13.03.2010

Not Stainless Steel

It's been a long, long time since my last blog post. Apologies for that, I've been real busy with work. For those of you that don't know, last year I took up an offer with Sourcebits to help create tasty things. At the same time I also made the dive and switched from Fireworks to Photoshop for the vast majority of my work. A lot of things have happened in the past year, some good, some great, some terrible. I won't bore you all with that.

Instead I'm going to bore you about lots of other things.

First up, Chrome and Safari. Those that pay any attention to my Twitter account know a few months back I switched to Chrome as my main browser. Just like any, it's got good and bad points. I thought I'd go through them. I'll start with the biggest problems first. Chrome is not made for heavy browsing on OS X. The design decisions made make this evident. There's no scrolling tabs or "view the rest of your tabs" element, like in Firefox or Safari. If you open three dozen tabs in a Chrome window you're instead greeting with a mess of ridges that are supposed to be tabs, but that would look more at home on the back of a dinosaur.

That's not even the worst of it. Due to the fact Chrome separates processes for plugins and such, you soon have dozens of "Chrome Helpers". Now that wouldn't be a terrible thing - I for one love the fact Chrome is practically uncrashable from plugins. However, I don't like it when it means I can't launch anymore applications. That's right, if you open up enough tabs in Chrome, you can't open other applications on your Mac. Finder will return an error and you'll be forced to close Chrome tabs.

Not just that, but when you hit that limit Chrome will no longer load new tabs. They'll just sit there with the async progress spinning and do nothing. That's insane and one of the largest reasons why Chrome isn't ready yet - if I enjoy it and use it too much, it breaks. Craziness. It's not all bad though. Chrome is very fast, loads pages quickly, has extensions and lots of neat little things. One of my favourite is being able to just being able to type "wiki", hit tab, then type my query. It works on other sites too, like Wowhead.

Another pet peeve is the download system. Having notifications at the bottom for download progress is neat. Forcing me to close them all the time isn't. I understand they wanted to do something different from the usual download window, but it doesn't work well. And if you're downloading or saving things from multiple windows? Well the bottom bars are window specific, so you'll have to close each. All in all it's just a messy system.

So overall? Chrome is good but has some damning flaws. I'll be heading back to Safari as my main browser. I think that blurb'll be it for today, I'll try to post at least semi-regularly from now on. At the very least the next post will be about icons and things. Maybe.

05.05.2009

Never Changes

Hello! A micro-entry on the frustration of trying to download Microsoft's free Windows 7 Release Candidate.

1 - Requiring an MSN address, Live account, etc. Basically you're probably going to have to sign up. I shouldn't have to give a mass of details just to download this. It's annoying. Getting an error when verifying my email is also fun.

2 - The registration and shit won't work in Safari. If you want it, you'll have to launch Firefox and sign in. Again.

3 - The download requires ActiveX or Java? Are you fucking kidding me? In this day and age? A fucking java application used to manage the download? It's 2009. Two-thousand and bloody nine. Classic Microsoft having to reinvent the wheel instead of use perfectly good alternatives such as BitTorrent or another service.

4 - Hitting download loads the java application in that tab. A lot of people, myself included, start to grab the download for something as soon as possible and then read through things. Such as copy-pasting the key. Forcing me to open a new tab and find the page in my history isn't a great idea. Maybe fucking ask if the user wants to browse away from the page and ask them if they have written down the key they need?

It's amazing how convoluted people can make things. Imagine an indie Mac developer requiring all the above to download a beta? He'd be fucking butchered. At most it would be the following: Field for email (to send the key), version and language selection and a button for either direct downloading or a torrent. One click. No mess.

Shame committees don't do simple.

24.03.2009

Purple Juice

Evenin'! I thought I'd type something up since it's been just over a month since my last update and there's actually some cool news to report! I recently started a new job with the cool guys at SourceBits, wrangled up by Piotr whom I've known since my '02/'03-ish Aqua-Soft days. It feels good to have a steady stream of things to work on.

Folks that have known me a long time will probably be shocked at the next news. I've actually started the move to Photoshop for all my work. It's been about half a week so far and except for some confused frustration it's been pretty neat. Certainly different workflow to the one I'm used to. I guess it was about time I did it though, I've probably pushed Fireworks as hard as I can and no matter what I personally do it's still not going a standard for the type of work I do. It's going to be a lot of fun seeing what I can do a year from now.

Here's lookin' towards the future!

23.02.2009

The Third Cog

Today's freebie update is one I've been meaning to do for some time. It's strange because it's extremely rare I go back and redo a freeware icon, let alone twice, but I think this one warrants it. The previous version have niggled at me to the point of annoyance. There's a huge reason why I wanted to redo the icon: so that the perspective isn't shit. I've spent a lot of time the past year just focusing on perspective and how things should really look rather than being lazy. Not only is the cog better done, but I've also included a version with an accessory to balance it out a bit more.

That said, I'm going to be working on catching up with my freebie releases, hope you enjoy today's. Oh and a quick question: Can anyone give me a hint to removing the underlines for image links in Firefox and Camino? They don't appear in Safari and it baffles me a little.

03.02.2009

White Box

Hey there. I thought I'd just do a quick post today to say I'm not dead and will have some goodies for you guys coming soon. I've mostly been quiet because I've had nothing exceptionally interesting to talk about (or rant about as is usually the case). I haven't been really inspired this month, which accounts for the lack of freeware releases. Not that I haven't done any, but none were really as great as I wanted and I don't like releasing stuff I feel meh about.

Hope you had a nice Christmas and New Year! If you have any ideas for icons you'd like to see done, don't hesitate to email me.

07.12.2008

Shift Alt H

Hey everyone. I just thought I'd do a quick post today in case anyone thought I'd fallen off the face of the Earth. I'm sorry I haven't really had time to do any Friday Freeware releases the past few weeks, I've got my hands full with a few bits and pieces that I'll talk about soon. The first thing I'd like to do is again, welcome all the new folks that found me - for the first time Vanillasoap broke 1 TB of transfer in a month.

I'm pretty much stunned. Thanks to everyone who posted about either Hydride or Lätt. It's really an amazing leap from the kind of traffic I got even three months ago.

Now it's December and unfortunately it looks like Façade isn't coming until mid-January. It's a shame and I know some people are getting mildly (ahem) annoyed. It's understandable and would probably of been for the best for them to not have gave any sort of date until much closer completion. They're not the first ones to do something silly like that, so please don't gut them okay guys?

I'm still going to be dedicated to releasing good themes once it's out. I know quite a few people are after an update to Niqu and it's definitely on the table to do after Qui. Now, for future reference, Qui and the Niqu update will not get official Windows ports. That has nothing to do with elitism or anti-Windows feelings (hell, I use Windows a lot for gaming), just the fact they're going to be pay-for themes.

At least that's the plan for now. Life is never certain. I'll try my best to get you guys some nice shiny icons this month. Don't be shy about sending me an email concerning Façade, theming, Niqu or anything like that!

04.11.2008

Fruit Mixer

So yesterday I got around to spreading my pixels across the corners of the internet, in what Cary would call "getting your name out there again sucker". The most interesting of them was the Apple Downloads section. Mainly because of the rather large boost in traffic, but also because they omitted any reference I made to Windows or Linux (I tend to include a note that there's icons and resources for both of those). Understandable I guess. Definitely going to do the lap as it were whenever I release new things from now on.

So that's probably a good time to say hello to any new readers there! I also did some changes so now the old Soapsuds RSS/etc feeds use the new Vanillasoap ones, since some folks don't seem to have noticed the move.

Facade is coming next month, hopefully with a shiny bit of goodness. I'm going to divulge something here that may shock and astound you: I hope it does well. Why? Because it can really change Mac theming. That isn't marketing shit. I mean it. Theming on OS X is often a trial in annoyance and bewilderment. Just mention "iTunes" to any regular themer and the chilling howl of pain will give you a clue to the suffering inflicted.

No, it can really change things. A lot of work goes in to a theme and it's just right that people will be able to get something for it now. And this snowballs. You earned a few nickels, so you can put more time in to your next theme. How about an entire suite with matching icons? This is all not without precedent either. Skins Factory, a big player in the world of UIs has payware theme suites too.

I'd love nothing more than to be able to work on an entire suite without feeling I'm shoveling money away because I could be doing something else. The warm glow doesn't pay bills, no matter how much we'd like it to.

31.10.2008

OooOOOoo!

Hoping everyone is having a fun Halloween. The MTF Halloween event (direct link to the game here) is just about over. It's shorter than last year's, mostly because it took an age for people to work those out. The prize (now unlocked) is a rather tastier one too; a complete folder and sidebar set, in two different flavours each. Hydride is the end result of jumping around the place with the Lutetium set. It's not as flashy, but then again it's actually out (wink wink).

Don't scare too many skeletons folks!

13.10.2008

Living Live

So Friday's release has spun around - it's not three days behind, it's your imagination - and it's creation was a bit strange. I got the neat idea last night of using Mogulus to stream arty things. It was pretty neat. Folks got to see how non-Photoshop people do things and live feedback is pretty cool. Definitely think it could be a nice regular feature.

It's strange how things work out. For the past year I've been focusing on doing each icon state as pure vectors - yet, half the time scaling down as a bitmap and touching up has a nicer feel. Not always, but sometimes. Especially with diagonal lines. Fireworks has a few oddities in the way it likes to draw paths. Odd to go back to how I used to do things. I did learn a few new things about masking last night though.

The other nifty news is that the spiritual successor to the LEON folders is done. I decided on "Hydride" as the name. I'd like to do a few more extra bits for it, but hopefully folks will enjoy it. The plan at the moment is for it to be the "prize" of the Halloween event. For those that don't know, or weren't around last year, I ran a small event on Halloween night, involving riddles and obscure clues in order to get a few SAW icons. Everyone seemed to enjoy it and so that's why it's returning this year.

Okay, enough cheerful rambling (this is supposed to be an angry blog!), take it easy!

02.10.2008

Around Around

My word, where has the week gone, really? I'm busy with lots of little pieces at the moment, mostly relating to my upcoming Qui theme, so I'm not sure if I'll get a freeware release done for tomorrow. We'll see what happens.

I'm also on planning on a About Me/Hiring page with more information and jazz. Shouldn't be too hard and is rather needed. Not much else to blog about today. I actually went ahead and made a Flickr account. Yeah, well behind the curve but Ji & Co. say I could do with some more exposure, and they're probably right.

Updated - Well whaddayou know? Friday's release a day early, inspired because Flickr's Uploadr app has a damn ugly icon. Hope you guys enjoy.

26.09.2008

Circling the Airport

Damnation. Well, unfortunately there's no Friday release this week - I've been busy working on it but it's just not finished off yet. It should be worth the added wait, I hope. Originally I planned on doing a wallpaper version of the Nanochromatic preview. Sadly it just didn't turn out how I wanted. Banding was a problem too. I'll get something whipped up this weekend to make up for it.

I've also been working on additions to my theme template. The update I've got planned will cover Textedit and Mail Preferences. This should bring the template up to covering the fast majority of things, including different titlebar sizes.

Not much else to talk about today, so here's a summery of recent thoughts. Apple are still being douches. "E" looks a brand new networking fad - because we really needed one. Atlantica Online is a fun turn-based group MMO that me and a friend are enjoying. If you try it out, my character is Silence on the Silkyon server.

Have a great weekend guys.

14.09.2008

Worms

Apple does some cool stuff. Some of the time it does pretty stupid stuff. The iPod nano G3 was fat, ugly and had stupid UI changes that distracted you whilst in use. The windows version of iTunes has consistently been a shitty application nearly every major update - 8.0 brought dreaded BSODs to Vista users. I'm not going to even go in to the long winded rant that I could about how they seem to be shitting up iTunes' interface every update with more styles that don't match, more non-system elements. Three fucking scrollbar styles in one app, what the hell are you guys on?

Not only that but the way they shovel Software Update and try to push Safari on to people is just asking for people to take offense. No. No stupid "You can just click the option off!" - because installing extra things should not be the default action. Everyone who took Apple's side on that is a fucking hypocrite. If Microsoft or Adobe had done the same thing you wouldn't of been able to find your ass for the tide of crying.

So what does The Fruit do after these recent ball yanks? Oh, how about forbid 'competing' apps for the iPhone. Total. Utter. Bullshit. Hey, here that Apple lawyers? That's the sound of hundreds of developers suddenly stopping and wondering if their bucks were actually well spent when they decided to join ADC. Oh, and the sound of anti-competitive lawsuit. I'm starting to think that the upper Apple tiers don't even know what gets accepted and rejected nowadays. Who on Earth would think that forcing competition out, for absolutely no reason other than that, is a good idea?

Who the fuck is in charge of these decisions? Why aren't they fired?

This is coming after the constant stumbles with Me.com and 10.5.4 bugs (I really enjoy randomly getting 1/8th my regular FPS on mac games!), it just keeps going. Apple may be candy and sparkles a lot of the time but recently a lot have balls have been dropped. It's time they eased off the accelerator and sorted out their shit.

Update - I finished applying the new style to past goodies releases and offered up a Font duo I did some time about when FontStruct went live.

12.09.2008

Friday Releases

In an effort to keep some sort of schedule I've decided to aim for a piece of freeware every friday. Dubbed the "Thank Fuck It's Friday" release. They'll be separate from regular entries, as you can see, and will just be a preview to a universal zip. So I won't be cheaping out on the words. Today's is an iMac icon I've had kicking around for a while and was mostly for myself. Nothing too extravagant, next week's is probably either going to be a Firefox or iPhoto icon, depending on which I decide to work on.

Going to try and get the back-date of stuff updated, re-zipped and moved this weekend. Forward apologizes if it spams the RSS - let's hope it doesn't.

10.09.2008

Rainbow Gel

See? I told you I'd get around to it. So the new look is finally done and implemented. Most things should work. I'll run over the changes and what I still need to finish off. Firstly; all the entries are here. I - ahem - discovered that you can export and import MovableType blogs so it was just a case of exporting from one and importing to the other. I still had to hand edit some changes, fix some encoding and what have you, but they're there at least.

I'm mid-way through a re-arrangement of the preview and download folders. This means that probably some will 404 for you if you try to grab older pieces of work before I'm done. Once I've moved them all, I'm going to do retroactive posts of older pieces of work, properly labeled and such so that if you want to see them you can just hit the Goodies category to the right.

I've tried to make the site much simpler. There's just two categories: Personal, which I use for ranting, personal issues and general stuff, and Goodies for some of the nice released goodies. Sometimes an entry is both. The Goodies category page is a makeshift release page because I hate micromanaging them. There's also tags, in the future I'll work on letting you search by tag in order to go to similar posts.

One of the fundamental things is the lack of comments now. It's rare that I feel a post of mine warrants them (the payware themes issue is one of the obvious exceptions). They're a fucking pain to work out how I want displayed and I hate forms, etcetera. It's not that I don't want opinions or even people to tell me a post is bullshit and wrong - feel free to email me such stuff. I'm sure I'll work out something nicer than what I was going to rush with it.

Anyway I've gone back to June's entries and fixed them to match the style. I'll be working on updating them and the preview images to fit the new look. Enjoy!

05.09.2008

Drama Breeds

Yeah, okay, seriously - this weekend I'll work on updating to the new look. I've been putting it off for months and I'll most probably just wipe the slate clean and slowly re-add updated posts with goodies.

I'm not sure what to say about the whole Facade drama on MTF. Although I think it'd of probably been best to not hype things up until they were more settled. I thought I'd take the time to talk about a few things. First off, I'm not really "sided" with anyone concerning Architect-vs-Other Theme Apps. I stopped visiting MTF because it was balls and was growing frustrated with the community and moderation. I don't mean the moderators, I know most of them and they're all awesome guys. I just feel things aren't strict enough, through no fault of their own.

Anyway, Johnny basically hit me up one day and showed me what they were working on and it got me interested. I recently helped them with their website preview. It's not as excellent as I'd of wanted but I didn't get much time to refine it. I liked how the bars, rope and frames turned out however.

So, long story short - too late! - I'm working on a theme. No hype or silly previews or anything. The Facade preview site will feature a preview but that's about it. Hopefully folks will like it. One of the decisions to try Facade and Architect was because of the idea of themes for money. I wanted to explore this. A lot of themers spend a lot of time crafting themes and, to be frank, they don't get a heap for it. The idea of paying for themes is a bit alien. I'm sure there will be a lot of folks who complain and stomp their feet but then you could turn around and say "You don't think a month of work from me is worth the cost of a coffee?" One idea I thought would work well would be for the theme-app developers to charge for the app and then hire themers to create themes. This would keep themes free to the end user, besides the initial cost of the app, and give more top quality themes to market the app with.

I've no clue how much Qui will be. This is more an experiment in seeing if people are willing rather than trying to gouge them. No more than $3 was my first thought. Opinions via comments are welcome on the matter.

Hopefully things work out and it'll breath new life in to Mac theming.

Oh and yes, if things go well, there will be a Niqu 2.

04.09.2008

Cry Some More

Okay, stop fucking whining on about Chrome. If I hear one more fucking person say "I DON'T GET WAT DA FUSS IS, DERES NO ADBLOCK, SHIT SUX OGMGZ" I'm going to take a cricket bat to someone's balls. It's been out like three fucking days. Did Firefox (ahem Phoenix) have AdBlock after three days? No. So spewing worthless shit about how the internet is unusable with ads - that's bullshit by the way - adds nothing to any discussion. It'll get a God damn ad blocking addon, now shut the hell up.

Alternatively I'm also sick of the "OMGZ IM FED UP OF HEARIN BOUT CHROME OMGZ" folks. Google releasing a browser is big news regardless if you think it's good. If you don't care, you don't care about the web trying pull away from the shit stain that is Internet Explorer.

It's really hard scrolling past articles/Twitter entries/comments. My heart bleeds for you.

25.08.2008

FYI.

Actual Title: FYI, I'm a Spy^H^H^HReally Cool Dude.

Things to do: a) Actually do things! b) Secret things! c) Jazz!

Yeah, I know, I should keep this more updated but nothing is really super exciting at the moment. I have been working on goodies though. Wink, wink. Oh and this is reason enough to use Firefox if you're on Youtube a lot. (Seriously, I think 95% of Youtube members are the most fucking retarded ass-cocks in the world.)

Take it easy folks. Where's my peanut? I feel a game of Space Invaders coming on.

05.08.2008

Big Boss, Big Ego

Quoting this from Gruber:

I posit that the usability and elegance of any product, software or hardware, tends to reach and seldom surpasses the level that satisfies the taste of whoever is in charge of the product. This applies universally, not just to free and open source software. For example, it explains why Microsoft produces such crummy software even though the company employees thousands of talented programmers and even designers -- Microsoft's decision makers have no taste. But the problem is endemic to open source. The people in charge of most free and open source software products tend to have poor taste in user interfaces; people with good taste in user interface design are seldom in charge of open source software projects.

This is totally on the mark. You can have the best artists in the world, but if the guy in charge wants polka-dots everywhere, your service is shit out of luck.

27.07.2008

No Worries

I've been trying to wait for something eventful or worthy to blog about, but since people yell at me if 'Suds sits on the porch and enjoys a brandy instead of yelling very loudly about things, I thought I'd make a quick one.

The super-duper new website is still in the works. Basically everything hard is done ("Float does what?" "Why is that DIV there?") and I just need to stop avoiding the boring shit of re-formatting the current entries and redoing all the damned previews. That's annoying, especially for things like the dock skin previews where I have to faff around changing them and shit. I also want to make a few tweaks to the preview templates before I start that, so that's holding it up a little too. I've still got my list of goodies and bits that I'm going to be working on. No worries.

Looks like I need to update MT's Spam protection, was a few pages worth. Also need to update/fix the other blogs on this MT installation (like my lemonpie's), 'cause they're throwing out errors when folks comment, huh.

Updated - Actually, I thought it might be cool to show how it's going to look, so you can click here to take a gander at test blog. I included this entry as well as some testing ones for comparison.

If anyone with a higher CSS power level than me can recommend changes, or can say if I've done something bloody stupid, I'd love to hear from you. Also if anyone knows how I can make the left and right column's text lines line up even after paragraph breaks, I'd be real grateful.

10.07.2008

Shit Bomb, Yo

Probably everyone who's a UI-freak has already seen Gruber's Flickr about an atrocious iPhone app design. I wasn't going to make a post about it before, at least I thought, it was obvious why it was poorly thought out and implemented. Of course then the creator decided to reply to the majority with basically 'I've been doing this for twenty years, and I'm not bankrupt, ergo I'm right and you're all wrong'.

Sorry Steve, it doesn't work that way. So I thought I'd go through and list what is actually wrong and offer a solution.

1. The background colour. It's very web 2.0 of you, but it doesn't match any of the iPhone UI colours. White, black or the stripes are usually the best route unless you have at least some idea of colour balance.

2. The top tabs and "Car #1" button. They're connected to nothing, are they supposed to be related? They give no indication if they're going to alter the view or are just selectable.

3. The "Type" buttons. Now you're using different things for (apparently) the same style option. One you gave tabs, the other you're using separate buttons.

4. The dial is not a fast-input method. And it's taking up a shit load of screen estate. Not to mention it's function is to fill the screen horizontally, to give users enough room to actually, you know, use it. Lumping it in a corner feels odd.

5. The "Destinations", "Purpose", "Frequent Trips" etc on the left are all aligned wrong. You align these to the right, so they're all the same distance from their object.

6. The plus and edit buttons are detached from the list of frequent trips. And the list has no indication if it's going to work like the regular list view and be scrollable. Also, why is one green? What does that mean?

7. The $ Spent, Save Data (Data? Jesus) and Clear are just lumped in to the middle of the UI. There's a reason most people put the final choices such as Save, Cancel, etc at the bottom of UIs, because they're meant to be the last thing you do. And the $ Spent isn't even aligned with the other two.

8. The Latest list doesn't even match what the others look like. The fields are all aligned differently. The arrow button isn't even attached or clear what it'll do.

Steve's whole defense summed up was that he knew his customers and that they wanted a fast UI. I'm sorry, but 'fast' isn't an excuse for eye-forking bad design. In fact, the whole point of UI designers are for them to create ways to use an application quickly and trouble free whilst pleasing to the eye. See any IconFactory's Twitterific for the iPhone for an idea on this.

My recommendation would be of Paul Walker's take on how it should be designed.

Additional: Check out some absolutely amazing artwork. I liked to the Undead section because they're stunningly grotesque.

02.07.2008

Endtimes

I'm sick of MacThemes bullshit. I remember when people had the balls to actually say when they disliked something and offer critique on things they thought could be improved. I remember when people didn't pander to shitty 5-minute releases. One of the biggest problems with a community which is based on people spending (a lot of) time on freeware things for other people's enjoyment is: They get better. And then they start doing it for money. When you start doing something as actually work you start to lose the enthusiasm for doing the same thing in your free time.

And so good releases tend to dry up for periods. This lowers the overall quality bar and new members have nothing to compare them to. That's not to say there aren't good releases anymore. Jonas always releases high quality works.

I don't care if this sounds elitist, but it damn well should be. You should want a community you've been around for years to want the fucking best of every single member. I don't want JoeSchmoe's fifteen minute icon, I want someone to slave over every pixel and make sure it's damn impressive. I don't want rehashed iPhone releases, I want some innovation.

Call me when people start really caring about the community instead of bubble-wrapping butt-hurt newbies.

Addendum: This is all in start contrast to an earlier entry. It really does seem like the pendulum swings between Eat-Up-Shit and Assholes-Everywhere. If only it hung in the middle or just off-center to the right.

26.06.2008

The Silent Killer

I'm behind on doing shit, yeah I know. Sorry. Tiny entry today mostly because I'm fucking sick of what I'm going to dub "Website Expansion Syndrome". Stop making websites so fucking wide. There's no reason in the fucking world why you need to eat 1000px of width whilst reclining on my display. Excuse me for wanting to be able to read something in Safari and have a few other windows open uncovered!

Apple is one particular offender with this. I've recalled some of their pages being upwards of 1200px wide. Just because they want a hugely large image smacked on it.

Fucking stop it.

17.06.2008

We Can Rebuild Him

Just a note that I'm going to be fucking around with the site this week, so if Soap Suds disappears or you start getting a lot of 404s don't worry. It'll all work. In the end. Hopefully. Well, maybe.

Fingers crossed.

16.06.2008

Flimsyfox

A lot of people are going on about the gradient in Firefox, in some cases saying odd things like Firefox is brighter in the middle. This isn't how it seems they've drawn the window.

You see, the gradient is STILL a linear one, except it's not stretched as far as the actual window height it seems. Once you split it in to parts (see above, right), you can distinctly see that there's the main window background, then the gradient and then flat darker part. It's really obviously wrong, because it looks like crap. I don't get what the big hold up is over it either. Just make the gradient stretch all the way from top to bottom.

And because it's there, I'm going to whine about how horrid those back/forward buttons are. First off, the curve of the inset behind the buttons doesn't even match the circle of the back button, making it look uneven. Next, why are the buttons separated? Segmented buttons are not detached, because they're... Well, they're a segmented button, y'dig? Personally I've got no idea what they were thinking. Here's something I threw together in a few minutes that I think would of looked much nicer.

It makes me laugh though, really. Firefox is so meh on OS X. Literally the only reasons I hear from people that use it on a Mac are "It has X plugin that I need". You have to hand it to them, adding open plugin functionality was a clever fucking way of making users "need" that app, when all they really need is a specific plugin.

On a related note, I'm trying out Safari 3. I've been a Camino user on and off for probably 6-12 months. Mostly form my time on my G5, because Safari could be a hog after a few hundred tabs. The only thing I miss is having the tab bar move tabs along as I moved along, so I always saw my selected tab in the tab bar, and ones adjacent to it.

11.06.2008

Devouring Dust

So, WWDC has been and gone with the fabled keynote. Overall I found it was tedious for the most part. The highlights were basically the iPhone price drop -- which, surprise surprise, no-one rumoured -- and... Oh. That was basically it. MobileMe is just .Mac, renamed with redone web apps. It's cool for the people that like it's features, the new online iDisk seems a big improvement. But it's still pricey in my eyes for what it delivers. A friend of mine, when the iPod was becoming more popular and more of a focus at Apple had a routine that he would complain how Apple paid so much attention to it. Special events, keynotes mostly dedicated to it. Imagine his frustration when this happens all over again with the iPhone.

Anyway. The iPhone price drop is good news and Snow Leopard seems to be as predicted really, except it contains a lot more new developer technology that people anticipated. Things like "Grand Central" and OpenCL are going to improve performance on any recent Macs and even more so in the future as consumer machines move from two physical processor cores to eight logical cores when the quad-core chips with SMT start shipping. Most applications don't make best use of four or more cores at the moment, and even then they're usually professional applications. As we move forward, more multi-threaded support seems crucial.

Next subject, I'm working on the overhaul of Soapsuds. After thinking about it a bit, I'm going to move it to the main domain, out of the subfolder and aim Soapsuds more towards a mix of its current blogging with more regular goodies releases. I'll also be rearranging the site structure to make it easier for me to organize files. The old files that haven't been available in a while (such as Capture) will be moved and I'll be sure the 404 has a list and links to older unsupported downloads.

Hoozawinga! Twopence more and up goes the donkey!

07.06.2008

Bullshit Totally

I'm so pissed off right now. Since moving, I've used a BT Total Broadband package. I needed something with a decent speed and no usage cap (I've bounced between 30GB and 75GB a month usage). It looked like a decent deal.

First annoyance is that I couldn't use my own wireless router. I fucking paid £150 for a good router, why do I have to use your £20 one? And true enough, within a few months it was dead and wouldn't start up. A week waiting for a replacement later, I got the next one. Ever since I barely get 400kb/sec during non-peak times. During peak time, I get around 140kb. Oh and it likes to drop connections like no-one's fucking business. And routinely slows to "Weak" strength. In fact, in XP I've never seen it higher than two out of five bars in strength. About three times a week it will just plain stop new connections - meaning that downloads will continue if I started them but it won't let me open new pages in Camino, or let me reconnect if I drop IRC, AIM and the like.

I should not have to baby sit your shitty hardware, BT. And your shitty excuse for a line is driving me nuts. So, the obvious option is to leave right? Sure, I have a contract, but I'll pay the fee and move on. Except I actually went to check out the price of that.

BT Total Broadband charge the full amount due over the remainder of the minimum term of the contract.

WHAT. THE. FUCK. I pay £25 a month, and the minimum contract length was fucking eighteen months. That means if I cancel early I'd have to pay a fucking charge of two hundred and fifty pounds ($500). That's fucking outrageous. Not only that, BT may charge an additional £40 to migrate my line to someone else.

That ends up as nearly £300. To get off this shitty line.

I'm going to be looking up some numbers for trading standards for sure this week, I'm not biting £300 of costs simply because my ISP is unable to supply a working router and connection I was advertised.

05.06.2008

Here Pussy Pussy

A quick entry because shitters are annoying me whining about the OS X 10.6 rumours.

First, concerning the name: It's a code-name. This doesn't mean it will be used for marketing. Fucking hell, it doesn't even mean they'll tell people it's called that. Jaguar's point releases had stupid names like Jaguar Blue, Jaguar Red, Jaguar Plaid -- and they were just internal names.

Also, it's a fucking name. Tiger sounded lame. Stop being a whiny whore.

Next, the price. No-one knows it. Stop saying "Baaaaw, I'm not going to pay $129 for a bug fixing release!" because you sound fucking stupid. It could be $5. It could be $29. No-one knows until it's on the store. Dropping Carbon and PowerPC macs? Good. People should be using Cocoa anyway, at the very least for the UI because of Carbon's quirks. Remember folks this won't be out until sometime next year. Most PPC macs were phased out in '06. It would not be outside the realms of possibility that 10.6 comes out in 2010 (Fuck yes, sci-fi dates people!) meaning four years of support.

Apple is not one to keep legacy support for long. This is how they work. Not many CEOs stand on stage and call people "laggards" for not upgrading within a few years.

Why are they doing all this? Here's my guesses. First Snow Leopard is not going to be a whizz-bang release. It's going to be mid way between a full OS update (Panther/Tiger/Leopard scale) and something akin to Puma (10.1). The first version of OS X (Cheetah) was very slow. Puma was a free upgrade for everyone as a thank you for sticking with it. Snow Leopard won't be free, but I could see a price of around $39-$69. Possibly something like: $69 for full, and $39 if you're using Leopard already. I would not be totally shocked if Leopard users could buy and download the update over the web -- Even a 6GB download isn't shocking anymore.

I'm sure there'll be more than just 'general security and stability', remember OS updates are usually the prime time for Apple to bugger around with the built in apps such as Safari, Mail, iChat et al.

My only wish for it is: Please fucking kill plastic capsules Apple.

30.05.2008

We're Off to See The Wizard

Quicky note entry today. I should have a rather long first-impressions and first-experiences post(s) concerning my trial of Age of Conan soon. Also I'm still working on some goodies, I've got a list that I want to do and hopefully can get them all done relatively close together and make a nice fancy release. And God damn I will get something concerning the "proper" site front sorted. If only it's a static page or some shit.

Not dead or lazy, I'm on the case!

29.05.2008

Thanks Hollywood

Fuck you greedy shitfucks in Hollywood.

In my head Alien Resurrection, AVP and AVP2 do not happen. No, Weyland-Yutani do not get their technology from fucking Yautja. No, xenomorphs do not reach Earth ever, because if they do it's game over. No ifs, no buts. Seven-hundred-odd years in to the future it would be game over. 21st century Man wouldn't stand a chance - bar nuking the contentant. Maybe that'd work. And the bullshit of having 'Bishop' be Weyland. I'm sorry, did you miss Alien 3? The whole Bishop was designed to look like his designer thing? The one that visits Ripley and gets fucking hit on the head?

SORRY DID YOU SLEEP THROUGH THAT?

But no, it's not enough, they went and shit all over Doctor Jones too. A God-damn refrigerator, Jesus.

22.05.2008

Love, Life and Leon

I actually managed to get some sleep, fuck yeah. First, happy anniversary to my peanut butter! She's better than pasta, coke and a Brasgalla icon all put together. An' that's saying something.

Bits and pieces in today's entry. WinClone looks like it'll be very handy. For those that don't know, it lets you clone your BootCamp (well, any disk really) to a disk image and then lets you restore it. All this is doable through Terminal and Disk Utility but WinClone makes it easy, fast and it's free. It's icon is pretty hideous though, so I'll probably end up doing one soon.

I also want to talk about Lutetium; frankly I'm just not happy with what I've done so far. I gave one of the #TUMT regulars the saves for him to cut up and throw around for the other regulars, but I don't think I'll be working on them again. There's a few reasons and I thought it'd quell (at least a little) some of the fist-shaking if I went through them.

Number one: Lutetium Eon was started before I moved to pure-vector work. As a result the majority of the older work were bitmap at 256px to 16px. Ergo, I couldn't neaten them up to the standard I want nowadays. I did make a start on redoing the 32px sizes and some folks liked those. But they're just not how I wanted LEON to end up.

Number two: The style. Originally LEON was to be a rather Minium° like set. Focusing on matching the folders to Apple's current designs. It went through lots of changes. The first, frankly, took fucking ages for me to do. I just don't have the time to spend three to eight hours on every single icon. The second was more simplistic but looked 'old fashioned' compared. Lastly, the front-on Leopard view. It's not really exciting.

The hard-drives seem quite popular. I'm really disappointed with the 32px state I ended up with though. At the very least I want to redo the hard-drives to a higher quality. Maybe include a generic folder and PSD, let people work with it. Should be a decent compromise. I know it doesn't set a good standard (what with Myre and a number of other icon sets not being finished), but this really isn't a case of just Can't-be-bothered-itus. Lutetium has a very specific kind of aim in my head, and I just don't want to release it until it... Well... Matches. Unfortunately my brain is rather good at changes it's mind on what to focus on.

I do have another very simplistic set I've worked on, called Latt. I will finish this, no teasers or any of that junk, because Raz will literally gut me like a fish if I don't. I'll try to have some goodies for you folks this weekend.

Have a good day guys.

21.05.2008

Lovesnickers the Saucy.

Been not too eventful past few weeks. Work and jazz, I got my snazzy new 2.8GHz 24" iMac yesterday. So I thought for once, fuck it, let's have a cheerful entry. Well mostly cheerful.

First impressions were... Well. Whoa. My old G5 iMac was not - to me - a slow dog. Sure, after 300 shapes and junk in Fireworks things did slow down. Sure, Camino took like 10-seconds to launch and usually ended up taking 15 seconds for a new window after I'd done some browsing. But it was fine. This thing screams ahead. Screams. Every app opens literally instantly. Starting up is super fast. I've yet to even get both cores to 50% usage. It's insane. I haven't reinstalled Illustrator or Fireworks yet, but I'm looking forward to giving them a spin on some of my larger saves and seeing how well it does.

The other big things besides just having a speedier CPU was the fact it's an intel Mac. Yes, I'm so fucking late to the party the drunk loud-mouth tart has already been under the coat pile for a few hours, the even drunker rambo has already run a car through the wall and no-one knows where all the cheese-it snacks went to.

So I opened Boot Camp, partitioned the drive - which in retrospect I should of given it more like 40-45GB, I've already used half of the 32GB - it was all really easy. I restarted with the disc in and everything went smooth. The installer restarted again and bam "Disk Error"... Hm. Well after twenty minutes of just thinking my discs were busted, I found out you're supposed to quick-format the "BOOTCAMP" partition, or else it'll still be HFS+. So I did that, everything worked fine.

Apple amazes me sometimes with their little touches. I popped the Leopard disc in, and wham. The Boot Camp installer leapt up and started doing it's business. After another restart it was done. Everything seemed to work great. Drivers for my 8800GS made the window drawing really smooth, even the volume keys on the Apple keyboard worked. Exactly like in OS X. You push one and it does the "POP!" noise and the volume overlay. I was pretty stunned at that.

Clearly, lots of effort has gone in to Boot Camp from Apple to make Windows that bit more familiar.

Later that day though, disaster struck. I let Parallels use that Boot Camp drive for it's virtual machine... All seemed fine, until I restarted and tried to install some games. "Disk full". What the fuck? I'd only used, at most, 10GB of the space. Yet it told me none was free. Turns out Parallels seemed to have buggered it all up. Don't ask me how. I don't know. In the end I had to reinstall Windows, formating the Boot Camp drive again and then re-set everything up... After that everything has been pretty okay though.

One odd problem I have though is that the sound is fucking loud. Even on the minimum setting, it's too loud for me to use headphones without thinking my head will explode. Going to try fixing that later.

Why would I go through that hassle of Boot Camp? Games. Of course it's games. I've not really played a 'modern' Windows game since '01 or something. The fact I play new games and play them well was a huge selling point. I'm so very lucky Apple upgraded the iMac just at the right time. I haven't tried many games yet. The Portal demo runs great. Could probably do with a bit more RAM, as it stutters during loading. Bioshock runs... Well, I was stunned basically. Only played 10-15 minutes of it but my jaw was open most of the time. The amount of work, attention to detail... Atmosphere... It's amazing. Can't wait to play through it.

Anyway, in short: It's all good, apart from a few Windows related hiccups. Really pleased with the purchase. Lastly, tomorrow is me and my girlfriend's first year anniversary! A whole year of her putting up with me and my toes, aren't you just amazed?

28.04.2008

Oh Shit, Mystic Powers

Friday I begged the Gods of The Internets that Apple's iMac update would come the following tuesday (so I wouldn't have to sit on moneys resisting buying the out-dated ones). Next day, rumours had it they were coming Monday/Tuesday. Sadly the reports were just that they would have slightly faster processors and larger hard-drives. I looked to the skies and pleaded to the same Lords of Jiggawatts that Apple would update the graphics card too.

Today: iMac update. Better processors, more RAM and better graphics card for the 24". And not just better, actually pretty damn decent for mid-range gaming apparently.

I'm going to be sacrificing a chicken pie to them later in thanks.

I don't game hugely since my... Er... Addiction, mostly from being busy. But the thought that I'd get 90FPS in WoW, on high compared to 15-20FPS with everything low or off is.. Well.. It makes the inner kid all warm.

Gaming hooooo!

25.03.2008

One Small Step for Mac...

One giant leap for themekind.

There's been some wonderful OS X theme related news in this thread. A big jump towards someone finally making Leopard customizable. I had a bit of fun last night playing around to make the buttons look like Max Rudberg's Milk theme. Unfortunately for the moment it looks like Niqu-like themes are possible because we have no way of changing button glyphs or text colours.

In other news, non-Mac users are actually using the fact Safari 3.1 for Windows is using OS X's font rendered and not ClearType.

I don't often get on my high horse -- because my lemon pie is usually petting him and giving him sugar lumps -- but dear lord. This is why people can put up with shit user interfaces (Hello Aero). It's why I don't actually read Ars' discussions, because it's full of developer types.

Now, I love me the smart sort. Christoph is an amazing developer. The Transmission developer was cool to work with. The problem I have with most Windows or Linux developers (I apologize in advance for these broad statements) is that they have no taste. A lot seem to have this jealous view of user interface designers that they just aren't needed. Usability is just coded, not designed, apparently.

Look, ever wonder why Linux is widely unknown? Why no average Joe cares? Because it looks like Windows Light. It feels like an abused wife. Okay, you've left your previous partner but now... Why are you making this next one so like him? Is there some deep emotional trauma going on? He didn't really mean to blue-screen of death you baby.

God damn I'm skipping all over the place with my analogues today. I've only had one coffee, I'll blame that.

You don't have to copy Windows. You don't have to copy OS X. Do something different. Something new, something fresh. Stop being assholes to 'proper' designers -- not psuedo "well I kind of know Photoshop" guys. Big distros? Stop fucking cheaping out buying stock icons. It just makes you look bland.

Lastly, recognize that user interfaces are like fashion. No look is ever perfect and no look remains cool or fresh past the couple of year mark. No, I'm not saying every UI should dazzle and swoon users. Just be good looking, usable, made from competent graphics and out of the way when you need to work.

Vista is the guy in the sparkling costume trying to impress. OS X is the guy in the sharp grey suit now. Don't let Linux be the badly dressed guy in the corner that no-one asks to dance.

13.03.2008

I'm Not Zombie Obsessed.

I bought myself a tablet this week. I missed drawing and decided to take it back up -- in pixel form! It's swell, especially compared to the shitty one I got many years back. Which broke. And didn't work on OS X. Need to re-learn how to draw shit before assaulting the world with mangled things.

We had a power cut, oddly, as well tonight. I was half asleep and convinced that the zombies had finally begun their attack. My long studies of Zombie Survival Guide would pay off! Unfortunately, chopping and bludgeoning weren't needed (I didn't even need to solve a fireplace puzzle).

Still busy with works, I know, I know. I need to work on Leon and some freebies.

This has been a public service announcement from your local Zombie Patrol.

19.02.2008

Idle Coffee Makes Work for Coffee Coffee

It's that time again! Busy week this week, I've got to look after my niece and two nephews for most of the week, which is damn tiring, and also work on a couple of pieces of work. I had a peek around and one thing I need to get sorted is Capture. I still find it amazing that something me and Chris did a few years back is still getting recommended by bloggers and websites in new articles. So I'm going to try and catch Chris and talk to him about updating it and everything - it'd be a shame to waste that work.

Need to find time to work on VS Goodies/About code. It was nice to see how easy it was to turn in to an MT4 template. I'm secretly hoping to get the new VS done by the end of the month. Would be really nice to finally have a proper site again for folks to see.

I don't think I've ever drunk as much coffee before.

11.02.2008

Choke a Bitch (or: How Today Sucks)

I fucking fail today.

- I decide, hey! Save monies by printing off magic cards to try them out. That's smarts.

- Printer is one of those shitty "Print from camera" dealies, so it doesn't have full USB port. So I can't hook it up to iMac (no cable).

- So I think, hey, I can transfer the card images to my camera, then print from camera!

- Camera doesn't support mounting as disk image, so can't transfer to it...

- So I think, hey, I'll buy a USB A-B cable from eBay!

- I buy it, notice the paypal address is still my old one... Cable gets shipped to old address.

And people really do wonder why the whole Apple "It just works" thing sells shit. I think Artie is going to have to choke a bitch before the day is out.

Edit: Huzzah the seller didn't send it until after my email, so it got sent to my new address!

08.02.2008

I'd Tap That

In a pretty bad mood, assholes down the road don't know how to shut the fuck up. My sleeping is pretty messed up too. Argh. Anyway, happier subjects, like lemon pies and geekery.

My current geeky but not-actually-spent-money-on is Magic the Gathering. With having quit WoW and given some of my old collected junk to one of my nephews, I don't have anything geeky to do. Which means excess geek juice, and you know what that means.

So after examining the colours I decided to go with black, although I might try out blue or red in the future. In those sorts of games, I don't play fair. I'm a cruel bastard. My first draft deck, excluding starter deck and stuff, is a discard deck. Megrim is going to cause damage every time you have to discard, and oh boy I've got lots of cards that do that. The main strategy would be to get my rats in play, have them die and bring them back, protecting my more valuable creatures. Mindslicer plus Abyssal Nocturnus would be a pretty harsh combo if you had seven cards in your hand (AN gets +2/+2 until end of turn when you discard a card.. Mindslicer makes both players discard they're whole hand. +14/+14, yum yum).

Although that isn't my ideal deck, there's a few I swapped out because they cost £15/$30 each, and I needed two of each. The deck above would still cost £60-80 though, which kind of made my wallet cry. Sticking with starter and a few boosters f'now I reckon!

08.02.2008

Ancient Lich Seeks New Thrills

A contentless post, to keep myself blogging! I installed and tried out Chyrp, it's a wonderfully light and simple blog/CMS system. I'm seriously thinking about moving VS over to it and working on reopening her. Basically making VS in to an expanded Soap Suds. I've been meaning to do something with the "main" site for a while.

Not much else, I've been doing some hopefully helpful stuff in order to get some more client work, trying out Twitterific 3.0.1 (feel free to follow me) and deciding what's for breakfast.

26.01.2008

"I Need a Blog! Oh Wait..."

Oh hell no, I didn't forget about 'Suds. Really. Seriously. Aw shit, I did. I've spent the last week throwing around ideas for a blog, from something I thought I could DIY to something extravagant. All the while, old Suddy here has been around, and isn't actually ugly. It needs brightening though, so Sans is now the default style.

Lots has happened since I actually kept this place properly updated. I got myself a wonderful girlfriend (of eight months no less!) and my house move were the two biggest. Quitting World of Warcraft is probably a third if you've known my backstory. It means I actually get time to make goodies and all sorts of niceness. Of course themes aren't really in the question, what with Leopard horribly mauling the Shapeshifter scene. Give me a wondrous new version of Shapeshifter and I'd happily update Niqu and Myre.

First new topic I'd like to go over is Lutetium eon, now that the cat's out of the bag. It's planned to be a full icon set -- which you don't see many of, outside of IconFactory nowadays -- with all the trimmings. I liked the name, especially because it's obviously tongue in cheek. It's basically the folder icons that are left, mainly, and I want each one to be a high level of quality... So it might take a while longer. One problem that has cost me some time is the fact during Leon's development I changed how I do each size. Beforehand each size was a scaled down bitmap, which I then hand edited for clarity. Now I redo each size using the vector paths from a higher size, meaning I can make every size crisper and it's a lot less work if I need to edit something across them all.

Next, I've actually began playing with 3D in order to try and make more complex icons with more accurate perspectives. It also lets me play with materials that are really hard to think up in your head, glass refraction is a notable one. I'm still definitely a newbie to it, but it's fun to learn.

Lastly, I'm going to be using 'Suds as a place to actually, y'know, publish released stuff. So if you like my jazz, be sure to subscribe to the feed.