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Missing vowels since before it was cool.

I did not mean to write an essay detailing all the ways in which slider controls in Photoshop CS4 reveal problems in the design, development, quality control, and management of the product; I really didn’t. I just pulled up the Smart Sharpen dialog one evening and, sighing at its hideousness for the n^th time, decided to put together a little joke post. That was all.

Is there an Internet rule yet stating that even the most obviously indefensible mistake will eventually be defended by someone somewhere? Awful marketing efforts get explained as genius viral campaigns, broken features become solutions.

So, several people wrote to yours truly picking on one single item from my post: the sliders’ deviation from OS X’s standard. The defense being twofold, it seems:

1. Photoshop’s sliders are different for a reason, and
2. Hey, Apple does custom controls too, so it’s alright.

To which I say:

1. No they’re not; not as a rule, anyway. There’s no reason for Memory Usage, Brightness, Pencil Width, Radius, and Scale to be different from each other. They all do the same exact thing: pick a single value from a range. (Needless clarification: yes, Scale has to be a bit smaller to fit comfortably in its window. Making well-fitting smaller versions of controls shouldn’t be rocket science.) These make up more than 50% of my examples. What’s the explanation for those?
   
   As for the remaining custom controls, they do more than pick a single value, so they should be different. But… this different? Why are the Threshold and Color Balance sliders aliased when Layer Blending isn’t? Does anyone find these well-rendered?
2. When Apple deviates, they usually innovate. When they introduce a new slider (like the one in iTunes 9) it’s an improvement. It feels at home in its window.
   
   However, Apple is sometimes wrong. Final Cut Pro - originally designed by Macromedia - is not Apple’s finest UI hour. Children learn at a young age that bad behavior isn’t excused by saying “Cathy did it too!”

(I have now written way too much about all this. Aren’t these flaws simply obvious?)

I’m not saying anyone at Adobe is evil or crazy. I thought it was, in fact, pretty clear why Photoshop’s sliders are an unappealing mess: they were designed by someone who shouldn’t have been designing, implemented by someone who should’ve been implementing better, skipped over by someone who should have been finding bugs, and approved by someone who should have had higher standards.

It’s not the end of the world that a thumb control is misplaced by one pixel. All software ships with bugs, or it doesn’t ship. But here we are, version 11 of the app, and one of the most-used standard controls in the app is broken.

And this is only sliders we’re talking about. If this dead horse needed any more beating, I’d put together a gallery of misaligned text labels, inconsistent popup buttons (often in the same window!), badly scaled controls, and nearly impenetrable UI bugs. (I mean, there’s a whole blog for these.) What’s the explanation there - is that innovation? Or is it simply the case that this doesn’t matter enough to Adobe?

I love Photoshop. It’s where I spend eight hours five times a week. I just wish that one of these days, instead of piling on more furniture, they’d clean up the place.

lonelysandwich has some examples of product placement in TV shows. Let’s not forget The Wire:

Preferences > Memory Usage

Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast

Filters

Blur (note the rendering of the thumb arrow)

Layer Blending

Layer Style

Threshold

Color Balance

Things to keep in mind:

1. These can be found in just Photoshop; I can’t imagine what I’d find elsewhere in the suite. Actually, fine, here’s the first one I found in Illustrator CS5:
   
2. The most common out of all these seems to be second one, Brightness Adjustment.
3. They’re all ugly. The only near-acceptable one is the Layer Style slider.
4. None of these looks like the standard OS X slider:

UPDATE: Some clarification here.

It’s not that cleversimon is the biggest NaNoWriMo hater, it’s that he’s the first I have an easy way to reply to:

The first fifty thousand words to fall out of your head do not constitute a novel any more than dumping the contents of every jar in your cupboard onto the kitchen floor would constitute a meal.

…but a challenge where you cook at home every day for a whole month would be a very valuable learning experience!

But if “the ONLY thing that matters… is output,” when the focus is “quantity, not quality,” you’re not writing a novel. You’re masturbating. It’s fun, it doesn’t hurt anyone, and a lot of people could stand to do more of it—but it’s not exactly something to brag about, and in the end the only thing you’ve made is a mess.

…but I don’t see any NaNoWriMo participants bragging about it. Sure, you can google around and find some, but there are blowhards and poseurs everywhere, and lumping my NaNoWriting-friends in with them bugs me.

And beware that word “only” in “only thing you’ve made is a mess.” Great things come out of creative messes.

“Write 50,000 words this month, and it’s okay if they suck” is a great idea. Calling the result a novel is asinine.

…but “novel” is a handy, catchy, comprehensible term to slap onto this. Look, no one in their right mind will print out what they have on November 30 and sell it in bookstores. It’s just that working on a “novel” focuses you on generating a lot of output which is still bounded; this aims to prevent nonsense which arises from other quantity-centric exercises, such as stream-of-consciousness writing. Those may produce interesting insights and connections, but they also result in a lot of filler garbage: “Here I am writing again blah blah this is so silly.” Aiming for a novel is something most people will never do otherwise. Let them fight this ridiculous overreach! Where’s the adventure in taking on the feasible? Where the challenge in drawing only when you feel like it? (i.e. very infrequently, if you’re a busy adult.)

There’s no need to get negative about the efforts of many smart, nice people on the very first day they roll up their sleeves. They’re taking on something demanding, new, fun, and entirely victimless. They’re the 9-year-old with a skateboard and visions of Tony Hawk, the high-school sophomore with a programming book and a sketching app all worked out in his head, the girl with a guitar from Target and tabs to ‘Sweet Jane’ she downloaded online. There’s neither victory nor samaritanism in telling them they’ll fail.