Recent Comments:
SecondView - The Nimble & Graphic RSS Reader
Second Life Insider
Aug 16th 2007 2:49PM HTML on a prim cannot come soon enough, I say.
Crescendo and Catalyst announce merger
Second Life Insider
Aug 16th 2007 2:43PM I'm pretty sure this sort of self-loving is illegal in some enlightened societies... not to mention draconian ones.
/predicts lots of furry palms all around.
//also: mass blindness
///Didn't your mom ever tell you guys it was a bad idea to do that sort of thing?
Second Life down for maintenance
Second Life Insider
Aug 15th 2007 2:28PM And I for one will be resting up here while grabbing WoW Burning Crusade.
Visual metaphors - the user interface isn't what you think it is
Second Life Insider
Aug 14th 2007 2:55PM Even the best design companies are perfectly capable of screwing up a metaphor when designing a user interface. Here's a classical example some older Mac users would be familiar with:
Apple had the oddest habit of requiring people to drag their floppy disks off their desktops and into a trashcan icon to eject them ever since the MacOS went graphical.
Can you imagine the thought process required to eject a disk that way? Lord knows WE don't eject our floppies or removable drives by throwing them into the nearby trashcan.
To its credit though, recent iterations of MacOSX have already smartened enough to quickly turn the trashbin into a normal ejection icon (the type you find on DVD/VCRs these days) when you drag a volume to be ejected... but really, it shouldn't have had to happen the way it originally did. Asking people to eject their disks the same way they deleted files off their desktop was a way to break the governing metaphor for the unexperienced.
People spend thousands of dollars a hour worldwide getting UI design down, and there's a reason this happens: all the power in the world is fscking useless if you don't know how to unleash it. This is why so many people tend to favor GUIs over the command line for day-to-day tasks on any OS that makes one available: sure a command line can do anything on less resources with the right privileges, but it has a disconnect from the act of moving stuff around a desktop.
Ginko Financial finally dead
Second Life Insider
Aug 9th 2007 8:39AM I'm open to taking over your bonds if you'd like, Eloise. :D
Practical Marketing - Planning for failure, or failing to plan?
Second Life Insider
Aug 8th 2007 2:11PM I call incompetence leading to shenanigans as a reason, Tat.
Seriously people, if you're going to engage with a medium, look at its strengths. look at its weaknesses. accentuate the right parts of it and stop wasting money and driving up the cost of owning a Private region for no real reason.
Comic - I am not making this up
Second Life Insider
Aug 5th 2007 9:51AM People who slam the sliders excessively in Appearance get what's coming to them, generally.
There's a reason why the slider doesn't go to 101.
Just Askin': Patterns of outage - What's this?
Second Life Insider
Aug 1st 2007 2:34AM I call shenanigans on this one, Tateru. Whatever it is, it sounds far from good to me to have regions taken down in any particularly obvious patterns.
\Will start freaking out totally when regions go in an uzumaki (spiral) shape. Then stick onto the wall and turn into a giant catsnail.
Just Askin': How transparent is Linden Lab when there are problems?
Second Life Insider
Jul 30th 2007 2:39AM I really don't think they're doing a good job this week of keeping the grid in one usable piece. The Ava-Star is going to have a pretty bad rating in the pages for them when the next issue pops out :(
Residents confused by Linden Lab emails
Second Life Insider
Jun 28th 2007 9:31AM People, if a email comes from your financially-important service asking you to provide new information or reenter logins, type the address manually for your service as originally provided at signup.
Honestly.
