About → User Interface

Here’s a great example of over-generalizing an interface and the weirdness that results.  The Add-on Updates screen in Firefox:

See that bar that says “There are new updates available for your add-ons”?  Yeah, I knew that already because an entire window popped up just to tell me that.  Thanks.

Clicking the X doesn’t really do anything either, it just hides that oh-so-useful message.

How often do people ever skip updates or uncheck a specific one to not install?  It seems like it would be more useful to have a global “don’t update this extension ever” dialog and just auto-update all of them without asking.  It’s not like a user can make an informed decision on what to do here anyways.

So it’s video card upgrade time for me, all the newest games starting to really chug along on my computer, struggling to maintain a playable frame rate (but really giving each frame a really good hustle). So what does one do when they need a new video card? Go buy a new one of course!

Well that’s easy enough, right? WRONG! FUCK YOU! Why don’t you go fuck yourself? And eat a dick too while you’re at it. No, make that a whole bowl of dicks. This is the feeling that everyone, including you, will inevitably get when looking to buy a new video card.

I fought this battle a couple of years ago. I was tasked with trying to find a good bang-for-my-buck deal across awesomely named products such as: Radeon x800 XT, Radeon x800 XT Platinum Edition, Radeon x850 XT, GeForce 7800 GT, GeForce 6800 Ultra, Radeon x1800 GTO, GeForce 6800 GS, Radeon x800 XL, Radeon x800 GTO2, GeForce 7800 GTX. Huh?

Also, that’s JUST CHIPSETS. That doesn’t even skim the surface of comparing pixel pipelines, texture units, memory, how 3rd party manufacturers implement/tweak the core architectures, major chipset revisions, etc. Yes it’s important information, but these are seriously the best naming schemes they could come up with?

I will now point you to a chart I found on Tom’s Hardware. It’s from their article “The Best Gaming Graphics cards for the Money: December 2007“. This article perfect for complainers like me who are in the market for a new video card. It basically summarizes everything I would of had to spend at least half a week easy researching. Thankfully they are paid to do that for us so we don’t have to, yay them. Anyways, the whole point here is the table I found on page 6 - it’s a list I’ve been wanting to see for years. It has probably been around for a while but I just discovered it so it is amazing and exciting to me.

So I present to you what I like to call, ‘buyer confusion’:

(The rows represent approximate performance levels. Chipset generations shift about every 2 rows.)

Here’s a great example of how even more confusing this can get: Around the time Doom 3 (a huge release) came out for PC, NVidia had launched their GeForce 4 line of cards, one of these being the GeForce 4 MX. This was a low-priced budget card designed for people that would maybe play a game or two occasionally, but that’s it. Doom 3 was one of the first games to use all the fancy-pants programmable pixel / vertex shaders in newer video cards. Older cards could produce similar looking effects but did so in ways that were extremely rigid and limited. Wanting to be able to play Doom 3, people would go to stores and see rows of boxes, GeForce 3s on the bottom and 4s on the top. Well hey, 4 is higher than 3 so those must be better right? Yes…unless they bought the 4 MX. The GeForce 4 MX was basically a GeForce 2 Ti (yeah Ti) with a GeForce 4 Ti-series memory controller. No programmable shaders AKA it was missing features the GeForce THREE had. So that pissed a lot of people off when they realized they literally couldn’t play the game when they got home, it wouldn’t let them, the card didn’t have the hardware necessary to run it.

I haven’t heard of this happening since then, but the naming is still out of control. None of this is a big deal really but I just find it sort of silly stupid that we can’t have reasonably named products.

I just chanced across an old announcement Photobucket made:

“Photobucket will undoubtedly be a rich source of photos for people to share on Digg’s dedicated images section, which goes live today,” said Jay Adelson, CEO of Digg. “Photobucket’s integration with Digg is a great example of the kinds of applications that can be created using the Digg API, and that leverages the Digg community as a collaborative filter for surfacing the most interesting content. Twenty-five million people a month visit Digg to discover and share the best content from anywhere on the Web.”

It took them all of those words just to say:

“We [Photobucket] have partnered with Digg. This should make it easier to find cool images.”

I guess it just doesn’t have the same ring without “rich”, “leverages”, “collaborative filter”, “surfacing”, and “content”.