Neven Mrgan’s Tumbl
Missing vowels since before it was cool.

(Hi, Tumblr Dashboard user!)

I love the Tumblr Dashboard, I hate the Tumblr Dashboard.

I love that it solves, in some way, the problem of RSS (said problem being, very few non-techies care or even know about RSS.) Anyone can easily set up their own stream of “what’s new” and read their friends’ streams, all with simple, mercifully restricted social features. It just nicely fills the gap between a Twitter account and a full-on website.

But I don’t like that the Dashboard strips away all the custom formatting and code in my posts. I know this helps keep things simple, but… I want my cake on the plate and in my tummy.

See, every now and then I’ll want to do a slightly more art-directed post, where the form matters, not just the content. Or perhaps I want to combine video with photos with audio files in a single post. This doesn’t fit any of Tumblr’s post categories, so it looks very broken when viewed in the Dashboard.

My solution has been to insert a hidden, Dashboard-only paragraph at the top of such posts, saying something like:

This post uses formatting and features not visible in the Tumblr Dashboard. If anything below doesn’t make sense or looks plain ugly, consider viewing the post on my website.

Hidden how? Well, I edit the HTML code of the post and give this paragraph the CSS class dashboardonly. This class is defined in my Tumblr theme’s custom CSS as:

.dashboardonly { display: none; }

Since the Dashboard knows not of my custom CSS, the paragraph will be visible in it, but not on my website.

By the way, if you’re wondering how to get from the Dashboard to the post’s original website - and I recommend doing this, since a lot of people make their Tumblr websites real pretty! - mouse over to the top-right corner of the post, right above the little heart icon. See that page curl? Click it!

I’m not sure what sparked my friendjimray’s rant this morning:

It’s not just that the Ugg boots you overpaid for three years ago continue to look hideous. The reason any man of character instantly finds you unattractive when he sees you wearing those stupid, stupid things is that you’re saying to the world “I bought into a fashion promulgated by the most shallow our generation had to offer.”

No one would mistake me for a fashionable man, but I will argue that I am not without character (Jim is fashion embodied.)

But here: I like Uggs. I think they’re cute. They’re from the snow-bunny universe and I can dig that. Big, goofy rain boots also speak to me; they’re jovial.

Full disclosure: I am currently wearing jeans, a white dress shirt, a blue&red-stripe tie, a gray-stripe cardigan, and running Reeboks.

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.