Windows without windows

Posted on May 28, 2012 by Travis

I’m pretty sure Windows 8 remembers the last UI used. Every time I bring my PC back from sleep it’s on the desktop UI. This means instead of Metro not compromising and providing me with a classic desktop experience, my desktop has a full-screen Start menu. And, by the way, that’s what I’m calling Metro from now on. Full-screen Start.

Compare that to say, OS X, which actually provides compromise. It lets apps run full screen and windowed, whereas, ironically, Windows doesn’t. I get full screen or windowed. No compromise.

Microsoft is in the midst of what is likely the most public battle with cognitive dissonance in tech history. It believes that users want both a classic UI with one set of controls, logics and experiences simultaneously with another UI with its own set of controls, logics and experiences that are subtly entwined, utterly dependent upon each other, yet breathtakingly unaware that either exist.

How you know your bureaucratic feature list ate itself

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Travis

I think a long time ago Apple secretly bought Microsoft and spent a decade beating themselves in the market so that when they released their long-planned suite of iHardware and OS X, it would make Windows look silly in comparison. That’s the only logical excuse for the way user accounts work in Windows.

Why, first of all, does a home operating system have an administrator account option? Then, second, and perhaps most important, why does this administrator account have the option, and a mandate in most cases, to run apps in administrator mode? Isn’t the very act of logging in as an administrator signaling to the operating system that you would like to run apps in administrator mode?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to get rid of user account levels and just prompt for a password when I need higher-than-normal access to the file system? Wouldn’t that be easier to explain to people than, “While running in administrator mode, right click the app and click, ‘Run as Administrator,’ and then when it pops up and asks, ‘Do you want to allow the following program to make changes to this computer?’ click ‘Yes.’”

In OS X you tap, type in a password and press enter.

In Windows, you log in as Administrator, right click, click, get a psychologically jarring audible warning with a dimmed screen, then click again.

Microsoft made an administrator mode that requires an administrator to modify administrator mode. That’s the deal.

Taking you away from me

Posted on May 7, 2012 by Travis

I dislike songs that say, “Nothing can take you away from me,” or “nothing can come between us.”

The following is a partial list of things that could take her away from you.

Car crash
World War III
Untreated swine flu
Large pride of feral cats
Pride of lions
Serial killer
Tsunami
Shark attack
Pristiq

Apple event media coverage

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Travis

My favorite thing to do after an Apple event is read the coverage. It’s usually a mixture of disappointment and “this will never work” followed by Apple making billions of dollars off it. Mashable provides my favorite example of a group covering all their bases today so they’ll have been right from the beginning in the future.

Depreciated phrases

Posted on December 28, 2011 by Travis

I dislike the phrase, “the sky is the limit” because it isn’t. We should have stopped using it when the Soviets successfully put Sputnik in orbit. For a while, it legitimately was the limit. Now we have Voyager 1 more than 11 billion miles from the Sun on the edge of interstellar space.

Amazon’s Jungle Logic

Posted on December 14, 2011 by Travis

There’s a story making its rounds about Amazon’s new app that lets you scan bar codes in stores. Amazon had a promotion that let users take a percentage off their purchase if they went to a store and scanned an item. Apparently, because this happened on the Internet it’s evil in comparison to my going into two brick-and-mortar stores and purchasing the cheaper product using a coupon.

The problem, which this story alludes to, is books as a product and books as culture. I frame this debate on the Internet vs. brick-and-mortar as two people fighting over the right to sell something with one person trying to piggy back on the idea that they’re a cultural guard and that if they should fail, we’ll lose a part of who we are. Any guesses about who is on which side?

I’m supposed to divorce myself from the reality of book stores and think of them on a higher level.

No.

Books are packaged, promoted and sold as a mass-market item. Book signings and book tours are press and marketing. We’re kidding ourselves if we think John Q. Local isn’t tracking traffic and conversion in his book store at signing events. He wants you in the door so he can sell something else. If not, the signing would have been someplace that fit more than 10 people.

Industrial design is art, but no one (well, there are probably a few) is complaining that Jony Ive isn’t signing iPads at Grand Central. Fashion is art, but I’m not upset that Simon Kneen isn’t signing my Banana Republic sweater.

I completely agree that books are works of art to celebrate. I just think cramped, musty book stores are an insulting place to celebrate them. Don’t get on your high horse and chastise me as a “scorched-earth capitalist” over your lack of a business model.

If you want to support literacy and books in your community, volunteer in schools or attend a book festival.

Why do we elect these people

Posted on August 9, 2011 by Travis

It’s messages like this one that foment my anger toward politicians. Senator Tea Party didn’t support realistic debt ceiling plans by his Republican colleagues or President Obama and in subsequent tweets said we should privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac after complaining about a failed liberal spending experiment.

Facts are, of course, not on his side. President Obama has created significantly less new spending than President Bush and privatization hasn’t worked in the past. We are now also aware that the downgrade occurred specifically because he and his Tea Party colleagues were unwilling to work with others. He also said we must pass Cut, Cap and Balance because it would have prevented a downgrade and would help us in the future, despite the fact that, again, the S&P said that’s a bad idea.

Raising taxes as part of a solution is naturally off the table, because that’s a job killer. I’d like some evidence that lower taxes encourage the wealthy to create jobs. I’ve never seen any.

Monsoon season

Posted on August 1, 2011 by Travis

I always seem to leave my house when it’s pouring. It thundered for four hours today and did nothing until I left for the evening.

An open letter to Sarah Palin

Posted on July 10, 2011 by Travis

Dear Sarah Palin,

I would like to show you something you wrote yesterday. I added my own emphasis for clarity.

As we approach 2012, there are important lessons we can learn from all of this. First, we should never entrust the White House to a far-left ideologue who has no appreciation or even understanding of the free market and limited government principles that made this country economically strong. Second, the office of the presidency is too important for on-the-job training. It requires a strong chief executive who has been entrusted with real authority in the past and has achieved a proven track record of positive measurable accomplishments. Leaders are expected to give good speeches, but leadership is so much more than oratory. Real leadership requires deeds even more than words. It means taking on the problems no one else wants to tackle. It means providing vision and guidance, inspiring people to action, bringing everyone to the table, and with a servant’s heart dedicating oneself to striking agreements that keep faith with our Constitution and with the ordinary citizens who entrusted you with power. It means bucking the status quo, fighting the corrupt powers that be, serving the common good, and leaving the country better than you found it. Most of us don’t see a lot of that real leadership in D.C., and it’s profoundly disappointing.

You quit early. Shut the fuck up.

Sincerely,

Travis Walters

TL;DR headlines are for old media

Posted on June 5, 2011 by Travis

I often read through the Starcraft 2 Mac Technical Support forum to see what the state of things are for the Mac. Today I came across this post in a topic on OS 10.6.7. I haven’t updated to 10.6.7 because I’d read elsewhere that the update caused Starcraft 2 to become unplayable on some machines. Why I check to see if my Macbook Pro can play SC2 when I play it on my PC anyway is a post for another day.

The very first line by AtomicBanana struck me. “TL;DR: Mac OS X 10.6.7 update makes SC2 unplayable on MacBook Air.” After reading “TL;DR” for probably the thousandth time, it occurred to me that in old media we’d call what came after “TL;DR” a headline.

This image serves no purpose other than to show a piece of cool artwork.

The evolution of writing on the Web amuses me. We consolidated our writing styles to make things move quickly and get right to the point. Efficiency is key. We dropped all the rules and now we’re realizing some of them were important. We inefficiently add “TL;DR” wherever we need a head or subhead because we didn’t design a special place for headlines in comments or forums. The only improvement is that this special type of Web headline can go at the beginning or end.

Of course this isn’t really meant to be a headline. It’s the product of a certain segment of Generation Y hellbent on making the rest of us look bad. “Too long; didn’t read” is there to summarize a post so someone can guess what was said and reply with their own opinion without having to read.

I hope bringing grammar rules back even if in a broken roundabout way catches on. We might be able start using punctuation again. Until then:

TL;DR blogger realized TL;DR are headlines at the top or bottom of text.