rebootied

(OK, it looks like this is a 3.1 issue; I thought I'd installed 3.1 at launch but apparently I was running 3.0.whatevs until this morning.)

TLDR version:I hate being made to feel stupid. Why do engineers ever think it's a good idea to put multiple search fields available in an application's user interface? iTunes does some weird crap, but even iTunes knows enough to make Search contextually sensitive to location within the app. In your Library? I'll search the library. In the Apple Store? I'll search the store. It probably also isolates if you're in your iPod or iPad...

One of the things which irks me a lot are shortsighted UI changes which look efficient but are actually confusing. Like MS Office "ribbon"? I hate that thing. It may be great for new users, but for users who are accustomed to Office, suddenly it's just about impossible to find my own ass with both hands, a flashlight, and a GPS.

Thunderbird mandated a "minor" revision this morning (actually with 3.1) and its search functionality has changed. Until this morning, it had a single search field, and the magnifying glass icon was a drop down for Search Type, e.g. search all messages, message body, subject, to: and subject, etc.

In today's revision, in addition to the Search field at the top, now there's a Quick Filter bar underneath it, with the ability to show only mails with attachments, tagged mail, mail from contacts, etc. The whole Quick Filter bar can be minimized/hidden, so you don't have to see it all the time. It also has its own Search field for text entry.

The functionality for Quick Filters was previously inherent to the universal search field, but now the various drop down Search options are now buttons. These are displayed only if text has been entered, so what was one step is now a progressive isolation of search results. That's not inherently bad, but it's a big change.

But now there are two fields for text entry when searching: "Search All Messages" field and a "Quick Filter" field. I just don't see a reason why this wasn't included in a "Search" bar. Anytime a user has to go multiple places to find things, it's confusing. And I can't believe the change isn't advertised in mile high flaming letters on the greeting screen.

Listening to The Savage Lovecast again today, and remembered chernobylred condemning Loveline's Dr. Drew. Driving home late at night during crunchtime, I really used to enjoy Loveline when it was Dr. Drew and Adam Carolla. The two of them were a great pair, because Adam is hilarious and Drew always seemed very insightful in terms of being able to identify trauma in someone's past that they'd not brought up in the question. And they were always at each other's throats, Drew largely through scathing silences, and Adam coming down on Drew for not loosening up a little.

( surprize! buttsecks! )

This morning I woke up to a contact's link to Animation World Magazine, Mind Your Business: You Will Lose All The Rights to Your Own Art. My first thought was, That doesn't sound right. That just sounds alarmist and scary, though there certainly is a lot of MAFIAA behavior that would qualify as scary and dishonest. When I read through the article, it seemed to largely be about "orphaned works" (wikipedia) - this is particularly an area where I'd like to see copyright reform begin to take effect. After all, there are heaps of works out there where there is no clear ownership of the original work, so using it is questionable and generally legally inadvisable. However, because of the cooling effects of copyright law, these works may fade entirely away; they're not in print, they're not being maintained and there's no positive result from trying to save them, only perceived potential for litigation.

“As the Copyright Office said in its notice, the evidence suggests that a large number of works may fall into the category of orphan works. We consider it extremely important, not only for the artists who are creating new work today, but also for the ideas created in years past, that orphan works be made as widely available as possible.

"The greater availability of orphan works will provide a new and valuable source of inspiration for writers, film-makers, musicians and artists generally. (Save Orphan Works)

I am not sure where the author thinks that work which is readily attributable to him will legally become open fodder for Disney and Halliburton, but that's not what orphaned works are really about. So I went looking for examples to counter this guy's perspective. It turns out, there's been a minor firestorm over this in teh blogospherez today, and at least one person has written up what's fundamentally wrong with the positions expressed in the AWM article: read Six Misconceptions About Orphaned Works for some common sense and insight. [via boingboing]

There are more games in my queue than I've got time to play. ( I'm a virgo, so you just know there's a list involved under the cut )

My family just got back from a trip to San Jose, California. I very much wanted to see my local friends, but instead decided to keep the entire trip entirely focused on being with my Dad's widow and my sister's family. My two kids get to play with their Japanese family every day of the year, as they're literally 20 steps away down the block from our house, but they've only seen their single US cousin once before. We made up for some of that discrepancy on this trip, and we really got my Dad's widow into the Christmas spirit, and she helped us do the same.

My apologies to weezie13, tsanders, allera, hedr_goblin, cyclopea, toxgunn, and heaps of friends who don't have LJ accounts. I know everyone was probably busy with their own plans anyway, but I feel bad for being incommunicado about it.

The trip started off badly but became better as the week went on. ( cut for length and video )

I returned from lunch to find that my computer had rebooted itself. The cute word-balloon message in the taskbar more-or-less read:

O HAI! [LOLZ] WE OTTO-INSTALLED UR UPDATES, AND HAD TO SAI-KI-D'OH UR MACHINE KTHXBYE. PS: HOPE UR UZING FIREFOX BECAUSE WE CLOSED LIKE A BILLION OPEN TABS. WER U RESEARCHING SUMTING? PPS: SORRY ABOUR UR EMAILZ."

I knew it had installed an update, and before lunch when it gave me a countdown dialog saying it would happen automatically, unless I chose later. I CHOSE "LATER."

OTOH, this excellent Moka French from Kaldi Farm is making me reconsider my Windows Rage. Yummmmm.

Travelers Tales, makers of the Star Wars Lego games is currently working on Lego Indiana Jones. Though those games were quite fun, I found myself playing largely to complete the game, not just for the joy of it. In the end, I was unable to convince myself to play through each level enough times to get all of the Xbox Live Achievements.

In the end, it turns out to have been a fairly simple miss - in trying to make a game which plays identically on any of its many platforms, they failed to take advantage of the features which are specific and beneficial on particular platforms. The Load Game dialog is suspiciously similar to the Playstation 2's process, which fails then to account for the possibility -no, probability- that a consistent data storage unit will be present and tied to the logged in user's account. Every boot-up, instead of referring to the User Account's save data instead makes you locate the storage unit, then select the Save Data file, then confirm that you really want that Save Data... Does anyone really accidentally load the wrong Save Data file? The Achievements in the game are really lazily implemented - instead of tying in to a number of different stats that are already tracked in the game, it instead tracks whether or not you've died during completion of a level; a fact which is entirely de-emphasized in regular play, and nearly impossible unless you've got the reflexes of a 12-year-old who's hopped up on a brick of Hershey's and mainlining NoDoz through a nasal tap.

The other measure for Achievements is a base check on percentage-completion of the game, which is tied into several variables, but also affected by purchase of unlocked characters, some of which cost over a million Lego bits. So it's a short game which ends up overcompensating by requiring obscene amounts of repeated play, which manage to rob the all the fun of the initial play-through in the name of completion. And all of it could have been avoided if they'd just tied Achievements in to the tasks which award Gold Bricks and Power Bricks.

So, yeah; I started off loving the game, ended up getting kind of sick of it, and if an Achievement Junkie like me won't jump through those hoops WHILE PLAYING WITH LEGO AND STAR WARS FIGURES, they've screwed the pooch.

In retrospect, this post is mainly about how happy I am that the implication is that there will be Indiana Jones themed Lego - though I suspect they'll replace the more generically pulp-themed Adventure! sets, and that's a little sad. But it may mean we get Nazi Lego - and that will just be... weird.