Photoshop: sigh no I don’t want to use the Global Light
Photoshop Sliders pt.2
Saw this tweet on Neven Mrgan’s follow up on the sliders
@nevenmrgan @gruber In one screen, Final Cut Pro shows three different sliders, none OS-standard: http://bit.ly/3vQto8 Just sayin’.
If Final Cut Pro jumped off a cliff would you? This example is terrible justification for Photoshops pathetic attempts at sliders:
Firstly none of the FCP sliders are broken, none look like they were hacked together by an incompetent developer who can’t even line up their fake thumb control with their faked gutter and they all fit consistently with the rest of the UI.
Secondly FCP is a video editing program, Photoshop is a graphical editing program… I could actually let some amateurish UI flaws like this slide in FCP because the creators don’t necessarily know anything about design while the Photoshop team should at least have enough knowledge to spot these glaring mistakes.
To be fair I don’t mind the sliders being custom in some cases (AE is clearly the best implemented and programmed Adobe UI and wouldn’t benefit from being more native) , its more the fact that you shipped those shitty aliased and misaligned aqua controls.
Update: Thomas Edwards pointed out via email that only 1 of the FCP controls is actually a slider, the others are a frame selection jog wheel and a variable fast forward/rewind control both of which wouldn’t work using a standard slider control. Which makes the Adobe justification even more laughable.
The many sliders of Photoshop CS4
Preferences > Memory Usage
Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast
Filters
Blur (note the rendering of the thumb arrow)
Layer Blending
Layer Style
Threshold
Color BalanceThings to keep in mind:
- These can be found in just Photoshop; I can’t imagine what I’d find elsewhere in the suite. Actually, fine, here’s the first one I found in Illustrator CS5:
- The most common out of all these seems to be second one, Brightness Adjustment.
- They’re all ugly. The only near-acceptable one is the Layer Style slider.
- None of these looks like the standard OS X slider:
Don’t mind the special function ones like Layer Blending, however blur takes the piss I mean you can see they even faked the runner under it probably because the UI drawing code used there doesn’t support alpha transparency, fucking amature hour if you ask me.
Illustrator: Couldn’t help but LOL at this, I mean how would this actually be any use to anyone?
Adobe gets bitchy over the iPhone and Flash, bit of an insight from the reddit thread :
About six months ago, a friend who was working closely along side adobe’s flash application development team told me that they received a prototype of Flash for iPhone. The prototype allowed the iPhone to have less than half an hour of battery life using flash. They then sent the prototype to apple and suggested incorporating this prototype iPhone flash into the iPhone OS in the next update.
Apparently apple sent this letter back thanking them for being interested in developing a working version of flash for the iphone but because the prototype is so processor intensive, and awful for battery life, they would not include it with their OS because it is just not good enough. They suggested using the gpu instead of the processor to render flash. Then they suggested building a seperate app for flash and web browsing because there was no way apple could endorse flash integration on the iphone in its current state.
Adobe apparently didn’t want to release the app under their name either and it never showed up in the app store.
A long story in short: Adobe sucks at programming, then apple told them they sucked at programming. If they want to release that shit under the name adobe so be it, but it sure isn’t going to be endorsed by Apple.
That was the last they saw of that prototype.
Flash: LOOK AT THIS FUCKING FONT MENU!
- Tiny fiddly custom scroll bar, overshoot and it closes the menu
- HARD CODED WINDOWS 95 SELECTION COLOUR!
- Stolen Windows opentype/type1/true type icons with messy anti-aliasing on the opentype one
- UTTERLY FUCKING USELESS PREVIEWS, yeah can totally tell the difference between those Gothams, you can tell this shit was only approved by developers no designer looked at that before it got shipped because firstly they’re too fucking small to be of any use and secondly what sort of designer needs font previews in a fucking menu? Leave that shit where it belongs next to word art, if I want to browse fonts I’ll do it in my font manager, I’d rather have my font menu open quickly without previews.
- Love how the tick is off center too, looks like it doesn’t want anything to do with those shitty windows icons.
- Doesn’t support consecutive searching, e.g typing “Hel” will take you to fonts starting with L not Helvetica
Look Flash team, its about time you started using your own software. I understand you are all a bunch of massive nerds and would rather play in Eclipse or Flash Develop but some of us actually have to use your unwanted child and would greatly appreciate it if you started using it yourself so that it wasn’t a pile of shit. I mean half the stuff you are putting in there feels like indulgent rubbish because your bored of programming the UI, like that IK tool I mean its a nice idea but it was just too processor intensive to actually use in any project, and the deco brush nice concept but who the hell designs in Flash? no one because the IDE is such a fucking mess. All the new features just feel like little indulgent things to keep developers occupied because they haven’t a clue where to take the IDE next because none of them use it.
I mean look at that motion editor, it felt like a developer had been given a checklist of things required by the motion editor and then just added them and ticked them off without even thinking about how anyone would use the fucking thing. I have yet to hear from a designer that has even touched it because its so fucking tedious to get it to do the slightest thing correctly, especially when you can’t even use your mousewheel to scroll the thing without risking changing all your values.
Thanks for everyone sending things in, I’ll get through them after my holiday.
Trading Stuff, Flash CS5 iPhone Game example (Free iTunes link)
Don’t think I’ve ever seen a game where dragging a slider control ran at about 5 FPS.
Also looking forward to every Flash developer on the net throwing enough shit at the App Store walls hoping some will stick.
Big assed post about Fireworks
Jon Hicks on his love/hate relationship with Fireworks.
Now I didn’t use Fireworks until I started a job where we used it about 2 years ago, but now I’ve got used to it I really have no idea how people can do screen design in Photoshop all day, its clunky as fuck for web design even with its vector tools and smart objects.
Don’t get me wrong its awesome for Photo manipulation and art working, but for laying out websites with forms, buttons etc its a complete nightmare. Oh and thats even when working with tidy designers, work with someone who can’t name layers and its a fucking nightmare. Most Photoshop users never realise this though because Fireworks seems so clunky at first glance that you only ever learn how to use it if your boss basically forces you into it because he can’t use Photoshop.
Basically Fireworks could be a game changer, it just needs a sensible rewrite by a talented team, needs to stop pretending to be some developer tool for mocking up AIR integrated RIA buzzword drenched shit. I mean really Adobe couldn’t you have invested all the money you wasted on garbage like Photoshop.com, Adobe TV, Adobe Drive, and all that other nonsense and just invested some money in fixing Fireworks’ problems.
tl;dr: Fireworks is a buggy, clunky mess but its still better at doing my job than Photoshop
Merlin Mann on Adobe
Not really exactly start over. But stop acting like these iterations around shuffling product lines and bolting on new bits of functionality is getting you anyplace good. Act like you’re inventing new apps for what people need today.
Excellent article about where Adobe are going wrong, agree with it completely.
Installer: Oh I don’t know I might just continue it yeah? It’s not like I have anything better to do with my time
Thanks Frank
