Re: The Dock through the years

Woody <usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Woody <usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Woody <usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Some things everyone wants to do. Although not the same things.

Most people have the ability to do something. Most days, I can't even
leave the house.

Which is a shame if you want to leave the house.

<shrug> I have no ambition any more. All I want is an end to the pain
and the misery and the pointlessness of living.

Which is also a shame.

<shrug> Life's a shame, really. Nothing to be done but keep breathing
until I stop. Nothing to be done about it: I've been discarded.

[snip]

Hmm. I find that icons don't stand out these days. Icon+text is what I
like.

Some icons stand out well, although they tend to be the same style as
the old icons. The macsoup one for instance stands out, as does the
iChat icon, but the spamsieve icon doesn't, which is as well as you
never click it anyway (don't know why it bothers).

I've got MacSoup, Mailsmith, and Spamsieve all next to each other on my
dock. It's hard to distinguish any of them because the dock's scaling
and whatnot means that all three have merged into a single long splodge
- no gaps that I can see.

Spamsieve is a particularly crap icon. Although to be fair, almost all
the icons I have ever done have been crap (in this case, almost all
means 'all except one').

Crap or not, the icons have no business being pushed so close together
by the dock that there's no gap between them - and they are so pushed
together.

It might not look quite so bad if it weren't
for the translucency of the dock letting what's underneath show through
- which isn't just desktop pattern, of course, because I have the dock
out of the way so I can *USE* that space.

I have a tendancy to try not to leave stuff on the desktop. Successful
on my machine, but tricky on the upstairs machine as my wife has a
'desktop filing system'.

I have a deranged setup caused by my inability at most times to deal
with anything at all.

Looking at my dock now, the only icon that stands out is Firefox. All
the rest of them are hard to make out - all of 'em. No exceptions.

Blurring my eyes, macsoup stands out (its between the black of terminal
and the white of preferences), Firefox, Cyberduck, and that is about it.

I can see all application icons perfectly clearly on the non-translucent
background of the DragThing process dock, mind - it's just Apple's dock
with its bad scaling and translucency that makes it hard to pick 'em
out.

Okay, even with DragThing, some icons have to be *looked* at to resolve
properly. SpamSieve does at least have a characteristic shape; far too
many icons are small circularish and often blue things - how the hell is
one supposed to spot the difference between them at a glance when
they're small?

I can't see any straightforward way of learning to distinguish readily
between (say) BBEdit's icon and Mailsmith's to take one specific problem
example. And far too many OS X icons are just vague circular things
that don't convey any meaning at all unless you blow them up to a huge
size and you can see what the designer was up to. But such icons are
useless for anything but `being pretty'.

I don't knwow mailsmith, but there are many icons that just blend.

Mailsmith's icon looks very much like BBEdit's icon, and they're the
same colour scheme. Hard to distinguish unless you take the trouble to
look closely, and I don't want to have to spend that much time just to
idenfity an icon - shouldn't take more than a glance, but it does these
days.

Mail I always recognise as it is always the second icon down (ie, the
top of the ones you can change).

I use a few positional tricks like that; thing is, shouldn't have to.

I just got the snot kicked out of me.

Me too. My mother instructed me that I must never, ever hit anyone,
ever. So since I was forbidden to defend myself, I got bullied horribly
all the way through school. Okay, one day when I was ~15 I did turn
around and the resulting manic activity on my part meant I was left
alone - very warily, since I was obvious a total nutjob who'd take the
bullying right up until the point where he'd explode without any warning
and then you'd be for it - until I left school, whereupon the threat
vanished.

Well, I had just got hold of someone a *LOT* bigger than me (he was
doing Bad Things to me and I wanted him to stop) and somehow managed to
get his head under my arm so I could repeatedly smash his head into a
wall while punching him in the face. He deserved worse, but that's all
he got. I'd only ever been hit up until then, never previously been
able to defend myself.

I just got lucky. I was walking down the stairs, when one of the bullies
went to kick me. As an instinct I grabbed his foot and he went falling
down the stairs (in front of all his mates). You know those really hard
school stairs.
It ended after that.

Ah yes - it would do.

I always hated those people who said that school was the best time of
your life - they were always wrong.

Ditto.

Arthur C. Clarke makes references in his writing to the lucky few who
survive their schooling.

Rowland.

--
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