log

The mes­sages that fol­low John Foliot’s email (thread) are the kind that make me rage. Is it blind advo­ca­cy of com­plex­i­ty? Lack of tech­ni­cal under­stand­ing? Unstat­ed Dev­il’s advocacy?

Glad I’m not the only one see­ing this, btw. It’s not that we’ve too many cooks in the kitchen, but that the clean­ing staff have some­how got­ten involved.

…that browsers would stop play­ing this stu­pid zero-sum game of strip­ping out all the UI. Opera 10.51, you’re ugly. It’s as if a pro­gram­mer dragged a brows­er com­po­nent into a blank form and com­piled. The Opera but­ton is prac­ti­cal­ly invis­i­ble, and no, that’s not a good thing.

Some­one drag these inno­v­a­tive UI design­ers away from the prime real-estate of your apps before they hurt some­body. The prob­lem with your gen­er­al­i­sa­tions — in the case of Fire­fox, oh, no one uses the His­to­ry menu so we’ll hide the View, Edit, Tools, Help, Book­marks and File menus as well — is that you start cater­ing to the ‘dumb’ audi­ence, who would be bet­ter off learn­ing a lit­tle com­plex­i­ty in the long term. This is why it’s zero-sum.

What makes this whole thing so bizarre is that these opti­mi­sa­tions are focussed on sav­ing small amounts of screen space on desk­tops where the mon­i­tors are increas­ing­ly large and high-res. Mobile != iPhone != Net­book != Desk­top. Don’t apply the same set of real-estate rules to the desk­top as the iPhone — they’re a total­ly dif­fer­ent envi­ron­ment, and any user who expects the app to be exact­ly the same is unre­al­is­tic. The Fen­nec team under­stood this, the Opera Mobile team under­stood this, but the desk­top UI design­ers seem amazed and daz­zled by the idea of sav­ing 5px of ver­ti­cal space on a mon­i­tor that aver­ages 768px tall.

The essen­tial jug­gling game here is bal­anc­ing the expo­sure of fea­tures with ini­tial visu­al com­plex­i­ty. If you’re a long term user (>6 months) of an app, how much visu­al atten­tion do you pay to an area of the app you don’t use? I would think the major­i­ty of peo­ple gloss over the details, just like I don’t visu­al­ly recog­nise the His­to­ry menu when going for Tools. Does His­to­ry get the way? No. Would I care if it’s removed? Prob­a­bly not. Should you nuke the entire menu bar to solve the prob­lem of one word being there that I already don’t notice? Err…

Leave my menus alone, stop remov­ing my book­marks tool­bars, and get off my lawn.

… is fuck­ing awful. Under any oth­er name it would be recog­nised as mal­ware. How I hate thee:

• When unin­stalling, it deletes the install files for games you’ve down­loaded. We’ve lost over 40gb worth of down­loaded games because of this and the next point.
• When updat­ing to a new ver­sion (auto­mat­ic!) it deletes the installed ver­sion and any down­loaded game installers.
• The new ver­sion requires Adobe Air to be installed, not explain­ing why, or whether it’s option­al, or indeed even what it is. First time through I can­celled the Air installer, and the EA Down­load Man­ag­er installer stopped. Of course it had delet­ed the exist­ing EA Down­load Man­ag­er install com­plete­ly, leav­ing me with nothing.
• The EA site has no vis­i­ble link to down­load it. I had to look at an old invoice from EA (that only arrived after they’d charged me twice, I might add) to find a link. Search­ing for “EA down­load man­ag­er” gives me a use­ful look­ing link that goes nowhere.
• The EA site con­tains no link to view your pro­file or account information.

So, a piece of soft­ware that needs to be installed, installs oth­er soft­ware with­out inform­ing the user of what or why, deletes unre­lat­ed impor­tant files arbi­trar­i­ly upon updat­ing or unin­stalling, and starts by default with Win­dows? Mal­ware.

Adden­dum:

• “The appli­ca­tion failed to ini­tial­ize prop­er­ly. Please ensure you are not attempt­ing to run the appli­ca­tion on mul­ti­ple Win­dows accounts simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. If the prob­lem still per­sists, please rein­stall the application.”
• It fails to start from the icon it put on the desk­top. I ini­tial­ly thought, “Oh, it’s because I man­gled the Air installer or some­thing”, so I unin­stalled every­thing. It still does­n’t work.
• I go explor­ing the EADM install fold­er. From the looks of it, the app is a bas­tard mess of QT, Adobe Air (and thus webkit), a serv­er, a com­mand-line app, XML and inex­plic­a­bly an SWF. What the fuck? Did the pro­gram­ming team just cher­ry pick bits of soft­ware and duct tape them togeth­er? I can under­stand depen­den­cies, but this list is absurd.
• I try EADownloadManager.exe. Does­n’t work. I try EACoreServer.exe. Does­n’t do any­thing. I try EACoreCLI.exe. An icon appears in the tray. Yippee!
• “Where do you want to save your down­loaded game installers?” Can’t type in the direc­to­ry text box. Ok. I think, “let’s use that stu­pid direct­ly your last ver­sion cre­at­ed, c:\programdata.” I select it. The soft­ware changes it to “C:\ProgramData\EA Core\cache\EADM\{ myemail@address }”. Why ask if you’re going to insert ran­dom crap anyway?

An hour lat­er I’m final­ly down­load­ing the game they’re still charg­ing retail prices for even though they’ve cut out all the mid­dle­men involved in the retail process. Great work guys!

BTW, bud­ding pro­gram­mers, don’t ever cre­ate hor­ri­ble short­cut tar­gets like ‘C:\Program Files\Electronic Arts\EADownloadManager\EACoreCLI.exe” ‑eadcommand:?cmd=agent_task_add&taskId=TASK_LAUNCH_VAULT&allowDuplicates=1′. If you need to do this on an end-user sys­tem, your pro­gram is bad­ly writ­ten and you’re expos­ing too much of the inner work­ings to out­sider influ­ence. Also, pass­ing amper­sand-delim­it­ed URLs with start­up instruc­tions to a native appli­ca­tion is dis­gust­ing and a hack. At least use real com­mand line para­me­ters, avail­able since the 1970s. Thanks for rev­o­lu­tion­is­ing appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment Air!

OK, so Hen­ri’s IE8 ren­der mode flow­chart was a run­ning joke in the web­dev com­mu­ni­ty a year ago. Now it’s offi­cial (albeit a year late).

Two strange quotes in the MS arti­cle above made me wonder…

[…] many high traf­fic web­sites want to ren­der in as many browsers as pos­si­ble, which is why they write for Quirks.

Think­ing in terms of web-scale, there are bil­lions of pages writ­ten specif­i­cal­ly for either Quirks, IE7, Almost Stan­dards, or the lat­est Standards.

Seri­ous­ly, no one “writes for quirks”, espe­cial­ly for com­pat­i­bil­i­ty. One writes in quirks acci­den­tal­ly, or from lazi­ness, lack of knowl­edge, or pos­si­bly as a result of head trau­ma. Phras­ing it this way makes it sound like peo­ple inten­tion­al­ly choose to ignore the past 10 years of brows­er land­scape. Besides which, you can’t be “writ­ing for quirks” with 1193 errors on your front page.

The offi­cial blog’s word­ing always comes across as care­ful­ly phrased to avoid tak­ing blame or hon­est­ly admit­ting past mis­takes that lead to the cur­rent mess, fur­ther ruf­fling the feath­ers of the many pes­simist hawks sub­scribed to their RSS feed. And the fact this post comes a year after the pro­duc­t’s launch (when the offi­cial flow­chart would have been use­ful) is befuddling.

Great arti­cle on the two com­put­erised musi­cal com­po­si­tion sys­tems built by David Cope. There are some fan­tas­tic quotes through­out, but my favourite:

The atti­tude, which he set­tled on at a young age, is to “treat myself as if I’m dead,” so he won’t affect how his work is received. “If you have to pro­mote it to get peo­ple to like it,” he asks, “then what have you real­ly achieved?” 

Oth­er choice quotes, such as

[In] an anthol­o­gy of debates about Cope’s research, Hof­s­tadter wor­ries Emmy proves that “things that touch me at my deep­est core — pieces of music most of all, which I have always tak­en as direct soul-to-soul mes­sages — might be effec­tive­ly pro­duced by mech­a­nisms thou­sands if not mil­lions of times sim­pler than the intri­cate bio­log­i­cal machin­ery that gives rise to a human soul.” 

and

“All the com­put­er is is just an exten­sion of me,” Cope says. “They’re noth­ing but won­der­ful­ly orga­nized shov­els. I wouldn’t give cred­it to the shov­el for dig­ging the hole. Would you?” 

high­light the enor­mi­ty of the dis­con­nect between Cope and his peers on the sub­ject of a machine’s abil­i­ty to affect human emo­tion, of which the argu­ment does­n’t seem so much about the music hav­ing being “writ­ten by a machine”, but a sub­con­scious pseu­do-intel­lec­tu­al or spir­i­tu­al rejec­tion of being emo­tion­al manip­u­lat­ed by pure­ly man­u­fac­tured mate­r­i­al. Is it that we find human com­posers (with their stock­pile of neu­roses and emo­tion­al invest­ment) pro­duce art more enjoy­able because of the rich fan­ta­sy we sub­con­scious­ly cre­ate about the gen­e­sis of their work? It’s hard to donate emo­tion­al attach­ment when we know the author did­n’t, and it’s not until we strip back that almost-famil­ial empa­thet­i­cal require­ment that we realise how bizarre it is that we can’t enjoy some­thing pure­ly for how it affects us. Of course with­out that empa­thy soci­ety would prob­a­bly collapse.

Most of our time isn’t spent cre­at­ing, but reflect­ing on the gen­e­sis of oth­er’s cre­ativ­i­ty, and I can under­stand the effect that has upon enjoy­ing com­put­erised work if you believe a ‘soul­less’ machine is gen­er­at­ing some­thing from noth­ing. We aren’t quite there yet, and I won­der whether we’ll be able to empathise with cre­ative com­put­ers when they do expe­ri­ence emo­tions, sim­u­lat­ed or not.