I should NEVER be able to alter a page I'm not looking at.

Thankfully the pages pallette does not jump, so I can see the highlighted icon of the page I'm actually on there, but I still gotta navigate back.

Is this post less shrill? I'm trying to be less shrill and maybe even move toward actually being useful. Lord only knows to whom.

The Olden Days Weren't Always So Good

Workings of Ancient ‘Computer’ Deciphered

“The mechanism still contains many mysteries,” Dr. Freeth said, citing questions about some of the remnant gears and a star almanac at the front that has confounded the experts.

They put the star almanac on the front?! Idiots! The thing's never gonna work that way.

A Note on Style

I am well aware, in the previous post, that I bothered to insert neither proper typographic quotes nor a true em dash. I do not haver time or interest for this kind of pedantry. The period goes inside the quotes, everything is properly spelled, let's all get a life.

Tip of the Iceberg

This is a little thing in Photoshop, but you think by now the louder voices would have called enough attention to it that Adobe would have changed it.

"Copy Color As HTML" in the color palette is of course massively useful and time-saving. What's useless is the format in which it's copied: color="#8fea05."

In this day of CSS, all we really need is the hex number: #8fea05. I can't believe that most people are pasting color="#8fea05" into HTML pages -- most are pasting it into style sheets, right? If you're using CS3, aren't you also using CSS?

Past Noon and No Trouble So Far Today

Of course, I've been away from my computer the whole time.

Same Old Story

Had I known that the iPhone OS 2.0 would reduce my 1st gen phone's battery life by more than half, I would not have upgraded. I can live without saving images off the web, and I certainly can live without all the dorky apps. But it plain sucks that the battery won't last the weekend.

There Is No Explanation and There Is No Excuse

Three weeks too late, I began wondering why, when I imported John's manuscript from Word into InDesign CS3, all the italics were stripped out. (Is this a big deal? How many words do you think appear in italics in a 368-page book? Probably a lot, right? You are correct. Now think about going through the entire manuscript and re-applying italics to all those words. Such is my pathetic profession.)

A couple tests confirms: InD CS3 ignores italics in Word documents. (And forget about being asked to import styles and all that.)

The solution: Import text into CS2, then copy it over into CS3.

The conclusion: I have to quit this stupid job. There's no excuse for this kind of crap in InD but in the final analysis, there's no excuse for me putting up with it.

Why We Are All Suckers

How long does it take for your car to start? How long does it take for your microwave to start? Your radio? How long after you pick up the receiver before you hear a dial tone on your phone? How long after you press the shutter release do you take a picture?

Now: how long do you have to wait for your damn computer to start up?

It's bullshit, right?

All You Really Need

I'm Just Asking

Why don't blogs ever include a 'back to top' link at the bottom of the page? I'm talking about the long-list type of blogs, like Kottke and Swiss Miss and Daily Kos and basically every single other blog. When I get to the bottom of the page, all that carefully thought-out navigation (aka usability tools, ahem) are long gone.

Likewise, when you choose to read an entry's comments, you get to the bottom of another long page and there's really nowhere to go. Some, like Jason give you a lot of other stuff at the bottom (I think this was Hemingway's 'innovation' that caught on with self-designed blog templates), but no global nav.

Am I missing something? Is there something fundamentally uncool about the back to top?

From My One Other Reader

Alex sent me this. He is way into technology and so I am sorry to say but he brought that misery upon himself. Let others be warned!

I Am Human After All

So last night there was nothing on TV (or so it seemed at first -- turns out "Big" was being replayed on Chanlle 13 -- so good!) so I did a little iPhone app installing. I tried the NY Times app, Facebook, Rotary Dialer, Twitterific, and Jott.

Within half an hour I'd deleted all of them except Facebook. I know, I know -- the iPhone is essentially moving towards being a computer platform (so much more than a phone!), but seriously. I love analog machinery as much as the next guy but Rotary Dialer is clever but completely useless because you have to know the number you're dialing. Jott requires you to open an account and I have no interest in that. NY Times is slow and not really very personalizable and who wants to read the paper on the phone anyway. (On the other hand, if I could call the Times and have someone read the paper to me . . . ) Twitterific is a flawed from the start because it's connected to Twitter, which is nigh on pointless except for wasting time at work when I'm at my real computer.

Luckily, it only took half an hour to learn all this.

On the Subject of Illustrator

If you have ever made a table made of threaded text boxes, you know it is a pain in the ass to select some of them. Dragging a cursor-select-frame (whatever it's called; in Photoshop it's the marquee) selects all the threaded text frames, not just the ones you want. De-selecting them is stupid and takes forever.

The solution is, once you get the right text in the right boxes, remove the threading completely (Type > Text Thread > Remove Threading). What you think will happen (ie, what would happen in InDesign, where text threading is the bread and butter) does NOT happen: the text in all but the first box does not disappear. What happens is all the text stays right where it should, which makes moving only selected boxes suddenly very easy.

So what do you called software behavior that is both non-obvious and inconsistent with expectations? Answer: Adobe!

Quick Saturday Post

I already don't care about the new iPhone 2.0 and it hasn't even finished syncing.

Proof!

I software updated my shit this morning, so I know I have the Flash player, bitches.

Let Me Save You Some Time

The ratio of iPhone apps that suck to the number of hours you are going to spend finding out they suck is going to be over 1:2. Just so you know.

Also, not one of them will make you a sandwich.

**Update: I have decide the ratio will be more like 1:5. Have fun, suckers.

An Entry on Tennis

Off topic, but this thought needs to be recorded.

Last night on Charlie Rose (good night -- Ted Koppel on China), Jim Courier was there to talk about the Federer/Nadal final. Courier was discussing Nadal's serve and he pointed out that in the French, he served almost exclusively to Federer's backhand. At Wimbledon, he served to Federer's backhand, forehand, to the body, down the middle and out wide. Lots of mixing it up.

So the question is, did Nadal use the French Open to plant some expectations (that serves would be to the backhand) in Federer's mind, only to completely confound those expectations at Wimbledon? Did he basically run a two-tournament mindfuck on Federer? Because if he did, if he planned his French serve strategy just to set up his Wimbledon strategy, HOLY FUCK. I prefer Federer's game to Nadal's but HOLY FUCK. That's awesome.

BFD

I am so totally over the way the palettes fade out in CS3 apps.

I Take It Back

Opera's bookmarks have something called "Sort by My View." That's literally what it's called. Everything is back to where it belongs.

I know this makes me like the sales guy when his penis gets restored:
http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com/

Opera Update

It alphabetizes all your imported bookmarks.

Ask me if this is what I wanted! Go ahead -- ask me!!

The Bottom of the Browser Barrel

Opera. Downloaded. Installed. Launched. Immediate problem #1: It does not import Camino Bookmarks. There are options for Safari, Firefox/Netscape (sic), and IE. And you can't fool Opera into thinking the Camino bookmark.plist file is some other browser (shouldn't it be the same format as Firefox? As everything fer crissakes??).

So I have to import my most up-to-date bookmark set from Camino to Safari, then bring it into Opera.

Don't even talk to me about del.i.c.i.ou.s.

The good news is, clicking the URL bar selects the whole URL right out of the box. And Opera's default behavior is, as is sane and proper, to autocomplete URLs from my bookmarks (with a completely virgin cache).

And now I have lost 15 minutes of my life.

What's Not Working This Week, part II

See previous post -- shouldn't Blogger, or some part of the internet less lazy than me, have converted that URL into link? Fuckers! And you -- can't you just copy and paste it yourself?

I Am Not As Industrious

From crusader-as-blogger Mike Essl: http://unexpectedlyquit.com/

Let the Bullshit Continue

Updated today: Safari 3. Did I try it out? Yes. Will I switch back to it? No. Why? It still doesn't load Flash content properly. All this browser bullshit, I imagine, is a lot like the early days of the auto industry when they were trying out square wheels and wooden windshields. It takes a long time to get these things right--more than TEN years at least.

What's Not Working This Week, Part I

Facebook Mobile is uploading my photos into nothingness. I email them off to the special address and away they go and then they're gone. Perhaps it's because it was a photo of Jean-Paul Sartre?

Firefox 3

Can I be bothered? What do you think?

In Response to a Recent Query

No I am not turning soft.

To wit, the iTunes interface mechanism for getting stuff onto one's iPhone is complete bullshit. Syncing everything every single time? Sync my ass, Steve Jobs!

It's enough to make me never buy anything from the iTunes store, which I wouldn't do anyway because it's too convenient and I don't believe in convenience.

Computers Helping Computers

Since its shaming in this forum (see June 14), InDesign CS3 has behaved at its best. That is to say, it has been adequate to helpful when it has not been completely clunky.

What is a spreadsheet?

I'm just asking, that's all.

Mail.app

Don't make me laugh.

Here's a Puzzle

On Friday, everything I touched in my InDesign CS3 file of John's new book — I mean everything — — and I mean touched as in simply clicked on — caused InD to crash. Excuse me, the term as of OSX is 'not repsond' as in 'InDesign CS3 (not responding).'

As with lovers so with software: not to respond is to crash.

Here's the puzzle: on Saturday — LITERALLY THE NEXT DAY — everything works. I'm back in CS3 with not a single nonresponse.

How did I do it? I will tell you: I used InDesign CS2 on Friday.

THAT'S PROGRESS!!!!!

What I Am Saving for a Special Special Day

All the problems I have with Adobe Illustrator CS3. Wear a seatbelt!

My Current Browser of Choice

Camino.

Verdict: it sucks, like Firefox and Safari before it.

Why have an about:config page if changing the settings does nothing?

Software Means Never Having to State the Obvious

Keynote is a presentation application. It is not a design application. You can't control the damn thing.

And why don't the guides on the master slides show up on the regular slides?! Idiots!

First of all

This template sucks.