Reductio ad absurdum

The reason why many older people do not follow fashion isn't because they don't understand it, but because they have seen it all before. This is also the reason why there is a tendency to get grumpier with age. The first time round fashions can have a certain novelty and, occasionally, something new does come along. People who now stick to a particular style have probably followed fashion at some time in their past. But a lot of fashion is just change for change's (or commercial gain's) sake, and that can get  wearing, very wearing. Resisting fashion can become a heroic fight as retailers are completely in its thrall and you can find that things simply become unavailable. A couple of years ago there was a fashion for purple clothing. It became quite amusing looking at shop window displays in Italy and seeing nothing but a sea of purple in all its shades. Anyone who didn't like purple would, presumably, have to wait till the next fashion bus came along.

Fashion, of course, makes itself felt in all areas of life. Clothing is the first thing that comes to mind when the word is mentioned but it also shapes the environment in which we live, infecting everything from the way food is presented to the shape of waste bins. Architecture is at the whim of fashion but, unfortunately for architects, any mistakes tend to linger and mean that buildings can become dated very quickly. Consequently architects will reign in some of their more extreme reactions to fashion in fear of leaving an embarrassing edifice to haunt them.

Not so software designers.

Microsoft have turned their back on anything that suggests three dimensions in their Windows 8 operating system and 'flattened' everything out into simple areas of colour. They call them 'tiles' and the whole idea of reducing everything in a GUI to its most simple and impenetrable form has met with some resistance. So you would think that other software companies would take note and steer another course. Actually, no you wouldn't, because if you are old enough to have seen it all before you know that the headlong rush into a particular design dead-end is unstoppable. Google are currently following the path to minimalism. I have mentioned this before but Google keep reminding me so I can't resist protesting again. Their latest roll-out of their search page has banished the menu bar. This now means that operations that used to be carried out with one button click now require two. This could, of course, be because Amazon have patented 'one-click' but it is more likely that useful things clutter up their nice minimal work space and need to be banished. Preferably somewhere difficult to find.

My wife has an Android phone and it has just updated itself. Mine has yet to receive the command from above but it will, doubtless, appear any day now. Without asking anyone if they want the interface with their most commonly accessed piece of technology messed around with they have now flattened everything. No choice is given, you are supposed now to be eager for a 'new look' and thankful that they have decided for you what it is going to be. Resistance is futile. They have also chosen to move some of the furniture around and their end users will just have to put up with banging into things for a while, for the sake of fashion.

If fashion went in a straight line introducing us to new and exciting things along the path to some sort of design Nirvana it wouldn't be so bad. But the reality is that the next wave of 'bright young things' will be along in a while and everything will rush headlong in another direction, probably backwards. The current BYT's will presumably recognize this as a 'retrograde' step and join the ranks of the grumpy.

In days gone by we had to put up with all of this because the infrastructure wasn't there to allow people to find and adopt their own style. Things are different now. Software can be designed to allow everyone complete control over the look and feel of things. By allowing 'user preferences' they can allow their customer base to locate their own comfort zone and opt to stay there. The computer modelling software that I have used for the last nearly twenty years allowed this. Each time they released a new version you could opt to stick with the old interface and not have to go through a new learning curve. Microsoft bought that company and then pulled the plug on it a few months later so it is permanently in stasis now. It won't develop as new technology comes along but then again I won't be bothered by BYTs gaining control either. On balance that is probably a good thing, and you never know it may become a design classic.

An Attack of Sticky Cursor.

Something I have been noticing lately is that when I use Google Street View the cursor gets 'sticky'. By which I mean that if you try and click to rotate the viewpoint it sticks to the little grey zone used to zoom in or move and won't let go so when you release the mouse button you move position. This has been getting increasingly annoying but I had thought the problem was at my end. Google wouldn't have updated one of their flagship pieces of software so that it no longer works would they? 

Wrong. Apparently they have. When I eventually found out what the forums were calling this phenomenon i.e. 'sticky cursor', I found that plenty of other people have been having the same problem - and it apparently goes back a long way. To at least 2011 in fact depending on which combination of hardware and browser you use.

However. On this occasion there is a fix, and it is simple. Just click on 'Full Screen' and the problem goes away. Now if the chaps at Google can just figure out why that is maybe they can break that too.

And That Reminds Me...

I am sure that there is little chance that I will run out of material for this Blog. I have a backlog as long as your arm of software-related nonsense to go at and only yesterday was treated to a whole day of installation hell by a bunch of amateurs who think they are running a software company. I shall be tackling that one soon. But I need a little space to calm down before I do so consider this a small interlude.

The software companies that form the bulk of my big backlog have little danger of being forgotten because I am reminded almost daily of their existence by irritating pop-up dialogue boxes. I have just been treated to the latest from our friends at Adobe.

One of the many problems that anyone who uses a computer has to wrestle with is how to handle updates. I have had many helpful people tell me that I am doing it the wrong way and that if I adopted their tactic I wouldn't get quite so irritated. THEY ARE WRONG. Updates are irritating no matter how you handle them.

It comes down to three basic choices:

1. Let the computer get on with updating without reference to you.

I tried this. To a degree it works. I am even currently adopting this strategy on my Smartphone until it goes horribly wrong - and it will. It is just biding its time until it can go wrong with the most effect. I used to let Windows update itself but Windows is an idiot. Whoever was Head of Wrong Decisions at Microsoft at the time structured it so that an update could restart the computer. Just wait a moment and think about that. Restart the computer. What could possibly go wrong? 

I build computer models. It is my job. I spend hours, if not days, building complicated meshes that then need to be 'rendered' to create the final image. The rendering process can take hours depending on the complexity of the model with its shadows and reflection and reflections of reflections. So I leave my machines running, often overnight, so that I can hit my presentation deadlines. I think by now you have probably guessed what happens if you do that? 

I wake up in the morning not to find all the renders complete but instead a dialogue box saying something along the lines of 'Your machine was updated and it required a restart'. If I had the temerity to render a model that I hadn't completely saved this piled on a whole new layer of pain and why? Because some idiot software engineer had decided that time was of the essence in updating the machine and it didn't matter if there was collateral damage. Thank you Microsoft.

2. Turn off updates altogether.

Not a good idea. You see, software companies write lazy and clumsy software. You only have to remember that Voyager 2 has managed to get into interstellar space after a journey lasting over 40 years with 68KB of memory whilst your average 'modern' program runs to Gigabytes to see something has gone wrong. When we had our first computer you would load programs on using floppy discs. Until the wheelbarrow wasn't big enough to carry all of them and then they moved to CDs and then DVDs and then direct downloads from the internet in the arms race between the hard disc manufacturers and the programmers. Every now and then it looks as if the programmers are going to win and completely fill your hard drive before you get a chance to use it but Moore's Law has kept them at bay and we now have hard drives routinely installed in computers measured in terabytes. Now there's a challenge. The only danger of course is that we will run out of words to name the ever-bigger drives and then all will be lost. But I digress.

The point is that in the middle of all that massive bloated programming there are mistakes. Big ones. And they will come out to bite you if the guys who produce it don't get to grips with quite what it is they have written before the bad guys. So, as they find the errors they fix them usually under the guise of patching a hole in security because that casts them as the good guys. Despite the fact that it was they that sold you the pup in the first place. If you don't keep applying these updates then bigger and bigger holes become available to the less scrupulous and that can be bad. Scrapping-hard-discs bad. If you delay applying the updates they just build up. You don't get to the stage where you save time by not updating. You are just putting off the inevitable.

3. Ask to be informed when updates are available.

This is where we came in.This is my weapon of choice because the innevitable outcomes of the others are too horrible to contemplate  Bearing in mind everything I have just said it makes sense that if I am keen to stay safe and up-to-date I will apply updates whenever I am notified. All well and good, but those notifications have come at progressively closer centres and they are now daily reminders that intrude into my life. I cannot turn on a computer now without a string of updates to one bit of software or another demanding my attention. And not just once, these things repeatedly nag until I give in. I turned on this machine this morning to get some work done only to have A

dobe nag me to update their Reader software. Why, for heavens sake do they have to keep updating reader software? They should have been able to fit the whole program inside 68KBs. To put the icing on the cake this 'update' required a reboot. A reboot! Why?

And another thing. Why do they keep putting radio buttons in that default to the option I never opt for? This may form the subject of a future Blog.

So, after having fired up all my working software I now had to shut everything down again and wait while these idiots mess remotely with my machine. It is pointless to delay the reboot because it will also keep nagging with the added danger that it could get bored and restart the machine anyway out of spite. The job I am supposed to be doing is pushed to one side and I am reminded, once more, about the subject of a Blog.

Such is life...

Oh, and by the way. Any solutions that require me to remember anything are doomed to failure. So don't even go there.

Who is Steering This Thing?

I have a great admiration for Google and what they do but there comes a time in the development of any company when an idiot takes the wheel.

It happened with Renault a few years back. We had a string of fine cars from them that did the job we wanted and even managed to get progressively better. Until they changed their Head of Design. He broke a perfectly good range of cars with his meddling. 

The result of his 'design' input was the 'Avantime' and the 'Vel Satis' both of which had negligible sales. But he wasn't satisfied just introducing cars which were so radically wide of the mark in design terms that no-one wanted them he also gave the rest of the product line a makeover. The Clio and Espace turned their back on the market and started to look like something out of Judge Dredd. The poor Megane gained a rear end that looked like a filled nappy. Needless to say we stopped buying Renaults and, despite their recognition that this had all been a big mistake, have never been back.

Google seem to have gained their equivalent to Renault's Head of Design and he is currently engaged in undoing as much good work as he can. Another example of this is the Play Store on Android. As with all the other Google products it has received a 'makeover'. The colours have been simplified and the layout is striving to achieve some sort of Zen state.

The problem is, this simplification once again makes the product less functional.

To start with the colours are now more uniform. There is the heavy use of areas of a single brightish colour rather like the tiles in Windows 8 to announce what the product is but after that all is subtlety. Unfortunately this means that silly little things like buttons now merge into their background. A white button on a pale grey background with a darker grey text isn't very readable when you are trying to see it on a smartphone screen in variable lighting conditions. Genius.

Just to make the task of actually using the product a little more challenging they have also tried to rationalise the layout. This has resulted in buttons now occupying a small area in the top right hand corner. On my phone, an HTC OneX, the screen is large. I like that. It means that someone with eyes my age can see what's going on. But even on my screen the buttons are only 5mm apart with a gap between them of 1mm, way to small for the fingers of most people. If these buttons were unimportant it wouldn't be too much of a disaster but the boy genius in charge of design manages to place the 'Open' and 'Uninstall' buttons together with hilarious consequences.

Renault eventually tracked down the source of their problem but not before a lot of damage was done. Hopefully someone at Google has their wits about them.