05.09.2008

Drama Breeds Drama

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.