iPad!

Coming to you from a shiny new iPad! This thing is bloody amazing...

I typed too soon

Yesterday, I mentioned that Google, in a somewhat eccentric move, had added buttons to a menu-bar in Chrome, but that they had refrained from doing so in the Mac version, for fear of Jobs' tablet-y vengeance. Well, it turns out that they were just running late:

Steve is selecting his iPad as we speak. A 3G one, probably; they're marginally heavier.

New innovations in peculiar UI design from Google

From the latest dev version of Google Chrome for Linux:

What is this, Google?! I hope that this is merely a brief experiment which will go away soon! Madness.

Fortunately, the dev version for MacOS is untouched. I say fortunately, because this is the sort of Apple HIG violation which causes Steve Jobs to personally come to your home and beat you to death with an iPad.

Creepy...

At the moment in America, there is a sort of latter-day McCarthyist witchhunt going on relating to journalists who dared have an email list without inviting the far-right press.

On a Facebook post listing these terrible, awful people:

First, this business of "You aren't a real [whatever] because you don't agree precisely with my ideologies" is deeply disturbing and unpleasant. But really, Reich?

Flash - aaaa-aaaa - he'll save every one of SEGMENTATION FAULT

Much has been said, lately, in great and tedious detail, about how terrible it is that Flash, present on every other smartphone (for values of 'every other smartphone' meaning 'the Nexus One') is not available on the iPhone, due to Steve Jobs' unspeakable cruelty. But what of the other end, that place where little Flash movies come from? That is, what of Adobe's Flash creation tools?

First, it is important to understand what these tools are. There are two of them, Flash Professional, theoretically a fully-integrated development environment, and Flash Builder, the 600 euro Eclipse plugin formerly known as Flex Builder. In practice, of course, Flash Professional is not really a fully-integrated environment; while you can draw vector graphics and write Actionscript (a strange Java ripoff, with a secondary prototype-y alternate-world OO system stolen from Javascript) in it, no-one actually does. It is, in practice, a system for taking vector graphics produced in Illustrator or whatever, possibly animating them, manipulating them modestly, and packaging them in a format agreeable to Flash Builder.

Let the last line be a warning to you all

Flash Builder is a reasonable Eclipse plugin; nothing special, and not a patch on, say, PyDev, or the C++ one, but not terrible. Flash Professional, on the other hand... Well, where to start?

First, the user interface is deranged, and getting more deranged; it has gotten noticeably worse from CS4 to CS5. There is a whole blog devoted to the topic of how mad Adobe interfaces are, and Flash is one of the more egregious examples. Adobe appears to be currently in the process of replacing normal, sensible UI elements with crazy UI elements that they have made themselves. While these are (usually) the same across the Windows and Mac versions, they are highly inconsistent, messy, and pointless. They don't behave like proper UI elements, they have ugly font rendering, and ugh, they're just terrible. Look at this nonsense. All of this is, for now, in a state of flux; maybe a window will have proper UI elements, and then maybe it will have the special broken Adobe ones. A selection of wonderful Flash things, stolen from the Adobe Gripes blog.

State-of-the-art UI design

Oh, well, ah, fine, then

Adobe, having invented PostScript, has no need to prove itself further in the typography stakes. 'p ackage'.

Native UIs are for lesser applications, not for WONDERFUL FLASH. Note that the dotted underline means 'you can edit this'

This is what comes of rendering your own fake scrollbars

Look carefully at the disabled radio buttons. Note that they are made by superimposing semi-transparent squares. Argh.

But that's just UI, right? Admittedly, one might think that UI would be slightly important to a company who specialises in design tools, but we can live with it. It should, by the way, be emphasised that these fake controls don't just look crap, they feel crap, too. They are extremely tedious and unpleasant to use.

Ah, if only the problems stopped at UI. Flash is also, well, fragile. Importing a Flash CS4 file into Flash CS5 is taking your life in your hands. Exporting a Flash CS4 file from CS5 is a triumph of optimism over experience. Undo will sometimes fail to, well, undo, instead changing things to a state which Flash presumably believes was the last state, but which is actually a new one that it has made up. Flash crashes. A lot. Particularly when saving (hence the post title), which is especially delightful. Saving can take a while anyway, so you try to avoid doing it too much, but then there's that horrible gut-wrenching moment, when you go to save and it explodes. Ugh.

As far as I can see, once Microsoft can be bothered to modernise IE a bit, and someone makes a Flash Professional-alike tool for making vector animations suitable for use in HTML5, Flash is basically doomed. And not a moment too soon.

Bonus: Adobe's amazing Inspire magazine (this month is the Flash issue!). It's just like a website, only it's one giant Flash movie so the fonts are extra-ugly and scrolling doesn't work properly and it makes my CPU usage jump to 60%. And Adobe professes to be proud of this abomination. It makes you wonder, really, is this just a public face, or do Adobe really not realise that this stuff is just this side of acceptable for an expensive, high-profile commercial product which they claim to be the best thing since sliced bread?

A fascinating article which appears for a few seconds before the real article loads on Inspire. Well done, Adobe.

You can't hide from me, Adobe, I have your debug plugin! Error message thrown up by Inspire on my foolishly attempting to touch-scroll; it then crashed, taking Safari with it.

As usual, demise of Apple greatly exaggerated

Apple beat earnings predictions today, as it always does, despite the usual cries of "this time, it's going to be a disaster." What a shock.

Ridiculously stupid comments; the Guardian edition

Yes, okay then.

Olive oil is serious business

On the subject of hazelnut and sunflower oil passed off as olive oil in Italy:

However, by early 1992 Ribatti and his associates were under investigation by the Guardia di Finanza, the Finance Ministry’s military-police force. One officer, wearing a miniature video camera on his tie, posed as a waiter at a lunch hosted by Ribatti at the Grand Hotel

.

So, remember, don't mess with the olive oil, or military-police-tax auditors will come after you with their tie-cameras.

A minor mystery, resolved

A while back, I was buying spices in Lidl. And I was surprised that, while they had just about everything else, they didn't have cumin. They did have caraway, a fairly obscure spice which is related to, and looks almost identical to, cumin.

Anyway, tonight I was browsing Wikipedia pages about spices (as you do), and discovered that, in many central European languages, the words for cumin and caraway are very similar, and frequently cross over in translation. So the stuff I saw in Lidl, a German shop, probably was cumin.

I realise that this is probably boring and obscure even by the standards of my normal blog entries, but this sort of thing interests me.

Exhaustion

Long, irritating week. I felt that I worked a lot, but didn't really get all that much done, which is always annoying. Nice to have the weekend off. I'm unpleasantly aware that I've been snappy and unpleasant with people...

Oh, well, I'm planning to take a week or so off in September (this will be the first time I've taken time off work since finishing college three years ago, which is slightly ridiculous); I can last til then. :)