Captioning Sucks [1]
Captioning Sucks is a new pseudopod out of of Joe Clark’s Open and Closed project. See also: Screenfont.CA. Peruse urgently.
{ Tag archives }
visual
Dogmatic slumbers [1]
What I noticed from Adam Gopnik’s The Real Work in The New Yorker for March 17, 2008:
Magic is possible because magicians are smart. And what they’re smart about is mainly how dumb we are, how limited in vision, how narrow in imagination, how resourceless in conjecture, how routinized in our theories of the world, how deadened to possibility. The magician awakens us from the dogmatic slumbers of our daily life, our interactions with cards and hoops and things. He opens a door by pointing to a window.
2008-03-15
Godzilla according to Youtube [1]
After tonight’s repeat screening of Godzilla: Final Wars, Liana sent me:
2007-09-22
cowsay — cowmonologue [1]
_________________________________________
/ On a clear disk, you can seek forever. \
| Man, I could use another cup of coffee, |
\ black as midnight on a moonless night. /
-----------------------------------------
\ ^__^
\ (oo)\_______
(__)\ )\/\
||----w |
|| ||
_________________________________________
/ Also: Ypsilanti links in sidebar, whose \
\ vital microcorrespondence is missing? /
-----------------------------------------
\ ^__^
\ (oo)\_______
(__)\ )\/\
||----w |
|| ||
__________________________
< Fall Out -- goodnight... >
--------------------------
\ ^__^
\ (--)\_______
(__)\ )\/\
||----w |
|| ||
2007-08-19
Shadows (and tall trees) [2]
Shadow Art Fair — Saturday 2007-07-14 — Corner Brewery — hasten — do not hesitate — go — go
2007-07-12
Single window mode (purple title bar button) in OS X Previews
From the party-like-it's-2000 department:
A couple of the Mac OS X developer previews had a weird purple button at the top right corner of window title bars, where the magical lozenge can be found more recently. This button appeared in a few developer previews, but was removed before the first really crappy public release.
This button was actually a toggle between normal layered windowing and a nasty “single window mode” which allowed only one window to show at a time. Single window mode simply minimized the existing (single) window whenever an action opened up a new window.
For more on this behavior and screen captures of what the button looked like in disabled and enabled states, see John Siracusa’s review of OS X developer preview 3 (start reading around ¶5).
The magical lozenge which occupies the same spot in more recent Mac OSes has two purposes. First, you click it to show or hide the toolbar. The second purpose — and the reason it’s a magical lozenge — you ⌘-click it to cycle between the various icon/text and toolbar size configurations. Like all forms of magic, this one has its downside as well, in that the odd ugly duck application may manage to do something just totally insane when you click the magical lozenge, at least until they fix the thing.
