Recently in miscellanea Category

As I type this, my machine is dutifully installing “Adobe® Creative Suite® 5 Production Premium”. Adobe is a company that enjoys a stranglehold over the design and publishing industries (try applying for a job in an agency listing “CorelDraw” and “The Gimp” on your CV and see how far you get), so why – oh why? – is their visual communication frequently, face-smackingly, awful?

The Read Me document that came with Production Suite has been typed up in Microsoft Word (truly! I checked), their logo a low-quality JPEG paste job, the type set in crushingly dull Times New Roman. Sure, I’m aware that they won’t be submitting their Read Me documents to any design awards. But considering it’s their customers’ first impression of software that they’ve just splashed more than a grand on, I don’t think it’s too much to ask that they run it by an eager junior designer with a copy of InDesign to spruce up. At least then they’d be using their own product.

Update: Todd Kopriva of Adobe replied to this post. He writes:

… the ReadMe documents are handled by overworked program managers who have approximately zero time between when the features and bug fixes and known issues are settled and the document needs to go off to be translated. The idea of spending any time to make them look good would be met with either guffaws or questions about one’s sanity. Just today, one such program manager said to me that no one reads the ReadMe documents, anyway. That’s why people like me (in Technical Support) end up making posts like this one.

And don’t make fun of my aesthetics. It’s hard enough to get all of the information out in time without having to be self-conscious about design. ;-)

I stand enlightened. So, rather than making fun of Todd’s aesthetics, let us close the book on the troubling mystery of why Adobe’s Read Me files aren’t as beautiful as they could be, and be grateful that we have up-to-date and pertinent information instead of purty columns and fonts. Gracias, Todd!

Recently, I’ve been using 1Password to manage my online passwords. Had I known about Clipperz, I might not have forked out for it.

Clipperz is a damned clever online password manager. But here, don’t take my word for it; let Matt Neuberg of Tidbits explain.

Pimp your maps with the newly introduced “Labs” feature. Add a latitude/longitude tooltip, drag to zoom, aerial imagery, and – why not? – turn it upside down.

From information aesthetics:

Chroma-Hash is a jQuery plugin that dynamically visualizes secure text-field values using ambient color bars.

Meaning: as you type, you see three little colour bars that are unique to your password. You get to confirm whether you’ve typed it correctly (by remembering your unique colour combo) while the password is still hidden.

More information and a live demo here.

A research video from Google that servers as a great reminder that the vast majority of people have no idea what a “browser” is.

Via B3ta.

Courtesy of buggy-as-hell Soundtrack Pro:

An Unexpected Problem

CNSExceptionWrapper type = 16777216, error = 0, message = REFERENCE WAS SOMEHOW RELEASED TOO MANY TIMES

… somehow released too many times? Like a repeat offender?

John Nack over at Adobe is waxing lyrical over the new tablet from – who else? – Wacom. The Intuos 4 has a click wheel, à la the old style iPods. Now if only they’d fix that clunky system preference pane …

I plan on making the top level landing page a little friendlier, so visitors aren’t scared off by the technobabble. So! You’ll continue to find more geeky Mac, After Effects, and scripting miscellanea at http://ianhaigh.com/blog/. The new Atom feed URL will be http://ianhaigh.com/blog/atom.xml.

Assuming I don’t break everything and have to start again, that is.