waffle

Since it seems like a relevant topic, allow me to state Jesper’s three laws of successful PR:

1. Apologize.
2. Profusely.
3. Mean it.

Apparently, Photoshop CS5, after transitioning their GUI code to Cocoa, decided to finally put the OS 9 animated watch cursor out of its misery. And replace it with a cursor version of everyone’s favorite spinner. There are no words.

Actually, there are.

• It is stupid for Photoshop to do this, because it mixes the aesthetics of a very common control with a cursor, creating a Frankenstein UI element that looks familiar but feels weird.

• It is stupid for Photoshop to do this, because the very indicator whose looks it mimics comes with clear, helpful advice (use where needed, close to whatever’s affected, and keep the rest of the engine revving) whose application would have enhanced the user experience of the whole application.

• It is stupid for Photoshop to do this, because people have now been conditioned to this behavior for more than nine years straight, and while some things have been constantly in flux and reinvented both by Apple and others along the way, this is one thing they’ve all been on-board with, maybe to the extent of branding the spinner.

• It is stupid for Photoshop to do this, because it indicates a search and replace attitude to the user interface. Don’t evolve it! Don’t fix it! Just slap on a workalike so that we may ship it. I appreciate the level of labor, grit and expenditure needed to port the Carbon-paired libraries to Cocoa-paired libraries while also getting stuff done in CS5 generally, but not to the point of excusing this behavior.

• It is stupid for Photoshop to do this, because it indicates that the team (that they claim worries about following the necessary conventions to please their customer base and fit in as a model application) didn’t catch this at all, or worse yet, managed to convince itself that this was a case of facepalm-inducing UI “innovation”.

It would also be stupid of me to mindlessly extrapolate all of this without any evidence. But it’s in the final product and they haven’t apologized for it or fixed it — what else are we to believe? Adobe probably spent more man hours inside Xcode last month than many of the critics of this change have combined, and yet here we are.

I would welcome some dignified feedback from Adobe: not John Nack’s Atlassian occasional brand of “oh god, you people are never satisfied, are you?” whining, but rather John Nack’s prevalent brand of weighing the pros with the cons when people repetitively yell buzzwords after him. I’d like to emphasize again that I’m not just shouting “64-bit” in a crowded theater, but telling him and the rest of Adobe actual arguments.

I don’t want people to stomp on Adobe. I want Adobe to stop repeatedly doing stupid shit that makes stomping on them a justified act in the first place, and whose side effects include deservedly drawing a large crowd, nodding, laughing and having another beer.

(Somewhat fleshed out from my comments on David Buxton’s proposal to use the OS 9 watch cursor instead.)

Something, and I’m afraid in the context of such a beautiful post it was the wrong thing, struck me today while reading dive into mark.

Almost every other weblog you go to is recognizably skinned. They are layouts on top of the overriding weblog engine; there are flavors of WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger, Movable Type and whatever your poison may be. The important thing, you may imagine, is that the text is easy to read, and secondly that the site is recognizably yours. (There are also other important things, true.)

Mark’s page is different. It’s his page; not his weblog engine’s. When comments are closed, there’s a form to contact him. When you visit a tag page, there are popularity sparklines. When you read almost anywhere, there’s little “because it was in the templates” metadata clouding everything else. I know that he switched to WordPress at one point because he’s such a good writer, but I made myself not look until I finished writing this entry, and I can’t figure out whether he still is.

Good pages are like this. Good pages are pages that people put every kind of work into: words, style, design. I’d like to think I’ve done a bit on this myself, but I look at Mark’s page and I want to slap myself around a bit with a large trout.

Mark started this several years back. His was one of the first weblogs I read, and I think the only that I continue to read. He’s always done this. Years before Trackback or Pingbacks or Technorati, he scrubbed his referrer logs and listed mentions right after the article. Years before WordPress did something like it, he hacked post versions, complete with diffs, into Movable Type, which is right up there with mounting a V12 into a Soviet tractor and winning the X Prize.

It doesn’t bother me that everyone now has weblogs, and when he started, no one did. It doesn’t bother me that tools like Blogger and Tumblr allow them to easily do that, without having to spend time figuring out their inner workings because they have other things to do. But it does bother me that of those with the time, capacity, capability, drive, interest and potential, everyone and their dog is now on Tumblr, and their site is now surrendered. Not to the evil grasp of centralized storage or managed software installation, but from the personality that turns a well-maintained, well-written, nice looking site into a great site.

Daniel Jalkut:

Pain is a gift: the signal that prevents a burned finger tip from becoming a body engulfed in flames. Apple is numb from success, and I hope the emerging competition from Google and others will re-sensitize them to the threat of failure.

Ed Catmull, president of Pixar:

Success hides problems.