The blog of galaxyAbstractor
rant
The new TweetDeck – is it a joke?
01 month ago
I’ve always used TweetDeck, and I always loved it. I liked its features – like support for longer tweets through deck.ly, translations, tweet shrinker etc. Then Twitter bought TweetDeck (so it seems). I have never in my life seen so many good features been removed. There is no longer support for the system tray, you have to keep it in your taskbar (which irritates me, it just makes me lose focus and clutters things up, why should a background app be in the taskbar anyway?). Then the option for choosing where the update popup should appear has been removed. Now it just opens in the middle of my second screen (which I don’t pay much attention to when I’m not chatting, that’s where I got my chat stuff like IRC, Skype etc). On another note on the popup, it suspiciously looks like some sort of IE frame or something, right-clicking it gives options to go back/forward and reload, and doing so completely breaks it.
Deck.ly support was removed, tweet shrinker was removed, translate was removed. A lot of other functions I’ve seen but never used are just not there anymore. I do understand that it seems like they started over from scratch, but at least add all the previous functionality before releasing a new version? At least release the new application as a alpha/beta until it got the same functionality as before, if it’s ever planned to be re-added.
Non-centered websites?
02 months ago
What’s the deal with these? I don’t know, maybe I’m the only one, but I have a hard time focusing on non-centered content. Like, a really hard time.
I guess it might work better on a 4:3 (example 1280×1024 resolution) screen where it isn’t very obvious and a big issue, and maybe the designers worked on a 4:3 screen when making the page. But, on a 24″ 16:9 (that’s 1920×1080 in resolution) widescreen (like I am using) it just looks horrible and it’s quite hard to concentrate on the text.
The last straw for me being annoyed with this was when the local newspaper, Skövde Nyheter, released their web edition recently. Here is a pic:
Skövde Nyheter
No centering at all. And look at that whitespace…
Update: I just discovered that my adblocker is messing up its centering. The page is actually centered, but I wonder how an adblocker can mess with the CSS like that to undo the centering…
Next up is Lerums Tidning, the local newspaper of my hometown:
Lerums Tidning
Also here you can see the page is waay to the left. And just look at that large chunk of whitespace left by it (one could assume that it’s a space for ads that is hidden because of previously mentioned adblocker, but I tested without adblocker too, it’s empty. The white sidebar is for ads though). The content isn’t all the way to the left though because of the sidebar menu, but still. The publishers other sites for other local newspapers they are in charge of are identical with the same issue.
You maybe have drawn the conclusion that these are smaller, local sites they didn’t spend very much money on the designing-part. I surely thought that was the case then BAM I noticed this:
SVT
This is the site of the Swedish national TV channel, SVT. You may think they can afford to get it centered, when you think about how they are forcing us to pay them because we own a TV. That page takes up roughly 50% of my monitor, 50% is whitespace.
In all of these designs, I’m more aware of the line happening at the middle of the page than aware of the content.
Am I alone being annoyed with this?
Why Ubuntu is not for desktop use
21 year ago
I have recently switched to Ubuntu because some of my RAM sticks are defect (6000+ errors in memtest) and Windows doesn’t like that. Although Ubuntu looks nice at the first glance, it isn’t as user-friendly as they say. There is lots of bugs and annoying parts. Software that exist for both Windows and Ubuntu doesn’t behave in the same way. Here are some of my issues and opinions:
Authentications
Why? I can understand it’s needed for security because some users are retarded to run every little program they get their hands on. But! Why do I have to login twice? Once to login, and once to unlock the key-ring? Why do I have to authenticate twice just to change network proxy settings? Why do I have to authenticate to connect to a network? Why do I have to authenticate to use Empathy? Even if I enable auto-login, I still have to authenticate to the key-ring. So I can chose either login twice or once, meh.
Windows doesn’t have this password issue, because, well, it doesn’t use passwords in other ways than login. I never had any security problems in Windows ever, because I know not to run every single .exe I find. Linux assumes the user is retarded to do this. (Well I’ve been told that the authentications exist so programs can’t rm -rf / your hdd etc).
Clipboard
Why is the clipboard so annoying? Why do the clipboard erase if I close the application I copied the text from? Do I have to have every application constantly running to ensure I don’t lose any data? I am using the clipboard in Windows very often and I close Firefox when I don’t need it, because it annoys me to have apps running when I don’t need them. I often have text in my clipboard that I might want to use later. Sometimes I close Firefox in reflex and then that URL I just copied is lost. Clipboard managers like parcellite doesn’t do their job very good. The history is there, except that the clipboard is still erased when I close the origin application. How much RAM can some text really use? Say I copy a 10KB text (which would be how many characters? 10 240?) I can’t see it taking up too much RAM when I have 4GB? Most users have at least 1GB haven’t they? Right now only 600MB RAM is used.
Chat
Why doesn’t Empathy login to chat services automatically on system start? Why do I have to authenticate for it to login to chat services? I am one of those that forget to login to msn etc if the computer does it for me.
Startup applications
“Automatically remember running applications when logging out”. Then why not start them next time you login? What’s the point of remembering them if they do not start at next login…
Firefox
Why doesn’t Firefox behave like Firefox on windows? You have to click 3 times in the navigation bar instead of one in Windows. Not everyone know how to use about:config and what to change. Not so user friendly there.
Why doesn’t backspace go back a page like it does in Windows? Again not everyone know how to use about:config.
Why doesn’t auto-complete URL work? Or, why doesn’t it exist? The key to add to about:config in windows doesn’t work in Ubuntu.
Random bugs
Why does the notification area move to a random position with every start? Why does the panel that says my account name (the one with a speech bubble) replace the shutdown button from time to time? Why does Ubuntu complain that the hdd is corrupt, when I can ignore it by pressing i? I have run tests and it shows the hdd is healthy.
Until these things are fixed, I am gonna say Ubuntu has a long way to go to be as user-friendly as Windows is.
SMS verifications
02 years ago
I’ve seen lately that several online services requires you to give them your cell phone #, like Google does now.
Thing is, what if you don’t got any cell? Or don’t wanna give your cell phone # to websites? I rather not give my cell phone # to anyone except my friends… And if you have no cell (I know people without any), good luck getting a gmail account…
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