Gallery 2.0 came out. Like I wrote about before, this is a really great upgrade. It’s matured in many ways: SQL for the database backend, significant UI improvements (especially for the installer), and a ton of modules (plugins) for extra functionality. Try out my demo or go check it out yourself. Gallery 1 upgrades are supported too!
Kudos to the Gallery 2 team on a great product.
I’ve been back at school for a while now and it’s been the best year yet.
I’m all moved into the refurnished apartment at Perkins Green. They gave us new carpets, a new shower curtain, an airtight front door, a new electric oven, and probably more. Bryan and I have a very cool setup in the room; we both have corner desks and I (finally) got an office chair that actually fits. The kind with a headrest for those of the 6’5″ variety.
Taber got a projector for the living room, I’m setting up a MythTV box for free TiVo, and the server this blog is hosted on [the infamous onpaws.com] moved over successfully too. So everything is golden with the living arrangements this year.
Of course to live in an apartment at RIT you come to depend on transportation. So the week the gas prices shot through the stratosphere was the very same one I bought one of those fancy pants car machines, a silver Camry in (hooray) immaculate condition. Why does nary a scratch deface the gleaming body? Because an older couple used it to get to church and back until their kids made them stop driving. Mileage is only 40,000 for a 60,000-average year. *cha-ching!*
So back to self-effacing mode…
Courses are pretty serious this year, and much more challenging than ever before. The list includes Interface Design (yay), Website Design and Implementation (hopefully we’ll do things I don’t know), Network Admin (holy crap this is time-consuming), and Microeconomics (interesting).
Changed my schedule to the new one RIT is pushing, got a few more free electives. Trying to do study abroad in Marburg this summer…
And, that, as they say, is that. That came out damn long, ha to those still reading!
All users are subjected to the interface designer’s choices in a very real way. If there is something that flies in the face of convention, users tend to live with it, blame themselves, or if you use a Mac, subject your blog audience to nitpicking rants.
I love experimenting with new software and seeing how developers/designers choose to implement the user side of a given feature. Apple’s well designed button layout in Safari, with the integrated progress bar-on-address-bar is pretty slick:
Furthermore, they combined the stop/reload buttons due to their boolean, opposing nature.
This particular design, incidentally, was shamelessly ripped off by Firefox, although the combined Stop/Reload button is available as a 3rd party extension.
Seeing the UI travesty that is the IE7 beta, however, yet again implies that Microsoft employees don’t actually use the software they write. Needless paradigm changes and missing features adorn their new browser. Of course, this is a beta, but for something Microsoft knew would be scrutinized with a fine toothed comb, they sure like subjecting testers to very poor usablility.
EDIT: I forgot to discuss the needless paradigm changes: if you click the rightmost tabling, it will create a new tab. Whoever thought that was a good idea…sigh. Adobe does something cool: if you double click the background of their MDI interface it brings up an open dialog. Why not make [double]clicking on whitespace create a new tab ala Firefox?