Musing : Confusing : Deluding

I bought CS4 Production Premium the other day. I haven’t had much time to play with it, but I did download a few Flaming Pear plugins and make this desktop background for myself. I designed it for my laptop, so the 1440×900 is the original, and the 1600×1200 is just scaled up (non-uniformly) from that.

Download 1440×900 or 1600×1200.

Ridiculous.

Skype security flub leads to discovery of Chinese monitoring:

[...] China not only monitors and logs text chat, but also targets specific users for further monitoring.

[...] “The captured messages contain specific keywords relating to sensitive political topics such as Taiwan independence, the Falun Gong, and political opposition to the Communist Party of China,” reads the report [by ONI Asia and the Information Welfare Monitor].

[...] If you’re the type who regularly talks about unapproved topics on Skype, you may be flagged for further monitoring of everything you say.

[...] Villeneuve notes that Skype is neither transparent nor forthcoming about the exact nature of its compliance with Chinese authorities, a disturbing trend among US-based Internet companies conducting business in China.

Yikes.

This is a white Cosmos flower that I photographed shortly before I left home for Cornell. I used this image as my desktop background for a while and liked it, so I made a few standard sizes should anyone else want to do the same.

Desktop-sized images: 1600×1200, 1024×768, 1440×900.

The 1440×900 one (with MacBook Pro screens in mind) has been cropped slightly to fit the wider ratio. A similar-size image with all the original data is available as 1440×1080.

I’m glad they went back to this device aspect ratio. The 3rd gens were just plain ugly.

(I cropped the image to fit this page; the original Apple image showcases all nine available colors.)

Microsoft warns of IE8 lock-in with XP SP3

Problem 1:

Microsoft Corp. yesterday warned users of Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) that they won’t be able to uninstall either the service pack or Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) under some circumstances.

Problem 2:

Visual Studio .Net Version 7, said Microsoft, will crash on a PC that also contains IE8 Beta 2. “No workaround is currently available,” Microsoft said in the release notes.

Problem 3:

“If you install Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, Windows Live Mail will crash when you create or reply to an e-mail message,” Microsoft warned.

Those all seem pretty serious to me. And this is beta quality software?

The Apple Product Cycle

As Macworld or the Worldwide Developer’s Conference draws near, the chatter builds to a fever pitch. Rumor sites jockey for position, posting a new unverifiable, contradictory rumor every hour or so. eBay is flooded with six-month-old, slightly used gadgets as college students, underemployed web designers and independent musicians struggle to clear credit card space.

On the morning of Steve Jobs’s keynote presentation, the online Apple store grinds to a halt as Mac-heads set their browsers to refresh every 15 seconds.

(via macuyiko)

What reading Tufte won’t teach you: Interface design guidelines

Edward Tufte’s books do a beautiful job of illustrating how to present huge amounts of information clearly and simply. Well presented information is critical to good interface design, but it’s not the whole story. Guidelines on how to present complex functionality clearly and simply are harder to find.

He proceeds to list a few interface design necessities from personal experience, explain them, and give good and bad examples.

(via Red Echo)