iMovie and Brushed Metal

Here's a rotten combination: Apple's brushed metal GUI and more importantly, the click-anywhere-that-isn't-a-control-widget-and-move-the-window behavior that goes along with it combined with iMovie, an app where the control areas are small and RIGHT NEXT TO WINDOW-MOVING REGIONS!!! There's two triangles you have to click and drag in order to select a region of your video. But if you make a mistake and click juuuust outside those triangles you move the whole damn window. Annoying as hell! Now, wouldn't it be much better to use a keyboard shortcut to move those in and out points? Well, there isn't. You can cursor to move the pointer, but as far as I can tell there's no shortcut to SELECT either in or out triangle widgets, or more sensically, a keyboard shortcut to select the region you want. You can shift-click to select a region with the mouse, but not with the keyboard. Argh! Apparently the only way out of this mess is Final Cut Express, a cool 300 clams. *doh!*

Now, a sensible person would say: "That ain't brushed metal, that's more like painted metal. Hell, it isn't even metal, it could be plastic, glass or wood! It's really just solid grey. Furthermore, evidence suggests this interface isn't physical at all, but rather pixel-based!"

That sensible person would be correct. But it's besides the point. On the point is that brushed metal graphics and click-anywhere-to-move were conceived in the same instance by our dear friends in Cupertino. Can't we have a preference to toggle this on or off? Come on people, get with the program. How often does one need to move a window anyway? Wasn't Exposé designed to facilitate this issue of locating windows? Besides, iMovie is an application that generally demands full screen interaction. The window should be locked down.

Click-Through Problem

OS X software developers really need to get their shit together with regards to click-through. I don't think it need be something that always works ONE way. Sometimes you want click-thorugh, sometimes you don't. But it should be consistent across the board and you should be able toggle between behaviors via key command.

Mozilla has one of the weirdest click-through behaviors I have ever seen. You can have an e-mail message window open and yet your active foreground window is something else. Mozilla allows you to highlight text inside the message window but you cannot type or paste anything because it hasn't switched the foreground app to Mozilla! You're typing something inside some other app! Sensing this mistake, you click inside the Mozilla message window and start typing again. No go, it still hasn't switched. No, you must click the TITLE BAR of the message window before you make it active! It drives me batty!

Most of the time I would like to have instantly-switching click-though, meaning that any screen object you can SEE, that isn't obscured by another window can be manipulated. But sometimes you don't want to switch away from your current app via mouse click. For example, accidentally clicking outside a Photoshop palette.

It isn't easy to figure out what behavior makes the most sense, but I guess my main beef is that some apps work one way and others the opposite. It's one of those subtle things which messes you up without you thinking about it.

Virtual Depression

As someone who is simultaneously fascinated and repelled by rapidly advancing technology I often find myself bemoaning my own apparent extinction process. I work in the publishing business and what we do is mainly print-based. But all around us the signs of a paperless society seem imminent. I don't have a financial interest in paper itself, but I do fear that it may one day cease to exist. Most of the media we consume is being faked on screens with no physical reality necessary between the content provider and the consumer. Everything about human life seems to be pointing towards screens. It's all about rectangles. Even the ethereal experience of music listening has incorporated the screen with the iPods and whatnot. A record collection has been reduced to a text list. People don't seem to want to touch anything anymore besides a mouse or a screen.

I recently subscribed to Netflix, a service which I do like, but the delivery method has already crushed any physical world, objective medium aspects. No more formal DVD case, you get a generic sleeve with generic printing. These discs are hauled back and forth by the post office. But then you logically figure that this is clunky and pointless; why not just download what you want from the internet? Well, apparently Apple is offering this now as well. The only barrier I see there is bandwidth. A regular definition DVD is 8GB and the new HD blu-ray\HD-DVD stuff is what, like 50GB or something. I don't see this as being practical to download, even with a cable modem. But that's just a matter of time. A future network will be able to pass that amount of data as quickly as one might subscribe to a pay-per-view cable TV broadcast.

Is there going to be any physical art in the distant future? Will mankind desire anything that cannot be put on a flat screen or projected onto our eyeballs digitally? And then I think that why even bother with showing you media\entertainment\education in real-time, why not directly affect the brain. A future Netflix where you just have to think about the movie you want to watch, your virtual fake numbers (money) will be taken from your virtual bank account and a memory of watching that movie will be implanted in your brain.

It makes me wonder what the point of medical science seeking to prolong people's lives is. The older you get the more disaffected you become from the younger generation. I feel jaded now, I can imagine how curmudgeonly I'll be at age 70! Humans seem really good at making all this digital stuff happen at such a fast rate, but it seems that nature has not caught up with us. We desperately want to live in a fantasy world yet our bodies are inextricably anchored in the physical world.

I keep thinking that at some point society will reach a breaking point and say, "Okay, enough with this fake shit" and there will be a growth of "old school" mediums. But maybe that is only my fantasy world, and the real world is a world where everything can be reduced to data and put on screen. Perhaps it is better to die when we die. Perhaps Tolkien had it right when death was considered a gift to mankind whereas the elves had to plod on forever. Did you read that story? I've got it on PDF, I'll upload it to your brain...

"What is real
What is fantasy
Are you who you are
Or what you want to be?"
-Mike Smail, Penance

What's The Ideal Computer Display?

I came across this digitaltiger site which sells totally batshit multi-up LCDs. It's pretty crazy.Check out THIS monstrosity:
Looks like the control room at a TV station! Excessive? Perhaps. This three-up beauty seems more my speed:


Big fat main work area with yer palettes and PathFinder windows etc. off on the side panels. Mmmm...that would be sweet. But again, I have to ask, why not one screen that size? One argument for multiple screens would be how applications currently behave. For instance, Photoshop goes into full screen mode on whatever display your image is currently sitting inside. In this manner you can put all the palettes off to the side and have a totally unobstructed view of the image. With a single large screen the palettes would in theory be on top of your canvas area. I also wonder if one would be subject to the "work expands to fit the time allotted" phenomenon, except in this case it would be "image size expands to fit the screen boundaries".

People have an innate desire for their image to fill up the complete physical area they are given. You may know the frustration of trying to explain differing aspect ratios to a layman (i.e. your parents) They just think in terms of "there's black bars and the image isn't filling the screen" regardless of the reality that ALL of the source image is being displayed. And who can blame them, really? Certainly mixing 4:3 and 16:9 is inherently half-assed and leads to these confusions. If the image doesn't touch the bezel you're being cheated is what they're thinking.

What really is the ideal size display? You want it to have more than enough room to show everything you want to show, but not be so large that you have to crane your neck or move your chair around. One theory I came up with would be that the screen should be as wide as your outstretched arms and as tall as you can reach while seated. This also assumes relatively close viewing distance of about 18-24".

But what about curved? Can they do curved screens? Is that gonna screw up the beauty of perfect geometry of LCDs? A curved screen would seem to make sense if it's going to be as wide as your uh, armspan. And I assume, it would correct for viewing angle falloff.

What about touch screens? Like Apple's latest phone, or that dude from that one link I can't find with the touch screen doodad. Now what about a really BIG touch screen like that, and not only that but make it 200-300ppi (I have yet to set eyes on a roentgen display, but I desperately want to) It would be not so much a display, but your whole damn desk. A drafting table, even! What about a 200ppi display as big as this:


Yeah, I'm lazy, I used the same screen grabs over and over, but it's just to show a general idea of scale. Imagine if you had that big of an area to work inside? We're talking tens of thousands of pixels here, but it's only a matter of time before that becomes entirely practical. And what if you could pick the top of this thing up, hang it on the wall and watch a movie on it? Wacom's already got a monitor you can draw on with a stylus (haven't used it) but I thought it would be super cool if the thing was just friggin' desk-sized. This could also encourage desk neatness because who's gonna wanna set their junk down on their 300,000 pixel gem of a display even if it IS a flat surface (that which attracts all objects to it, regardless of physical or chemical property)

Cripes, maybe someone already did it (not the touch screen part though)
sharps-4k-x-2k-64-inch-ultra-high-res-monitor/
And Jesus Wept...

Sales Tax, Gambling and Chutzpah

I'd like to extend a very personal and heartfelt FUCK YOU to Apple Inc. for charging sales tax on out-of-state online purchases. What gives? That's why you buy stuff online, so you don't have to pay goddamn sales tax. But order anything from apple.com and the assholes charge you sales tax. So fuck Apple for their compliance and fuck the federal and state governments for taking a taste of something they had jack shit to do with. Praise be to all other online merchants who do not charge sales tax, such as Amazon.

Of course, it can be argued that a more tangible tax is preferable to the hidden ones we pay on absolutely everything we buy. Why? Because you know you're being taxed. (a devil's advocate arguement I suppose) Roll the tax into a single figure and people don't care so much. This is the Pissing-People-Off-Will-Help-Them-Resist argument. It's not an easy one to support, but I can see the logic.

I'd also like to extend another heartfelt FUCK YOU to Potawatomi Bingo and Casino for their shitty, dewey-voiced radio ads boasting how much taxes they pay to the "community" (whatever the hell that is) like they're some goddamn humanitarians. You know, all the money for fire trucks and roads and baskets full of kittens for crippled children. My goodness, how could we ever live without fucking taxes!? We'd all surely die! Those people throwing what's left of their paychecks into the casino so it can be turned around and sent back to the government, those people are helping keep our community going don't you know? Taxes are the life blood of humanity! Ahhhh!

It's poetic justice when the descendents of violently overthrown native americans form gambling havens to voluntarily pick the pockets of Whitey, but to boast and gloat about how much tax revenue they're generating for Whitey's government makes me sick. That's one surreal, enigmatic sell-out if I ever heard one! Almost as bad as the enigma of a state who wants to ban online gambling on one hand and sponsor a lottery on the other! I call for all yiddish dictionaries to be ammended using this example in the definiton of "chutzpah"!

Yes folks, that gambling...ooh it's the Devil's tool it is! Sinful! Shame on you all for wanting to gamble! How dare you throw your money away like that instead of buying milk for your family! You should go down to the corner store right now and get that jug of milk for your poor doe-eyed wife and children! Straighten up and fly right, citizen! Oh and while you're there, make sure to pick up a few POWERBALL TICKETS! Odds of winning are only 1 in 300 million! Oh it will be so wonderful to fulfill your patriotic duty! Let the floors of our great state be covered with instant scratch off metallic detritus! Hooray!

They Hate Our Freedom!

You know, I think George W. Bush was right in his numerous speeches talking about how "the terrorists hate our freedom!" Okay, maybe not 100% right, but definitely 50% right. Somebody does hate our freedom, but it's not usually the terrorists (defined here in the most popular mainstream American definition of "scary brown Muslim people from the Middle East who blow stuff up"). If there is anyone who really hates freedom in its strictest sense, they're living right here in the USA. That's only partially correct too. Very few people actually hate freedom for themselves, but they sure as hell hate freedom for other people.

This particular fault is something many people are guilty of in one degree or another, any why not? It's much easier to hate the freedoms of your neighbor than it is to hate the freedoms of folks across the ocean. Whenever you engage in political schadenfreude over a certain group who got shafted by Uncle Sam, you are a freedom-hater like it or not. When you delight in the result of the latest banned behavior, product or service you are indeed hating the freedom of others and loving the fact that it's now illegal. It's a natural feeling, one we have all felt at one time or another. But it's a highly ignoble and dangerous feeling as well. It's a feeling that can turn against you in time. There is no guarantee you will always be on the right side of the equation. One day the stuff YOU like to do might be up on the chopping block.

Take for instance, the most bizarre, surreal and utterly ludicrous campaign I have ever heard of. The trans fat ban! Can you believe this shit? People actually want to ban a certain FOOD INGREDIENT!? Am I still on planet earth? Has everyone gone fucking nuts but me? People actually VOTED to ban trans fat in New York. How ironic that this occured in the same state where the whole, 'the terrorists hate our freedom' mess got started back in 2001. Apparently freedom is so critically important that in order to "secure it" we have to send the army to kill thousands of foreign "terrorists" but at the same time we are voting away our own freedoms in our own fucking country! WE AMERICANS HATE OUR FREEDOM!!!

If it isn't trans fat it's smoking, gay marriage, drugs, whatever...name your issue. If there's something you don't like, NOT doing it yourself just isn't good enough is it? You have to stop your neighbor from doing it too don't you? Doesn't it just feel so good to force people to bend to your will? Isn't it great to have your enemy over a barrel? Aren't you filled with hot, sweet, righteous indignation when you see that stinky smoker forced to smoke his cigarette outside in the freezing cold? HA! HA! HA! That's what you get, sucker! But no, these are not positive feelings to have. We all must resist these urges if we claim to love freedom. To a religious person I would call these thoughts sinful. These are freedom-hater kind of feelings. It's an ugly feeling which should make us recoil and wince in disgust.

There's plenty of things in life that are potentially dangerous, risky and unhealthy. But most things like that also have an extremely positive side to them. If you value your life why would anyone jump out of an airplane or off a bridge with a bungee cord tied on? Why indeed would we lock ourselves into heavy metallic cars filled with gallons of explosive fuel, racing along at high speeds nearly everyday of our lives? Why would we take a bunch of dry leaves, burn them and inhale them? Why would you eat something that makes you fat? It all sounds really dangerous. But we still do them because we have decided that the risks are outweighed by the benefits. Other people have decided that for some things the risks are too great. The ability to choose what risks you want to take is part of the whole freedom package. When you start chipping away at that you are not only ruining your neighbor's freedom, but your own as well.

Why Not Just One BIG monitor?

I am a total junkie when it comes to computer monitors. Seems like you can never have too much screen area. As great as the technology is, it still can and needs to go much further. The resolution is still very low. Sure, you can have a screen eight feet wide, but it's still the same res. I suppose there is a practical limit to where your eyes are not going to comfortably focus and the distance you have to move the mouse is too large. As of yet I have not seen this limit in action, however. Dual monitors are awesome, and I would be glad to go for three, maybe four. (I was thinking three across and one up in the middle) At work I have a beautiful Apple Cinema Display (the only LCD I've seen which doesn't suck) and a trusty 21" CRT. At home I have two trusty 21" CRTs. Oh sure, they aren't as sharp as the Cinema, but they're nothing to be sneezed at either. Okay, that's not entirely true, I sneeze on them quite often, but any overspray is quickly wiped up.

But I was looking at the Cinema Displays at Apple's website today and I thought, "Ya know, why in the hell bother with multiple monitors anyway? Why not just one BIG monitor? I mean, screw the bezel in the middle! Why put up with that nonsense?"

Why settle for this...

When you could have THIS!

Sure, the dual sharkie is cool, but this rig would be the fuckin' Megalodon! No stupid separate hardware, just one continuous image. While I'm fantasizing; now let's imagine that instead of 72-96ppi this thing was 300ppi! No more silly ideas of pixels anymore, cause you just can't see them without a loupe.

Perhaps there's a better aspect ratio than this, but my point is... although multiple monitors are cool and efficiency-increasing, they're essentially just a half-ass measure because they break up the image into pieces. It's like printing a poster on a letter-size printer, tiling is a pain in the ass.