Author Topic: Latest Davis E-news newsletter and caravan weather stations!  (Read 6239 times)

elagache

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THANKS! (Re: Caravan weather stations!)
« Reply #15 on: August 03, 2017, 11:03:24 PM »
Dear X-Air and WeatherCat World Wide Web tipsters,

Just click on the thumbnail. A large version will open in a overlaying window. Click and hold anywhere on that image and drag it to your desktop (or any other directory you want). I'll be deleting this image in a few hours...

Hey thanks!  :)  The contextual menus are disabled on Firefox (I didn't try Safari,) and I assumed that companies like eBay had added something into HTML to prevent people from grabbing images.  I never thought to try drag and drop.  Works like a charm!

Sometimes you've just got to try stuff!

Cheers, Edouard  [cheers1]

xairbusdriver

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Re: Latest Davis E-news newsletter and caravan weather stations!
« Reply #16 on: August 04, 2017, 01:46:09 AM »
You must be a new Mac convert. First thing you have to do is forget that every thing is supposed to. E complicated and non-intuitive. [lol2]
THERE ARE TWO TYPES OF COUNTRIES
Those that use metric = #1 Measurement system
And the United States = The Banana system


elagache

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Not new . . . . too old! (Re: Latest Davis E-news newsletter)
« Reply #17 on: August 04, 2017, 10:03:21 PM »
Dear X-Air and WeatherCat users from the golden age of the Mac,

You must be a new Mac convert. First thing you have to do is forget that every thing is supposed to. E complicated and non-intuitive. [lol2]

*Sniff*, Quite the opposite.  :(  I still remember when things like drag and drop could be depended upon to work all the time.  These days, developers are so sloppy with their user-interfaces that you can't rely upon it all the time.   The Mac just isn't what it once was . . . . . . :(

Oh well, . . . . Edouard

xairbusdriver

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Re: Latest Davis E-news newsletter and caravan weather stations!
« Reply #18 on: August 04, 2017, 10:56:42 PM »
Quote
You must be a new Mac convert.
Quote
*Sniff*, Quite the opposite.
I think you do know I was pulling your chain... [lol]

Not to point one finger while having several others point at me... but, just yesterday, I noticed a couple of slides my wife was going to use today had dark blue text on a black background. I suggested that there was so little contrast with those two colors that not many in the audience would be able to read the text. I, of course, agreed to tackle this complex technical challenge for her.

That's when I saw that the slides were in Powerpoint, the coulda been Keynote app from the company famous for making the simplest things complicated.
Quote
"You use a browser to find files on your computer?"
"No, 'Explorer' was how we find files before we even had the inteweb, the names are just a coincident we didn't see a need to clarify.
The user will figure it out... eventually. Besides, it adds a sense of discovery to boring tasks like finding where something is... eventually.
We use the same logic to limit name suffixes to 3 letters, that's more than we'll ever need."
Still, how hard can it be to change a font's color?!

Unsurprisingly, the first thing I noticed was that the 'text-entry' cursor looked 'funny'. In fact, it was two 'text-entry' cursors slightly offset vertically and horizontally. Strange, but it seemed to be able to select the barely legible text, although not totally. While the left-hand edge of the high lighted area covered the first character, the right-hand edge only covered about half of the last character. Trying again, made no difference. Selecting from right to left didn't change the display, either.

Even with these two different UI problems, I continued to think that the task would be simple. I think this is the definition of what is called "tunnel vision"? Anyway, with the vast majority of the text selected, I felt sure the little button with a colored "A" on it would be all it would take to change the color, so I clicked the button and selected a nice, light shade of blue-gray.

"Thanks!", she said? Not on your life! Apparently, 1 plus 1 don't always equal 2 in Redmond. The text changed in absolutely no way; it was still in the glorious dark-navy-blue-nearly-impossible-to-read color! [banghead] Several more attempts, even trying different buttons and twisting my tongue till it hurt, resulted in nothing more than sharply increasing my blood pressure. [blush]

Fortunately, we were on a Mac and Keynote easily opens most PPT files. In less time than it takes Powerpoint to open, I had control-clicked the Powerpoint file telling the OS to open it in Keynote. I then selected the offending text, from the left to right-hand ends, with a single text-entry cursor. I then clicked the color I wanted in the multi-mode color picker and saved the file as a ".ppt". Reopened Powerpoint which happily, if somewhat confusedly, displayed the slides with much more legible colors. I'm sure you've guessed that the MS software had to be used because the computer to be used does not run the macOS without sacrifices/contributions to Mr. Gates' Foundation.

The Mac and the OS (or even Apple) are not nearly perfect, no question. But I still don't understand the MS "philosophy" of doing different things than what the user expects. Do they really think users like 'surprises' when working on their computers?! Oh well, I'm just glad I don't have to remember 'tricks' when using Windows. I understand they still have those delightfully memorable "function" keys on their keyboards where the same key does something different depending on what app happens to be in use... I guess people like to play guessing games while switching between Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Exploder, etc., not me, thank you very much! [goofy]
THERE ARE TWO TYPES OF COUNTRIES
Those that use metric = #1 Measurement system
And the United States = The Banana system


elagache

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Dear X-Air and WeatherCat users of the venerable "desktop" user-interface,

Quote
You must be a new Mac convert.
Quote
*Sniff*, Quite the opposite.
I think you do know I was pulling your chain... [lol]

Yes indeed you did!  However, probably not in exactly the way you intended!

But I still don't understand the MS "philosophy" of doing different things than what the user expects.

Unfortunately that is hitting the nail on the head when it comes to user-interface design.  Just what exactly is a user supposed to expect since they aren't literally interacting with the computer via commands like UNIX or MS-DOS?

What made Mac OS so unique that Microsoft had to copy it was the desktop user interface.   Behind this is a insight that certainly doesn't seem well understood by either geeks or the general public.  Since you can't understand out a computer really works, the computer must provide for you a virtual reality that you already understand: like a desktop.  The folks at Xerox PARC understood that the general public would need some sort of paradigm that they did understand so that they could use a computer without a lot of training.  Steve Jobs helped himself to the desktop paradigm and as they say "the rest is history."

Sadly it is much more ancient history than it should be.  So that is the analogy with daily life that allows you to figure out how to use an iPhone?  As far as I know, there isn't anything of the sort.  It is a Graphical User Interface, but without any real world analogues that would help new users figure out how to use iOS. 

Apple is better at user interface design than most companies, but they have failed to understand why Mac was such a success - so much so that Microsoft had to steal that user-interface.  As much as we would hope Apple is otherwise, it is now just another warehouse of geeks and they do not have the sort of awareness of everyday people that was the inspiration for the Mac.  We are all worse off because the sort of academic attention to detail that was present at Xerox PARC didn't get copied into Apple and other high-tech giants.

Cheers, Edouard