ThoughtsOnThinking

Upgrades and Downgrades - an Update

Just as a follow-up to my earlier lament re: Windows Vista (side note: What a book cover!) and upgrading to Delphi 2007: I ended up acting on both. 

Vista / XP / Toshiba: Called Toshiba to see if they would downgrade my Satellite notebook to Windows XP, and though the tech I talked to very much understood and could empathize with my situation, I was informed Toshiba had no plans to offer XP on that machine.  I thought about downgrading manually, but I knew drivers would be a nightmare.  The showstoppers for me with Vista were network incompatibilities w/VMware (the wi-fi adapter wouldn't show up as a virtualize network adapter, which could be a hardware issue, regardless of OS), and various specific-software incompatibilities that were just getting too annoying (namely, some graphic-intensive stuff, and a few older apps that I use regularly).  I ended up bying a Dell Inspiron, which offered XP as a free downgrade, and which had more RAM to boot (but less hard drive space).  I'm running happy as a clam now. 

Not, though, that I basically agree with Joe Stanton's point: "From my POV, this all sounds just like the when XP SP0 was released, everyone hated it and stuck with Windows 2000 until SP1 and SP2 came out. Now XP is the old reliable mule?" 

Truth is, I found XP pretty darned annoying when it came out too, for many of same reasons.  In general, I find Microsoft's propensity for wheel-reinvention and eye candy  frustrating... but maybe that's just me.  Given the choice, give me improved functionality over useless glam any day of the week.  (Not to say that beautiy is not important -- in fact, I think it's one of the key indicators of elegance.  It's just that I prefer it built-in, not bolted on).

OK.... man I've got opinions about UI stuff.... sheesh.... "shut up already, Cass".... <g>

Delphi 2007 / CodeGear RAD Studio:  CodeGear had a special  running until December 31 that enticed me to go ahead and take the plunge.  Since I run my development environment on virtual machines, I've been able to run parallel with my Delphi 6 setup while getting D2007 up to speed.  More on all that later, but suffice it to say I compiled my first real project two nights ago, and overall my impression of Delphi 2007 is good.

Lastly, Rob touches on some of the why-use-third-party components issues.  Short answer: If I have the choice between writing-from-scratch, or instead dishing out a few hundred dollars for say, 250,000 lines of world-class, fully-tested code -- with source -- I'll take option B every time.  ; )   That said, it's still harder to upgrade from one version of Delphi to another than it ought to be.  Like I said, more on that later...

Geo-tagging, Photography, and Virtual Travel

I finally got around to posting another web album tonight.  Prior to that though, I was enjoying some "virtual travel" in Google Earth, freshly inspired by a conversation today at the office during lunch.

I've long believed that ubiquitous wireless Internet connectivity and GPS data receiving are both "givens" as to what the future will bring, technology-wise.  They are both already here, in terms of the technology itself, and have been for quite a while, but I think we're just now on the cusp of the "ubiquitous" part, which is where the sea-changes happen. 

It's just a matter of time, I think, before we see GPS location-stamping built into digital cameras fairly pervasively.  I'm not the first to post about this, obviously, but it's interesting seeing the convergence of technologies surrounding mapping-meets-photography.  Panaramio is built into Google Earth now, which lets you cruise around and find pictures like this, (which looks remarkably similar to this, don't you think? <g>).   From the comments on the O'Reilly Radar article above, I also found yourmap.com (boy, they need a new website design, IMO), GeoSpatial Experts (ditto...), and GPS PhotoLinker looks promising at first glance too.  There's also Mapping Flickr, which I haven't explored much yet, and, not related to photo-mapping at all, TerraServer-USA, which has a nice set of topographic overlays built in -- another way of mapping three dimensions instead of just two.

I've also been checking out Picasa 2.0 recently, which is a big improvement over version 1 in my opinion (I wish it handled date-based navigation in conventional calendar-based ways, rather than just its eye-candy-laden (encumbered?) "Timeline" view, but I digress....).  It has some neat initial forays into integrating w/Google Earth, to allow the user to geo-locate a photo by pointing to the location in GE, which could work well for me.  Perhaps (I'm not sure), the Picasa-hosted web albums could integrate this functionality as well?  I'm not eager to fork over yet more data and pictures into the Google Machine just yet, so for now I'll just watch.

Overall, it's an interesting space though, mapping images to geographic maps in two and three dimensions.  (Here's a bonus link on the three-dimensions front: photo tourism). 

One thought that comes to mind is this: How will things look when Google Earth and other image-mapping technologies start adding a fourth dimension: Time?  I once watched a History Channel show that walked the viewer though the Battle of Normandy by linking all these technologies together -- 3D image mapping (using the aerial shots taken that day, mapped to a 3D map, much like Google Earth does now), but also time-stamped, so they could walk through the day and show / explore what happened.  It was fascinating.  Imagine what it would be like to be able to scroll though time as well as space in Google Earth (wait - isn't that what it's called?... space-time?), seeing things such as the expansion of a city over time, or pre- and post-war (or natural-disaster) shifts, etc.   

* * *

(BTW... What's the point of this site?.... it shows up as a sponsored link when you search Google for "picasa": http://www.24-photo-software.com/, but doesn't look like it's officially related to Picasa, it doesn't appear to generate ad revenue, and it doesn't go anywhere...)

* * *

Update (04/01/2007): Just stumbled across this, looking for info re: Google Earth's KML files.... looks interesting: RoboGeo and Google Earth.

VBA is about as consistent as English...

The kind of language sloppiness that drives you (OK, me...) crazy if you're a Delphi developer mucking around in an Access app.  Agh... 

(I may have to do some Object Pascal work for fun this evening, just to cleanse my brain...)

Amazon's UI

Is it just me, or has Amazon's user interface/shopping experience/checkout process  become cluttered to the point of just being completely out of control?...

Google Code Search

Cool!  Via Delphi Developer Notes, I just found out that Google Code Search (which I'd forgotten about entirely) now supports Delphi as a language (which I don't think it did before). 

Excellent.  : )

PDF Printers / Creation Tools, and a Somewhat Related But Subdued UI Rant

I think of all of the Joel On Software posts I've read, this little snippet, along a few others from this post, is one of my favorites.  It captures, for me, the essense of why I am generally so reticent to "follow the lemmings" off the "our app has to look and act just like Microsoft Office" cliff:

When Microsoft Excel 3.0 came out in 1990, it was the first application to sport a new feature called a toolbar. It was a sensible feature, people liked it, and everybody copied it -- to the point that it's unusual to see an application without one any more.

The toolbar was so successful that the Excel team did field research using a special version of Excel which they distributed to a few people; this version kept statistics on what the most frequently used commands were and reported them back to Microsoft. For the next version, they added another row of toolbar buttons, this time containing the most frequently used commands. Great.

The trouble was, they never got around to disbanding the toolbar team, who didn't seem to know when to leave good enough alone. They wanted you to be able to customize your toolbar. They wanted you to be able to drag the toolbar anywhere on the screen. Then, they started to think about how the menu bar is really just a glorified toolbar with words instead of icons, so they let you drag the menu bar anywhere you wanted on the screen, too.  Customizability on steroids. Problem: nobody cares! I've never met anyone who wants their menu bar anywhere except at the top of the window.

It seems that no matter where you live, what is "fashionable" comes to take over what is "useful and effective" yet still beautiful.  I was struck recently, while looking at this house (which is now almost 60 years old), by how timeless original design can be.  A few weeks ago, in stark contrast, I came across this site, and was equally struck at how pathetic fashion extremes can be, twenty or thirty years after the fact.

Shag carpet.  Acoustic ceilings.  Pebble-and-epoxy flooring.  Corian.  Granite countertops.  Pretty much just pick your date, and watch their popularity expire.

That's kind of just the way fashion is.

But excellent design?  That's timeless.  The Porsche 911.  The standard paperclip (do you know how many variations there have been on that?  But the one design we all know has remained "timeless" for quite some time).  The classic architecture of, say, a 1910's bungalow.

The thing is, things that work can be beautiful, and things that are functionally beautiful, almost inherently become timeless.

So I guess that's the little nerve in me that gets struck somewhat frequently, but I was thinking about it again tonight, because i was thinking about Adobe Acrobat.

I first used Adobe Acrobat, the full version, back with version 3.0.  The PDF Writer was beautifully efficient and straightforward.  There was little to complexify about the interface.  I think I could even search and find what I needed inside the various PDF files.

Well, tonight I had a real-estate person try to send me a lease agreement over the Internet, and their little instant-contract application sent it out as a straight proprietary-format, not-readable-unless-you-install-the-viewer file.  I managed to find the viewer OK, but decided to educate the person a bit on how they might make that easier for the next person. 

So I went looking for Adobe Acrobat.  $279 on PC Connection.  Ouch.  That's a bit more than I think "creating a PDF" is probably worth to this person.  ...and to be perfectly frank, I'm not even sure how easy Acrobat makes creating a PDF anymore -- last I remember, the process was getting more complex, not less.  The simplicity of PDF Writer got lost somewhere along the way.  (BTW - anyone tried this?  Tell me what you think about it.)

So, I decided to do a quick search for alternative solutions.  Found these:

• CutePDF
• DeskPDF
• PrimoPDF
• PDF995

Haven't tried any of them, but they look fairly promising.

Has anyone else noticed how complex the once-simple-and-intuitive Acrobat Reader has become?... (...or is it just me?)   I used to be able to just pop open a PDF and read the darn thing.  Now I feel like I'm firing off a new IIS catalog index every time I load it.  Crazy.

SO, there are my software finds for the evening; let me know if you find or now of any great simple PDF creation apps out there, preferrably that work as a straight printer driver, and better yet are totally free.  If you try out one of the above and like it (or DON'T like it), let me know -- I've not actually tried any of them yet. 

But lastly, a question... or maybe two:

Check out, say, Firefox 1.5 on Windows XP: Who decided that having toolbar buttons only look like "buttons" when the mouse is over them, and why is that becoming the UI standard these days?  (Not to throw rocks at glass houses; I've got some apps with this look too). 

...and, is this shag carpet, or timeless design?

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Aesthetics and Construction

Makes me think of UI design in software:

It is time now to reevaluate the once-horrifying statement of John Ruskin that architecture is the decoration of construction, but we should append the warning of Pugin: It is all right ot decorate construction but never construct decoration.

        Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegass (via Tufte's Envisioning Information)

Complexification.net

Stunningly cool images, IMO....

update 03/24/2006:  Make sure you read the details, and play with the applets that generate the images...