Simon's Dictionary: Integer Handicap

Integer Handicap
[compound noun]
The period of reduced efficiency while you adjust to the fact that the software vendor has relocated vital application functionality to strange and different parts of the user interface in the next version, seemingly for the hell of it.

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In the land of grey and pink

I’m pretty happy with my current-model MacBook Pro 15”. I got the Santa Rosa based 2.2 GHz model via a very good education price deal (I work in a university), and it’s a great all round machine. Because I take lots of photographs , I have calibrated the MacBook Pro’s display as well as my 23” Cinema Display so that I get true colors when preparing photos for web or print. I used the Spyder2 Express from datacolor, which is a great little gadget. The idea is very simple: you use the supplied colorimeter to look at your monitor while an application displays swatches of known colors. The colorimeter reports the actual color appearing on the monitor, and the controlling application creates a table that records the difference between the RGB values in the swatches and the ones recorded by the colorimeter. This is known as a device color profile and the Mac can use its generic factory-shipped ones, or the more accurate ones you create for your own displays with...

Alien User Interface Hell

I tend to like a movie to be playing while I'm working, preferably one I know well so I can ignore it. Today Alien was up on Netflix Instant. While going to make more tea I noticed the early scene where the Nostromo 's captain goes into the command area to commune with Mother. What the hell were the designers thinking when concocting the fake system user interface that is depicted in that scene? There's a million tiny status lights , all white, set into a white background. None of them has a readable label. The whole surface of the pod is encrusted with incomprehensible but significant miniature beacons. It's been frequently pointed out that some errors on our limited space missions so far have been tied back to ambiguous or confusing information displays in spacecraft cockpits. What evolutions did Ridley Scott expect to have happened in a few decades that would allow a standard human pilot to instantly discriminate one white light from ten thousand others and act on ...

Folk Ergonomics: or, it all Fitts

When I was a poor civil servant ( plus ça change ) and part-time graduate student I longed to own a Mac. I’d read everything available about them, and nothing I read did anything to dissuade me. What I wanted, as well as the crisp, typographic display and the integration between the applications, was the windowing system. I already knew, somehow, that a Proper Computer™ would be able to show more than one program on the screen at once and let you move between them. Lacking the funds to buy the current model Apple was offering, a Mac SE, I made do with an Atari ST 520 STFM. This was a strange machine with a dual personality: a games machine with aspirations to being a workstation, and which used the non-broken version of Digital Research’s GEM windowing environment. This system had been shamelessly copied from the Mac interface, so much so that Apple sued Digital Research and got an injunction that prevented later versions of GEM (used on DOS machines, notably those from Amstrad...

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