3 posts tagged “rant”
Specifically, I'm referring to Mozilla Firefox and it's incessant addon pestering, in various shapes and sizes. Ironically, the addons behaviour feels like the most bolted-on thing in Firefox.
Firstly, short of the sky falling, nothing should prevent software from getting to a usable state when the user performs the relevant action to start it (clicking a shortcut, invoking a link handler from another process.) Possibly the most annoying thing that Firefox does is pop a dialog up in your face telling you about how your addons have updates before the rest of the browser starts, bringing about (at least) two sub-annoyances:
- It prevents you from actually using the software until you make a choice as to whether you want to update your addons or not;
- If you happen to click multiple links (expecting them to all open in tabs), only the first one is handled while the rest vanish off into the ether.
I realise that, in someone's mind, this might have been a good idea because you can't update addons without restarting the browser, and that restarting the browser isn't what most people would call fast; but it really wasn't a good idea. At all. Ever.
Secondly, after having survived the first point and chosen to update your addons, you still have to watch progress bars slowly fill up and your browser restart, while you twiddle your thumbs. You are then assaulted with another addon dialog, informing you that the progress bars you just watched complete were actually addons, by the same name, being updated! If you're lucky then you are ready to start using your browser. If you're not so lucky, some of your addons (I'm looking at you, NoScript) have taken it upon themselves to provide additional annoyances, usually in the form of opening new tabs that explain very little about what you did not know and quite a lot about what you did already know.
There have been some attempts to openly discuss improving the current addon experience, although things seem rather quiet at this point in time, one can only hope that the Firefox team realises that there is a problem and maybe Firefox 4 will have teleportation, time travel and an improved addon experience.
Communication. The only real reason humanity wasn't wiped out millennia ago by some catastrophic event (like a flock of doves flying overhead) is because we have a guardian angel. Communication. If it were not for not for someone shouting "Watch out!" our forefathers could have easily walked off a cliff and plummeted to their untimely (and wholly unnecessary) demise. Thanks to those handy road sign things, I may never have to find out what it's like to unsuspectingly drive into incoming traffic. Communication is like the hardhat of mankind. Fact Fiction Fact.
Human communication, like electronic communication, has a bandwidth, some forms have significantly more bandwidth available for use and some less so. To draw a comparison, communicating via email is rather a lot like trying to get a spade down your throat: pointless and painful. Communicating via telephone is a step up from email but is still like a midget giving birth to a dinosaur. These things are just hard to do, it's hard to communicate even a vague idea of your meaning in words. It's not that you just need to think a little bit harder or put some more effort in, no, these are hard things to do. Some people spend years getting university degrees in communication just so that they can really convey what they mean over low-bandwidth mediums; you know, things like "So what do you want changed?" "Can you make the text purple instead of black?" I mean, I'm certainly no expert on this and there are probably a thousand things wrong with those sentences. So what now? Are we doomed to never communicate at our full potential? No, there is a divine solution. Meetings.
Meetings are great, the face to face kind, they're high-bandwidth crackdens Edens. You can do all sorts of fancy high-bandwidth things that you just can't do over email or the phone, things like waving your hands or tapping your pen on the desk. These things are important because they really communicate your motives, they're like the Plaster of Paris for language. The next time you really screw up your sentence, try waving your hands a bit, raising your eyebrows or winking; suddenly, and I like to call it magic, those looks of absolute confusion will turn into looks of zen-like understanding. Meetings practically obsolete email and telephone conversations, just think: a waste of time activity probably thousands of years old is obsoleting modern day technology! Rather phenomenal stuff!
All in all, nothing says "I'm a bonehead businessman" like a meeting (almost) half a state away.
So, about 2 months ago my Logitech MX518's right mouse button died, it just stopped working one day. I'm a fairly avid FPS player and play online quite frequently, having a dead right mouse button (which is my jump button, incidentally) helps me nothing at all. What all this means is that the mouse is effectively useless to me without a working right mouse button, a mouse less than a year old, a fairly high end mouse; a bit pathetic, if you ask me.
After changing back to my MX300, as a temporary solution, I realised that going down the DPI ladder was much harder than going up it and now I've decided to give the Razer Deathadder a go. One of the hardest things about the Deathadder is actually procuring the damn thing, I've been waiting about 4 weeks now and nobody appears to have stock of the mouse. DEAR SUPPLIERS, I AM NOT A BUSINESSMAN BUT ACCORDING TO MY RESEARCH I THINK YOU WANT TO GET SOME STOCK TO SELL SO THAT YOU CAN FEED YOUR FAMILIES. LOVE JONATHAN.
