The Eleventh Doctor and Amy Pond mistakenly arrive in a location other than the one they intended. By the looks of things they expected to land within cold surroundings, but instead The Doctor and his feisty companion find themselves in a very green and lush tropical environment where a seemingly hungry beast is looking to invite the duo to dinner as the main course… or not. You decide.
Lately I’ve been greatly interested in painting fan art. I believe my interest in doing such comes from the years I spent working on my now-defunct Web comic, Dark Phantasy. My time was occupied illustrating nothing but things which were in their entirety nothing but my creations and the concepts of my comrades who wrote what we all hoped futilely would be an epic graphic novel.
My string of fan art illustrations are also expressions of my interests. Together they tell a very small story of who I am. This one is an expression of a recently acquired interest — Doctor Who. It is in my opinion the best television program in existence today. I know that is not saying much considering mostly what complete garbage occupies the tube these days, but the 2005 revival of the venerable show has been for the most part extremely enjoyable. This freshly completed fifth season has been exceptionally brilliant, and that season’s new Doctor is the one I illustrate in this piece. His tendency to explicate “Blimey!” is where the title comes from.
I wasn’t a fan of the show as a child. Where I lived the show aired on LPB, and the people there didn’t even bother to show the episodes in correct order. It created confusion for its young audience, but despite this the program was always a good laugh. Even as a wee lad I found the lack of production quality hilarious at times when I actually took the time to sit down and watch it. The new series doesn’t suffer from this problem. There’s been some bad episodes, but you’ll have that in any series.
My journey of painting this scene began with a conversation between my friend Jeff King and myself. I believe I was the one who stated that I missed collaboration like we enjoyed when working on the Web comic. I thought it’d be interesting for me to paint something then have a story be written to further illustrate a story surrounding the occurrences within the painting itself. He thought it to be a brilliant idea, so we started brainstorming what we would do. We fleshed out precisely the scene above. Everything about it was set in stone before I ever started my first sketch. Unfortunately as can be seen this illustration isn’t accompanied with solely a short story but instead this essay. Jeff’s free time has increasingly shrunken in size to the point it nearly seems improbable he could provide his part in this anytime soon. I decided to go ahead and publish what’s been completed, and when he’s achieved a short story to his standards I can publicize it at that time.
The painting had no particular deadline, and few knew about it. There was no reason to rush, so I took my dear sweet time with it. I started work on it on April 18th and finished it two weeks ago — several months. I’ve put more detail and precision into it than I’d perhaps normally do as a result. I usually work with ridiculously large canvasses so I wouldn’t have to spend a lot of time on details because a simple brush stroke when reduced to display size would register as detail. It’s like looking at a classic oil painting up close. This image in particular is originally 14,400×9000 split into seven parts with each PSD on average about a gigabyte in size. My computer can take the strain, so I might as well take advantage of it.
I did quite a bit of research on this, and I hope it shows. I investigated absolutely everything — even the scarf. However, I toiled the most on the TARDIS itself, and I believe I’m pretty damn close with my rendering of it. I’m at least as close as I’ll ever be without direct access to the actual prop itself.
The monster is completely my creation, and I believe we decided to call it a ‘Trucid’. It’s sort of a cross between a carnivorous dinosaur and a parrot with two rows of teeth. I sort of chuckled when the episode Vincent and the Doctor was aired and a parrot-like monster called the Krafayis was causing trouble in late 19th century France. Thankfully the one they created was a whole lot different than what I’ve done here.
All else I can say is whatever I do next time will be much more simpler than this. Enjoy.
For the longest time I’ve provided my opinions and criticisms of Opera’s interface on the Macintosh. Lately I wrote about my disappointment in how the design started with Opera 10 wasn’t made to be even more native-looking for Opera 10.5. Opera 10.5 and 10.6 in my opinion have major problems which are more important to tackle than the interface right now such as its volatility (especially on PPC) and not being able to reliably print, but the interface’s appearance is still quite important.
On the Macintosh an application will live or die by its appearance. Aesthetics and platform integration are imperative as those two are what drives people to use the platform to begin with. Opera for the longest has been thrown aside by the masses on the Macintosh as a laughing stock, and it will continue to be such until the application is given due attention to detail — both externally and internally — by the developers. There’s a drastic difference in quality between the Windows builds and the Macintosh and Unix builds. Opera is advertised on its sheer speed today, and while it’s extremely fast it gets spanked on the Macintosh performance-wise by both Safari and Chrome. In my opinion it can’t be advertised as the fastest browser when performance isn’t somewhat consistent across platforms. Time is taken to make Opera’s visual appearance blend in with Windows Aero while on other platforms something somewhat usable is slapped together for those users to use.
I’ve attempted for quite some time to create something that might be useful to show the powers that be what Opera would look like provided it was designed with Mac OS X integration in mind. I started work on a long and exhaustive document which included everything from screenshots to diagrams detailing precise dimensions items on the screen needed to be. Unfortunately that document was started during the transition from Tiger to Leopard, and as we all know Apple made some welcome enhancements to the Macintosh UI in 10.5 which pretty much required me to restart my effort. I stopped my attempts all-together in a show of faith because of my immense respect for Jon Hicks who spearheaded the design improvements we see and enjoy today in Opera. He’s since left, and because of such I think it’s time to show what else needs to be done. When I wrote my last review it was my intent to eventually show visually what I meant by my criticisms of the interface, and I’ll start on that here.
This is a joint effort between myself and Ralf Demuth, a fellow Opera user who is equally as interested as I am in securing Opera’s rightful place as a first class citizen of the Macintosh. While I did all of the pixel pushing he provided his opinions on what he would personally like to see. What I am about to show is the result of such collaboration. Neither of us have any clue as to what direction Opera plans on going with its application. We’re just trying to show what Opera should look like now with its current set of features. The skinning system within Opera is powerful and gradually gets better with each release, but it’s not powerful enough yet to create what is necessary to make Opera Mac-like in appearance; it would be a waste of our time to attempt to skin Opera to look like these mockups. I hope to do multiple posts on the topic as there’s a lot to cover. In this one I’ll cover just the initial default interface and Speed Dial. For the sake of simplicity I’m not going to provide screenshots of Opera’s present interface. It’d be best when reading this document to compare my mockups with a local install of Mac Opera instead.
This document will be rather straightforward. An image or a series of images will be shown followed by ordered lists of points which correspond to numbers placed in the images themselves. If an unadorned image is necessary each image is also a hyperlink to a version without the numerals.
On Windows and Unix the Title Bar and Menu Bar are collapsed by default. The Menu Bar on the Macintosh is on the top of the screen disconnected from the window, so there isn’t a need to collapse it on the Mac. However, for consistency across platforms it would be advisable to collapse the Title Bar on the Mac as well. It’s also my suggestion to make this customizable where the user can choose to toggle the appearance of the Title Bar through the preferences just like is possible today with the Menu Bar even if it is only in opera:config.
The present Mac Opera Address Bar is too large. One exactly the size users are accustomed to would be much preferable. I assume the larger size of the present one is for accomodating the progress bar in the input box. I’ll address that later.
The Address Bar input needs a physical button on the side. This is standard in Mac OS X. Also when clicking in the Address Bar the text “Enter Address or Search”SHOULD NOT jump to the right side of the input box. It’s ridiculous, confusing to users, and has no precedence on Mac OS X. This goes for every input box in the application.
The Search Box doesn’t require a search icon on the right side of the input box. Search input boxes differentiate themselves by their rounded appearance. For searches without a favicon the magnifying glass icon should be used in place. Currently this search box in Opera is nearly native. It even shows a clear button on the right when text is typed within, but every other search box in the application is different from this with the dropdown arrow on the right. All of them should be consistent, and all of them should appear somewhat like what I’ve mocked up.
Presently Speed Dial items have a Windows-like appearance because of the Vista and Windows 7-like drop shadow. Everything on Mac OS X is lit from a top light, producing drop shadows which are heavier on the bottom than the top. Even icons and menu bars are lit the same way. To produce something that would fit in with Mac OS X it would be preferable to use a drop shadow which is the result of the item’s being lit like the rest of the system is. In addition, I’ve chosen a few appropriate Web sites which would be more useful to users than what is provided presently. These are identical to the default ones on Opera Mini with the exception of Bing.
Since Mac OS X Leopard it’s not appropriate to use Aqua buttons in the user interface. They’re used instead only on dialog boxes (and presently as widgets in Web pages). Using a rounded toolbar button appearance would be preferable here. However, what I’ve mocked up isn’t exactly like the standard toolbar button. Exactly how it is different will be showcased later on. The “About Speed Dial” button should be reduced to a button with just a question mark on it. It still instantly reads as a help button, but it isn’t as obtrusive as the button is presently. After you know what Speed Dial is there’s no need to be reminded there’s a button there that will tell you what you already know about the feature. The buttons are floated left to make way for the search input box instead of being distributed evenly horizontally across the document.
Presently the Speed Dial Search Box is at the top of the document. It wastes space up there when the majority of the space should be utilized for the Speed Dial items themselves. Placing it on the bottom next to the buttons would make it less obtrusive and less likely to be disabled by the user. One of the first questions I receive from new Opera users is how to remove the Speed Dial search simply because it’s nothing more than an eyesore placed at the top. In addition to all of this I’ve personally made it a history search. At the top of the window there is a default Google search input box. Having a Bing one on Speed Dial as well is stupid and not the least bit useful to users. It’s only useful to Opera as another attempt to get money from users’ searches. I chose a history search simply because I couldn’t think of any search that would be more useful to users. Instead of using a search input box to advertise Bing I chose to place it in the center Speed Dial item instead. Bing is still being given screen space.
The Status bar is being shown with rounded corners. Not all Macintosh applications use this appearance, but aesthetically Opera would benefit from doing such. The panel toggler is on the left while the Opera Turbo, Opera Link, Opera Unite, and View buttons are all aligned to the right. My reasoning for this is that if all on the left they are given precedence over the status itself — which is what needs to be the most important bit of information on the bar. The Status Bar isn’t a toolbar. It’s a Status bar.
The Opera Turbo, Opera Link, Opera Unite, and View buttons all are combined on the right side of the toolbar. Like stated earlier moving them on the right side leaves breathing room for the status itself. They’re also easier to recognize because they’re not dark icons thrown on a dark bar.
Since Opera 10.5 most dialog boxes in the application were made modal only to the document they were associated with. On Windows and initially in early builds of Opera on the Mac those dialog boxes were given a unique appearance, giving users an easy way to recognize that the dialog box’s being shown isn’t modal in the regular sense. However, the appearance of these dialog boxes were changed in the Mac builds to look exactly like modal dialogs. End users aren’t given any indication whether they’re allowed input outside of the dialog box unless they have prior knowledge of such or accidentally discover they could. My suggestion is to do exactly like what the Windows builds do except make the dialog box appear look more Mac-like. The Speed Dial Information dialog originally had its own special appearance. I’m suggesting make it use the non-modal dialog box appearance. There’s absolutely no reason for just one dialog box in the entire application to have some sort of special appearance. Additionally, I’ve fixed some grammar mistakes and have used the ⌘ symbol to designate the shortcut described within the prose as it should be used instead of writing out the word “Command”.
Speed Dial’s configuration dialog should use the dialog box appearance as well. Presently the customization of the layout of Speed Dial is handled by a series of confusing radio buttons that don’t offer any flexibility in layout. The user is limited to only a few configurations and if the user itself wants anything else they have to manually edit speeddial.ini in their preferences folder. What I propose here is a preview with an addition and subtraction button. The user can clearly see what their Speed Dial configuration would look like. Even their chosen Speed Dial background and tiling method would show up in the preview.
Presently the checkbox states “Disable Speed Dial” and is unchecked by default. Having negative names for checkbox items are confusing. It should be “Enable Speed Dial” and be checked by default. When unchecked it’s disabled, and when checked it’s enabled.
The background image is changed, displaying that the preview would also display to the user somewhat of a preview of what their chosen background image would look like.
Speed Dial is shown with a darker background image. The rounded interface buttons now appear darker because of a semi-transparent effect in the buttons. It allows for the same graphics to be used for a wide range of image and color possibilities.
The individual Speed Dial item configuration dialog is being shown. The list box has items in it which conform to Mac OS X standard margins and dimensions instead of Windows-classic ones as Opera does presently. The dialog box has a pointer attached to it which points directly to the item which is being edited. The current item is also highlighted by not being darkened. It’s completely obvious to the user which item is being edited.
A Web page is chosen in the list box, and the Speed Dial item is in the process of being updated to show the new selection.
The new selection is displayed.
Speed Dial has been updated to show cnn.com in the 7th Speed Dial item while the hover status of a Speed Dial item is shown on Number Five.
Since Opera 10.5 Opera’s tab previews have become less useful simply because the preview image gradually fades to nothing, losing information which sometimes can be used to identify a document. In my version the image doesn’t gradate, and the box it is contained within has similar dimensions to what are found on tabs and Speed Dial items in my mockups. The box also doesn’t have a Windows-looking drop shadow — instead sporting a drop shadow which fits with Mac OS X.
Opera is being shown in the progress of loading a Web page. Opera has multiple ways to display page loading progress, but the default method is for it to be displayed within the address input box. Presently it uses a default progress bar, but not the inset one as would be appropriate in this situation. It uses the raised one, complete with drop shadow. It’s quite ugly. In this situation it would be preferable for Opera to deviate and use its own. The one I’ve mocked up hugs the edges of the address input and is placed in precisely the same location as the current one is. However, it doesn’t look like a fish out of water. It looks like it belongs there. My thoughts are that it would change depending on whether the Blue or Graphite appearance is chosen in the System Preferences. I use Graphite, so I’ve mocked it and other things like it in that manner.
While the progress bar shown previously was an indeterminate one this one shows a definite completion time. The appearance is similar and looks as if it belongs there.
The page is loaded. The feed and widget icon is shown in the Address Bar. The widget icon has an appearance that’s more similar to the standard feed icon.
Opera Turbo has been enabled, and the document is being shown with heavy image compression usually associated with the feature.
Opera Turbo, Opera Link, and Opera Unite all have been enabled and are designated as such by the buttons’ icons appearing to be lit by a green light. The Opera Turbo button, however, is toggled by having a green pressed state. Everything is obvious and fits within Mac OS X’s interface design while retaining Opera’s already established conventions.
Opera Turbo has been set to Auto mode, and the green pressed state of the button has been replaced with the typical grey. Right now Opera uses “A” to denote Auto mode, but in my opinion it’s not the best choice. “A” can mean a lot of things while “Auto” is usually associated with “Automatic”.
The View button popup menu is shown with an appearance similar to the Speed Dial item dialog box. Padding and Margins are consistent with menu dropdowns in Mac OS X and not made up. The ugly-looking 100% button that’s in Opera right now has been replaced with a simple “Default” push button. The Zoom slider is given a more native appearance consistent with its actual behavior. The limitations of the slider is clearly shown to the user where he/she can only zoom from 20% to 300%.
Currently in Opera the address bar dropdown has quite a similar appearance to what I have mocked up. The only difference on the surface is that I’ve used standard system margins for all the contents. What Opera has right now is quite functional and appropriate.
In fact the only big change I would make is to make the “Search Bookmarks”, “Search History”, etc. into actual buttons but only designated such by a hover status.
Last but not least I’ve mocked up visual tabs. I’ve made the margins consistent between regular tabs and visual tabs so when the Tab Bar is expanded the tabs don’t change shape horizontally. It creates a smooth transition when resized.
I’m throwing a lot of criticism toward Opera. I’m not doing such in any sort of malcontent. Opera’s my favorite application, and I use it far more than any program on my computer. That’s surprising considering I’m a graphic artist and really enjoy working in Photoshop and Illustrator. I’m doing this out of my love for the application and my respect for the excellent developers Opera has around the world. Like I’ve said before I plan on doing more posts like this. Hopefully the following ones will be a lot shorter. This one is quite the long one. Ha.
Every year during the World Cup or whenever some important football game is occurring passionate football fans go on the offensive toward Americans for two things: the fact that Americans don’t much care for their sport and that we call it soccer. It flabbergasts me whenever it happens because it shows they’re woefully ignorant of their own sport’s history, and to a true sports fan the history of their sport of choice should be quite important. I’ll like to explain why the sport is how it is in the United States. For the sake of clarity I’m going to refer to soccer as football for the majority of this unless when discussing it would be confusing to call it such.
Football hasn’t yet made a foothold in the United States although it has rapidly grown in popularity here. It’s especially popular among small children today — although it is established as an LK sport. It’s only been played professionally since 1996, and therefore it doesn’t have the status of sports either invented or established on this continent. The United States isn’t the only place where football isn’t the dominating sport. It’s not dominant in Canada, Australia, or New Zealand — all of them also formerly directly controlled by Britain and for much longer periods of time. Canada established its own sports and took a liking to American ones while Australia and New Zealand took a liking to rugby. Japan prefers baseball. Football became popular throughout the world because of the immense power of the British Empire and the cultural influence such created. The British Empire was the largest empire in the history of the human race, and it spanned the globe. It’s quite arrogant to attack Americans for having a liking to their own sports when there’s other countries on the planet who show similar favoritism to their own sports and when the popularity of football across the planet was created out of imperialism and cultural influence born out of power. The latter is usually bounced back at us due to the popularity of baseball in Japan, but upon further investigation of the history of baseball there it’s shown that the Japanese took a liking to baseball long before we occupied the country after the end of World War II.
Will football ever gain vast popularity in the United States? I very much doubt it. American football only gained the dominant position because of mismanagement of baseball by MLB. Money is the most important factor in baseball today. Players are paid ridiculous amounts of money, and have struck when their million dollar plus paychecks weren’t enough. Teams with the most money get the best players. These are long-established problems the MLB refuses to rectify, and because of such many people have given up on baseball for good. After the 1994 strike I never watched a single baseball game again, and I won’t. Baseball is still popular in the North, but that is mostly because of the greater concentration of teams there. There are 5 teams in the South in the United States while there’s 9 in the NFL. With American football it’s easy to find a local or somewhat local team to root for. For football to gain ground like American football did in the United States there would have to be a catastrophic failure of many popular sports in the US such as American football, baseball, basketball, and stock car racing all at one time. Football is gaining in popularity, and the spark for such was the 1994 World Cup held in the United States which still today holds the highest attendance record of any World Cup and of any sporting event in the history of the United States — including any Olympic Games held on US soil. However, without transcontinental professional teams filled with primarily American athletes it’s going to be a hard road ahead.
That first point isn’t thrown at us Americans as much as the second, and the history of football is especially important when discussing the word soccer. In the latter part of the 19th century there were two sports in Britain named football that by that point even had been played for some time — Association Football and Rugby Football. In fact at one point they were both simply called football, so it’s easy to imagine exactly why there was a necessity for the two completely different sports to be differentiated with an adjective. The word soccer was born out of Oxford slang created in an attempt to further simplify the name of the sport as let’s face it Association Football is a mouthful. Soccer grew in popularity quite a bit more than rugby did, and simply due to its sheer popularity it gained the right to be simply called football. The old slang term for the sport was generally forgotten by the British who invented it because many generations of Britons were born not knowing anything other than the term football to refer to their country’s most popular sport.
When the two sports were brought over here by British immigrants they were called soccer and rugby football. Over here the term soccer became the proper name for the sport rather than slang. Rugby retained its original name, and therefore its child sport — football — was never called anything else. Because of blind targeting of Americans it’s not widely known that Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders all call the sport soccer. Australia and New Zealand made formal announcements that in international competitions the sport is to be called football in 2005 and 2007 respectively. The US and Canada both have yet to do this and probably never will. The sport is already referred to as football in international competitions, and changing the associations’ names from soccer to football in the two countries would do nothing but cause confusion. It’s completely ignorant and arrogant to wish that Americans change their beloved football to something else in favor of a sport which they mostly not a single bit of adoration for especially when other countries’ general populations call it the same thing for the exact same reasons. To put it simply if you didn’t want us to call it soccer the British — the inventors of the sport — never should have told us to call it such in the first place.
September of last year I wrote a review of Opera 10, named the title of the article “A Perfect 10″, and proclaimed it to be “the best release of the software yet”. Does Opera 10.5x stand up to my praise of version ten?1 No. I’m mostly going to focus on the Macintosh release as it is the platform I mostly use, and therefore it is the platform in which I have spent the most time using the application. However, I will discuss other builds when necessary. This is going to be a long and exhaustive review of Opera 10.5x, so get some coffee; it might take a while.
Development Schedule
Unlike most software releases it’s imperative to discuss this Opera version’s development schedule due to a staggered process. Opera chose to develop the browser by placing focus on the Windows platform first, and releasing the Macintosh and Unix versions afterwards. The graph above describes the schedule as it stands at the time of this writing.2The graph is an SVG, and Opera is the only browser in existence which can view it properly. I’ve also prepared a PNG image for those who use browsers which are behind in their SVG implementations.3
In December of last year most of us Opera users received an early Christmas present — an early build of Opera 10.5. It was presented to us just a bit less than a month after the first alpha build of Opera 10.2, a version that never reached final because there was such a desire to get Opera 10.5 out. Only the Windows and Macintosh builds were released initially, and the Windows build was quite a bit further along than the Mac one because the Macintosh one was a complete rewrite, going from the aged Carbon API’s to the Cocoa API. The Unix build was nonexistent, but it was stated that it would experience an even greater and more difficult rewrite than the Macintosh release. This sort of staggered release of snapshots was rather normal. The first alpha Unix build was released just a bit over a week later; the true nature of the development schedule wasn’t stated at all.
The users’ first glimpse into the development schedule didn’t occur until a month later:
The current estimates for the remaining work for Opera 10.50, however, indicates that we will reach final product quality earlier on Windows than on the other platforms. As such, we have decided to not let Windows users wait for the other platforms to catch up, and rather push it out earlier than the rest. You will notice this in the near future as we will reach the beta milestone for Windows, while Mac and Linux will reach beta around the time Opera 10.50 reaches final on Windows. When the Windows version hits final we will focus our attention on bringing the other platforms to the same quality as soon as possible. We also expect this to be an exception from how we work, meaning we will once again ship final versions for all platforms at the same time in the future.
This news hit like a lead anvil. Opera’s always been accused of placing Windows above any other platform, and here we were slapped with convincing proof of it. Windows releases have almost always been polished while the Mac and Unix builds have traditionally been far from it. Significant strides have been made in improving the Macintosh releases’ interfaces because of outspoken criticism from Macintosh users about it. Even today with all the improvements the application still feels sometimes like a ported Windows program, and Opera is never going to gain a lot of Macintosh users by not catering to the platform’s aesthetics. The same can be said for Unix, and it’s not until 10.5 it’s even received the attention it deserves.
Staggered releases like this have been done before with less than appealing results. Adobe produced staggered releases of their software in the late ’90’s. Adobe decided to place more focus on Windows development, releasing versions of their Macintosh software on a slower schedule. The result of that experiment was Windows versions of their applications which were stable and Macintosh versions which were far from it, creating user backlash because the majority of the professionals creating quality artwork using their programs were on the Macintosh platform. When using common sense the reasons for this outcome becomes quite obvious. Upon release of the Windows versions of their applications it was only natural for the developers to feel a sense of obligation to get working versions of the Macintosh counterparts out as quickly as possible. Because of that the care which normally would have been taken during the development schedule was reduced significantly simply because there was a rush to get the work done. Opera 10.5 suffered a similar problem; the only difference’s being that it suffered the same problem on all platforms, not just the ones not given initial focus.
On June 11, 2009, Microsoft agreed to not include Internet Explorer in its bundling of Windows in the European Union because of a lawsuit initially filed by Opera.4 I was initially against this lawsuit despite the fact that I agreed with Opera’s complaints because there was no mention of a solution for end users as they would be getting an operating system without easy means to even get a Web browser, Microsoft or not. I wasn’t the only one who foresaw this problem.5 That decision didn’t empower users at all; it hurt users buying Windows alone as they had to resort to alternative and sometimes archaic methods of obtaining a browser. Eventually later that year the problem was solved when the EU agreed to allow competing browsers to randomly be listed on a browser choice screen; Eventually the decision was made to make the choice page finally be public on the first of March, 2010.
This browser choice screen created a deadline for Opera 10.5 as it would be beneficial for Opera to have their latest and greatest ready for download when that page went live, and that’s exactly what happened. It generated a mad rush and a lot of overtime work, but the build was finalized on time. Opera had 10.50 ready for download on the browser choice screen. While extremely fast, The build itself was quite unstable and contained numerous bugs which never should have made it to a final release. Many of these problems have since been attended to, but if my first time using Opera was Opera 10.50 I’d be hard pressed to ever download it again.
The 10.5x releases so far for the Macintosh weren’t devoid of any easily-caught bugs either:
The Mail panel bugs are extremely old bugs, having existed for several versions now — perhaps as far back as Opera 7 or 8. To make matters worse Gmail crashes Opera on the PPC build. The print preview problem and the Gmail crash especially should have never made it to the final. The Desktop Team did state that they would revert to their usual development schedule after 10.5, and I sincerely hope Opera never adopts a schedule similar to this in the future as I believe this release has suffered quite a bit due to the change in procedure.
Interface
The interface is at times the most important aspect of an application; this is most true for the Macintosh platform. If it is poorly designed and therefore hard to use that alone will doom any application no matter what it’s capable of doing. It’s how the user interacts with the program. Opera’s been accused in the past of having a rather atrocious interface, and I thoroughly agree with such sentiment. However, Opera has improved significantly because of the improvements made to its visage.
There were so many changes to the interface last time I had to pick and choose what I wanted to focus on. This time around there’s really only two major changes to the interface on the Macintosh — the unified toolbar and the thin panel separator. These are actually significant changes that are welcome to many Macintosh users, but I can’t help but feel some disappointment in the overall interface of Opera 10.5. After the quantum leap experienced by the change in appearance for Opera 10 I would have expected polish for this release. By polish I mean a significant continuation of the interface design by applying it to the platform’s specific design aesthetics. Aside from the two changes mentioned above Opera 10.5x is essentially devoid of any such attempts.
There’s so much to discuss about Opera’s interface that I could probably write a novel on it. What I’ll provide right now in the form of screenshots are a few obvious problems adjacent to examples of acceptable similar interfaces in other programs on the Macintosh. I hope to communicate these and other problems in more detail at a later date, but the few examples I do provide at present should showcase necessary improvement to Opera’s demeanor.
Aside from the panel’s background color it bears little resemblance to how a listing should be handled in a sidebar on the Macintosh platform; it looks more like a Classic Windows listing.
Opera’s interface is littered with rectangular, hard-cornered, and ugly buttons which look nothing like what end users expect buttons to look like.
Opera’s list headers are a noble attempt at appearing Mac-like, but they fall apart when examined next to an example of a native Finder window’s list headers. The Classic Windows-like margins are especially unpleasant.
These problems have existed for quite some time in Opera, predating the release of Opera 10. I didn’t choose to cover these problems in my last review as I foolishly expected many of them to be addressed. No matter what vast interior improvements are made Opera’s going to continue to be ridiculed on the Macintosh for failing to integrate with the platform unless it takes significant strides in actually integrating the appearance of its interface with the system. I cannot downplay the progress which has been made on Opera’s interface over the past couple of major releases, and I realize it’s difficult and requires an insane amount of obsessive-compulsiveness to do; it’s just extremely important to end users of the Mac platform to get this absolutely right.
Platform Integration
In its initial post about Opera 10.5 the Desktop Team listed platform integration as an important aspect of this release. On the Macintosh this meant a rewrite using the Cocoa framework and usage of Core Text for all text in the browser. People with modern MacBooks will be able to use finger gestures to navigate Opera, and all Mac users with Growl installed will enjoy much better notifications.6
It’s hard to really describe the significance of Opera’s conversion to the Cocoa API. Programming an application with Cocoa automatically creates a particular look and feel — the look and feel Macintosh users expect out of their applications. However, due to Opera’s necessity to retain immense abilities for end users to customize the interface it doesn’t get to benefit from much of that automatic platform integration, and aside from the automatic basic visual improvements like the unified toolbar Opera gains nothing but perhaps a boost in speed from the switch to Cocoa. Its switch to Core Text definitely means an increase in speed, but it also means text appearance consistency between it and the majority of the rest of the platform — a very good thing.
I don’t have a modern MacBook or access to one, so I cannot say much about the multitouch gestures. I do own an iPhone, and navigating Safari using similar multitouch gestures is a treat. I assume this applies to working with the Magic Mouse as well, but again I don’t have access to one of those either. I’m rather sure they’re welcome, and I can see where they’d be extremely useful.
Growl notification support is something I absolutely never thought I’d see in a million years. It hit me like a bolt of lightning when I read it. Opera’s internal notifications have always been annoying, and aside from popup notifications I’ve always disabled every last single one of them regardless of platform. The reason why I never thought I’d see it is Opera’s tendency to use their own implementations of everything else. Opera uses its own address book, its own dictionary, its own password storage, et cetera. It’d be even better if Opera’s built-in notifications somewhat copied Growl as its way of handling application notifications is a prime example of ones which are not obtrusive.
On the Macintosh there’s a few more things which could be done to improve platform integration, and those would be interface improvements, Keychain integration, Address Book integration, Dictionary integration, and scripting support. I’ve already touched upon interface improvements earlier, so I won’t discuss that any further. Address Book integration is imperative. It’s ridiculous to have to refer to the Address Book application for an email address because Opera doesn’t link to it. That’s the primary reason why I won’t use Opera’s built-in mail client. All my contact information is in the system’s address book and can be accessed by my phone and most applications on the platform.
Keychain support isn’t absolutely imperative in my opinion, but it’s important to a lot of people. My brain stores my passwords, and I don’t want a computer storing my passwords for me. Storing passwords in the system is useful for a lot of people, and like the Address Book the Apple Keychain is used by most applications first party or not on the platform. It’d be quite useful if Opera did as well. Hell, the Subversion command-line client has Keychain support for crying out loud. In addition to this I know many people who absolutely refuse to use Opera because of their reliance upon Keychain or 1password. That’s their own stupidity in my opinion, but at the very least adding support for 1password would be beneficial for a large amount of people and not at all unprecedented now that Opera has Growl support.
Mac OS X also has its own built-in dictionary, and again the majority of the system’s applications utilize it. The system’s dictionary can learn words provided you manually teach the words to it. Doing such in one application would make the learned word recognizable by the entire system — except Opera and other applications like it which do not use the system’s dictionary. I don’t use inline spell check, and I don’t use spell checkers that often. I much prefer to use a custom search in Opera to spell check individual words for me, so like with Keychain support my call for Dictionary integration is more of a feature request for others than for myself.
Sometime during Opera 9.5’s development Opera added in basic AppleScripting support. It’s been difficult tracking down initial information such as an announcement about it. If memory serves me correctly it was originally announced on the Mac Team’s blog. Unfortunately its entire archive has been wiped, so all the informative previous content is no longer there. There’s not a single mention of it on the Desktop Team’s blog. In fact the only location on the entire domain I could find any information about it was a small post on Opera employee Michael Vacik’s blog about updating a TextMate bundle to support Opera. Its support was indeed basic, and on the surface it looks as if Opera 10.5x is bereft of any support at all as AppleScript Editor cannot find an AppleScript library for Opera — even when told to look for it manually. It must contain basic support as LittleSnapper uses AppleScript to grab the active tab’s URL for capturing, and it still works with Opera 10.5x. Opera could get ahead of the curve and implement a robust AppleScripting environment for end users to utilize, even going so far as to allow AppleScript to be used in buttons on its interface. I’ll admit this isn’t a very important feature to focus on, but Opera would indeed receive a lot of praise for it because aside from Safari its competition is nearly devoid of any support.7
New Features
There are five major new features and major feature improvements in this version. Opera has finally added in better inline searching and private browsing. Most uses of dialog boxes are now non-modal, and Opera now has a changed cache viewer. In addition, widgets are now handled differently, increasing their usefulness exponentially.
Opera has actually had inline searching for several versions now, but it’s been somewhat of a hidden feature — accessible only by pressing .. It would pop up a small box at the bottom of the page to type the text in. It was clunky and not really that accessible. The functionality of the new method is quite welcome as it’ll show a bar for searching regardless of whether the ⌘F or . shortcuts are used. Despite all this improvement the inline search bar still looks rather ugly, overly large, and doesn’t much at all fit Mac OS X’s axioms.
As far as I can tell in 2005 with the introduction of Safari 2 Apple invented private browsing. Since then every browser has created their own implementation of the concept. With Opera 10.5, Opera’s added in their own private browsing functionality. In the usual Opera fashion they’ve gone further with it, adding in private tabs in addition to private windows. On other browsers private browsing is toggled in the menus and makes everything you do from then on out private. Now in Opera private windows or tabs can be created, allowing for both public and private browsing to be performed simultaneously. It’s not a feature I’ll be using much as I rarely use Opera on public machines, but I’m absolutely sure it’s a welcome feature for a lot of users.
For quite some time now Opera has been accused of being too obtrusive in its use of dialog boxes. Every last one of them was modal, and on some websites which made use of dialog boxes a lot it could get quite old. Opera’s finally solved that with its change to using non-modal dialogs. However, from looking at this screenshot you can’t tell whether it’s modal or not as it looks identical to many modal dialogs on the system. In fact, if Opera didn’t even tell us I probably wouldn’t even realize I could navigate to another tab while the dialog box is open because I’m so used to being restricted.
The second image above shows the same exact dialog box in Windows, and it’s completely obvious that it’s non-modal from the way it behaves and looks. I believe Opera should have done something like that on the Macintosh build, and if I remember correctly it did at one point during the development process. It wouldn’t look entirely native; nonetheless, there are instances where it’s best and recommended to deviate, and I believe this is one of those instances.
By typing opera:cache in the address bar the user is shown a location in which it’s possible to peruse their cache. Other browsers have had this for ages, and Opera’s no exception. Prior to this release opera:cache was just a simple listing of files in the cache. It wasn’t that robust, but it worked well for what it did. In its present form it’s almost completely useless. The entire process of viewing the cache with it is counter-intuitive. By checking boxes and typing numbers in the form at the top it would be expected that by doing so the list at the bottom would automatically change to your specifications; it does not. Clicking on a list hyperlink for a particular domain is required, and then a separate page is opened with that content which depending on what criteria was selected might indeed contain nothing and be a complete waste of time. Everything should just be done within that page, and searching for particular filetypes should be able to be done without having to know what domain the files come from. It’s cumbersome, and to be frank it’s rather retarded in how it works. The old simple listing was actually more functional than this.
Like with private browsing and inline search widgets weren’t an original concept invented by Opera either. It’s actually the first one to go about it the right way, submitting and working on a widget standard with the W3C. Doing such creates a standard in which anyone can follow, meaning widgets created for Opera’s widget engine could some day work in a different browser or application which also follows the standard. This is quite unlike what we find today with Yahoo! Widgets and Apple’s Dashboard which have their own separate ways of doing things.
Prior to Opera 10.5 widgets ran while Opera itself was open. It was interesting, but it wasn’t all that useful in my opinion. I use Dashboard for simple stuff such as weather, delivery status, and the yellow pages. Dashboard might be proprietary, but it’s always there — available at the press of a button. Now Opera Widgets run as standalone applications and are installed in the Applications folder with everything else. This means that entire Web apps can be created and ran as widgets instead of relegating widgets to being little simple information gatherers.
Web Technologies
Opera’s improved support for Web technologies is where Opera 10.5x really shines. Opera 10.5x contains two new engines, Carakan and Vega, for JavaScript and vector graphics respectively. There are multitudes of improvements to what it already supports and quite a few additions as well. Because of such I’m only going to touch upon what I believe to be the most important ones.
Opera now has support for HTML5 audio and video elements. WAV and Ogg Vorbis are supported for audio while Ogg Theora is the only thing supported for video. It will play neither video nor audio outside of an HTML document which is unfortunate even if you manually tell it to open the files in the preferences; that’s something which I believe needs to be addressed as it’s silly to call upon a plugin to handle something which it supports internally. A sort of format war has erupted because different browsers are currently supporting incompatible formats. Hopefully much of this will be alleviated soon if the rumors about Google’s open sourcing of the VP8 format are true; if so I hope Opera supports it as well as Theora is shit when compared to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC or any other more modern codec in existence. VP8 is very much comparable and would be a great way for the Web to escape having to use a patent encumbered codec. Even then it’d be an uphill battle which is most likely to fail.
Webfonts support has been vastly improved in this release, and I am absolutely overjoyed. Opera still has trouble with split fonts, and hopefully that will be addressed in due course as it is in violation of the CSS 2 and 3 specifications to handle the font stack it the way it does presently. Another feature I called out for in my last review was local font overriding, and it works except in user style sheets where it would be far more useful in. Opera is well aware of both of these issues.
Border radii are finally supported in Opera. Yes, finally. Safari started it off with support for it in August of 2005, and here nearly 5 years later Opera has added support. The earlier reasons for that delay are really unknown to me, but recently it has been because Opera was waiting to use Vega for it first — a good idea in my opinion.
Native JSON support has been added as well. That’s another thing to say a “finally” about as Opera 10.5 is the last major browser to support it. Opera’s saving grace on this has been because IE 6 and 7 also did not have native JSON parsing, meaning external libraries were required. Yes, Internet Explorer 8 supported JSON parsing before Opera.
Furthermore Opera has added support for numerous CSS properties such 2D transforms and transitions; multiple background images; and Web storage and database support. There are actually much more, and if interested in particulars and information about what I just listed above it might be best to inspect the threeseparatedocuments I had to read through to verify my information here; it builds character.8
Conclusion
I personally don’t find Opera 10.5x to be as good a release as Opera 10 was. Opera Software has definitely made significant improvements to its browser, but I think because of the scheduling the immense speed improvements, Web tech support, and new features all have been at a cost of stability and polish. Would I, personally, use anything else instead of Opera? Not no, but hell no. It’s just that if I think of it in terms of whether or not I would recommend it to my sister or someone not as familiar with the software or the technology behind it I wouldn’t recommend it at all. It’d be too cumbersome to have to describe to her that the browser is awesome, but Gmail crashes it on one of her computers.
I will refer to what I am reviewing as Opera 10.5x because there are multiple point releases included in this review. ↩
Opera Software also has a graph of their own, but it portrays predictions on releases. My graph also doesn’t acknowledge the “pre-alpha” releases because quite frankly calling something a “pre-alpha” is stupid. Seriously, what’s before alpha in the greek alphabet? Yeah. Nothing. ↩
Thanks to Jeff King for speeding me up by doing most of the work on the SVG graph. ↩
Numerous parties eventually joined on Opera’s side. ↩
Opera received a lot of bad press on this issue. Aside from criticism on the users’ lack of a means to download a browser the rest of it was unjustified drivel. ↩
Anyone with a Macintosh should install Growl for unobtrusive and useful application notifications. ↩
This fragmentation is due to the fact that there’s been three iterations of the browser engine since the previous desktop release of the browser. There are documents listing changes between desktop release versions, but they’re neither as complete nor as detailed as these. ↩
CSS declarations which use browser-specific CSS properties must also contain the standards-based property if it exists in a specification.
What exactly does this mean? It means if -webkit-border-radius is used then border-radius must also be used in a CSS declaration. No ifs, ands, or buts. I shouldn’t even have to write this because it’s just a fucking elementary concept to do this; it takes seconds to type and future-proofs the style sheet in the process. It’s absolutely ridiculous to open one of these touted ”CSS3 Experiments” and see something which doesn’t even use CSS3 and doesn’t work properly because it only uses WebKit or Mozilla properties. To further clarify, this is absolutely the wrong way to apply a border radius to a block element:
div
{-webkit-border-radius : 8px;
-moz-border-radius : 8px;}
Every once and a while I take a look at a feature which is done by another browser or service and figure out ways to get it to work with Opera better than was done with the initial method. I’ve made things like an Opera address bar Twitter client and an Add to Amazon Wishlist button and menu item. Now I’ve decided to create a custom search for Goo.gl. I use Twitter a lot, and I prefer it when I create my own shortened URL’s. Since I use Opera doing such is quite a simple task without much effort. Usually all I have to do is type a keyword before the location I’m already at and it does the rest.
If you’ve been living in this century and have paid any attention what a URL shortening service is should be quite obvious. Its use predates Twitter, but Twitter actually made it have a viable use as simply shortening URLs to remove GET variables or other garbage was necessary to be able to have some URL’s fit within the 140 character limit.
With most any URL shortening service it’s relatively simple to create a custom search for Opera for it, meaning typing bitly http://google.com would create a shortened URL for Google using Bit.ly — provided you had the search created for it using that keyword. Goo.gl is a bit different. There’s no way to access a form to do it from Google’s website. They prefer you to install toolbars or use browser extensions to shorten URL’s using their service. Bastards. Both third party toolbars and third party extensions are a plague, and thankfully neither work on Opera. Custom searches can be created manually, and data URL’s and JavaScript URL’s can be used for custom searches:
This looks like a mess, and is quite like what I created initially for my Address Bar tweet mechanism. I couldn’t for the life of me get a JavaScript URL to work with this, so I had to resort to using the uglier data URL. If anyone out there can accomplish this using a JavaScript URL be my guest. I didn’t want to spend a whole lot of time because at this point it’s essentially a proof-of-concept. Presently this uses JSONP to accomplish its methods, so it does rely on an external website neither you nor I have any control over. If you’re paranoid it’d be a good idea not to use this. It’d be also worth nothing that this could stop working without notice.
To install this custom search follow these directions:
Go to Opera → Preferences (or Tools → Preferences on Windows and Unix).
Click on the Search tab then click the Add… button.
In the input box labeled Name type in Goo.gl.
Type in your preferred keyword in the Keyword field. I use googl.
Paste in the Data URL above into the Address field and click OK.
It should be obvious how to use it. I’ve tested this script personally over several weeks, using it for every instance where I’ve needed a shortened URL. If I were to make improvements upon this I would create some redundancy, allowing it to fallback to another method in case the website’s being used for JSONP ever goes down. Perhaps I’ll do that in the future. This is licensed under a Do-whatever-the-fuck-you-want-with-it license; the details of the license are contained within its namesake.
Arguments have flared up recently about the Adobe Flash plugin on the Macintosh. I’ve been rather vocal about the issue lately by Tweeting my views about the entire debacle; I have written bits about Flash’s and Adobe’s general incompetence here; and I have made comments in weblogs where I find it an effective platform to get my views heard by those who matter. I and others like me have been nothing but insulted by the Adobe Flash team for our viable and extremely genuine problem.
I will say imperatively that I absolutely abhor Flash. I can’t express in words my undying hatred for it, but I don’t despise the plugin because it’s not a web standard; it has so far filled a void that web standards have been incapable of filling and as of right now can’t fill. I detest it because it’s unstable, inaccessible, and inefficient. It does absolutely nothing but attenuate my browsing experience by either crashing the browser or bringing my computer to a screeching halt by devouring its available resources to display something as minute as a 320×240 video. If the Adobe Flash team were to remedy the capriciousness and incompetence of the program then my convictions about Flash would take a complete 180° turn toward outpouring support for their product if and only if when it doesn’t impede the expansion of web standards. However, they’ve refused to do so. The Adobe Flash team have done nothing but insult their users pointing fingers at people and other corporations as the source of their problems when evidence presents itself proving it’s everything to the contrary.
This past Sunday paraphrasedtranscripts of the iPad town hall meeting at Apple were released, and Steve Jobs didn’t have much that was nice to say about Adobe:
About Adobe: They are lazy, Jobs says. They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it. They don’t do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy, he says. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash, he says. The world is moving to HTML5.
Steve Jobs sites Flash’s instability as the reason why none of Apple’s iPhone-like devices are able to execute Flash. I have been throwing around a theory for some time that stated that Apple didn’t want Flash near their products because Adobe was incapable of programming a stable release for the Macintosh. Steve’s statements have proved my theory to be true.
Mr. Jobs also calls Adobe out on being lazy. I thoroughly agree with that, however, all of Adobe isn’t indolent. Anyone who has attempted to install Adobe CS3 or CS4 absolutely have much scorn for the installer. The Installer Team have taken the complaints to heart and gone above and beyond to fix the installer. A much improved installation process will be present for CS5. Likewise, complaints about Flash UI extensions in CS4 and the severe lack of extensions being developed have caused the Creative Suite team to allow the use of WebKit for UI extensions in CS5. Now if the Creative Suite Team would submit more than one or two bug fixes for their software things would be perfect on that front. What does the Adobe Flash team do? Instead of doing what their colleagues at Adobe have done they instead point fingers at their own users and at Apple for the source of their application’s troubles. Adobe itself isn’t lazy, but the Flash team sure is.
Adobe’s executives and managers could be called lazy for not firing their employees who refuse to do their jobs such as John Dowdell and Lee Brimelow who have done nothing but spread lies and malcontent over this issue. The problems with the Adobe Flash plugin began long before Adobe acquired it by purchasing Macromedia. After nearly a decade of having to deal with an unstable plugin it’s about damn time it’s fixed. Adobe’s developed it for four years of the nearly 9 year period of misery. Instead of accepting Steve’s reasons for the iPhone, the iPod Touch, and the iPad’s lack of support for Flash they instead claim it’s still Apple’s fault. If it was Apple’s fault then Flash would work wonderfully on Linux like it does on Windows; it hardly works at all on Linux. So, Adobe, is Flash’s incompetence Linux’s fault as well? Adobe also claims that Apple doesn’t cooperate. Apple had absolutely no trouble cooperating with Adobe during the PowerPC to Intel conversion, letting Adobe in on Rosetta months before the masses even knew Apple was switching architectures. Adobe was given immense amounts of lead time to work with Apple to make sure that all of Adobe’s applications ran smoothly (including the Flash plugin), and when bugs arose in Rosetta months down the road which caused rounding errors in Illustrator among other incredibly annoying problems Apple worked with Adobe yet again to remedy the problem in short order. Like with Rosetta, Apple would benefit from a stable Flash plugin on the Macintosh, but I’m sure it’s difficult for Apple to cooperate now when Adobe’s doing nothing but badmouthing the company and its policies. Instead of whining and posting false information about website support on the iPad they could fix their plugin and hope to God that Apple would be merciful and willing to allow Flash on the devices and others it produces like it. Regardless the Adobe Flash Team is doing a great job at tarnishing Adobe’s fading reputation as it’s almost fashionable to give Adobe a good tongue lashing over Flash these days. That’s a good thing because they’ve deserved it for several years now.
Apple’s not without fault in their relationship with Adobe. H.264 hardware decoding isn’t in the Flash plugin on the Mac because there are no open API’s on the platform for decoding; they’re specific to QuickTime. Apple definitely should work with Adobe, providing them with a way to decode video on their plugin. However, the absence of hardware decoding isn’t the source of the Flash plugin’s sluggishness at rendering video when there’s other players on the platform without hardware decoding capable of displaying H.264 video without crippling the computer in the process. Additionally, back when Apple announced they were dropping support for 64-bit in Carbon Adobe was caught by surprise, having spent countless hours developing its CS4 suite for deployment in 64-bit. This lack of communication by Apple caused its users to receive a 32-bit only release of Creative Suite 4 applications; none of it was Adobe’s fault like some have claimed. Some good is coming out of this because if Carbon was 64-bit in Mac OS X Adobe wouldn’t have a reason to rewrite their entire suite in Cocoa which provides better system integration among other benefits from the aging Carbon API’s.
There was a time where the name Adobe was synonymous with great software and great customer support and communication. This is hardly the case anymore. Reports have come back by people who attended Apple’s town hall meeting about the iPad which said that Steve Jobs was almost nostalgic about the Adobe of old. That’s what Adobe needs to be again. They need to listen to their customers’ concerns, keep the employees who do their job, and fire the ones who don’t like the ones who are in charge of maintaining the Flash plugin.
An Apple user is typically a computer user who has to be at the ready to defend himself at the drop of a hat at any given point in time. Imagine being both an Apple and Opera user. Imagine having to defend yourself not just on your platform of choice but also for your web browser of choice. That’s me. I’m unsure what constitutes an Apple user, but I do know for sure what constitutes myself. Neither I nor people I know personally or online are the stereotypical user exclaiming that the sun shines out of Steve Jobs’ every orifice and waiting for long lines at launch while blindly buying everything Apple makes regardless of whether they perceive a necessity or not. I and many others like myself despise those people as much as the Apple haters do as they are usually our public face, making idiotic gestures at the camera while they foolishly stand out in the elements to get some unnecessary object. A purchase regardless of price should be considered thoroughly and have a particular purpose before the money is spent. Many different products can be bought for multitudes of reasons, but electronic devices typically need to be purchased only if they have a purpose to fulfill. Putting all of its hardware and software problems aside for a bit, from what I saw this past Wednesday the iPad isn’t something I can yet see a use for. In fact that is my main beef with the product as a whole as I can’t get to its other problems without first observing the main one.
Usefulness
Apple has had multitudes of successes in the past. The Macintosh, iPod, and iPhone are all successes any company wishes it had, and Apple is hailing the iPad as yet another innovation to be among the ranks of those three. I just don’t see that yet, but just because I don’t doesn’t mean it won’t be a success in the marketplace like its predecessors have been, and my not seeing a use for the device doesn’t equal a belief in its being abominable. It just looks like a large iPod Touch with an even more ridiculous and easily ridiculed name.9 Unlike many in the country I was born and reside in, I have to see a purpose for a device before I’d even consider buying it. What’s the use for an iPad? I have to reach deep into my head to come up with anything that can even resemble reasoning to purchase such an object. The absolute only thing I can think of is to own one to test websites on as its form factor opens another can of worms for website development. Even with that thin logic it never would constitute in my forking over $500+ for it as it doesn’t change things enough in that category to warrant such a price. I’m not the only one who has difficulty describing just what the product is for, and I’m not the only one wondering what the answer to the question is. Even people who are in ecstasy over it have difficulty describing its usefulness.
John Gruber is an example of someone who’s about ready to kill someone because he’s so ready to get one for his own. He describes people like me as “not getting it”. “Getting it” to my mind means first actually seeing a use for it. He cannot even explain just what that is. He can only exclaim how you need to use it first to know. His entire argument for the device revolves around the fact that it is fast. He repeats the word numerous times over the course of a few separate articles on his website, but one paragraph in his article entitled The iPad Big Picture contains three mentions of the word in a row as a form of emphasis on the subject:
It is fast, fast, fast. The hardware really does feel like a big iPhone — and a big original iPhone at that, with the aluminum back. (I have never liked the plastic 3G/S iPhones as much as the original in terms of how it feels in my hand.) I expected the screen size to be the biggest differentiating factor in how the iPad feels compared to an iPhone, but I think the speed difference is just as big a factor. Web pages render so fast it was hard to believe. After using the iPhone so much for two and a half years, I’ve become accustomed to web pages rendering (relative to the Mac) slowly. On the iPad, they seem to render nearly instantly. (802.11n Wi-Fi helps too.)
The speed of the product is probably exhilarating, but driving a Camaro at 290 km/h must be exhilarating and fast. I’m not going to buy one of those simply because it’s fast. Buying a product for that reason alone is impulse purchasing by someone with more money than he knows what to do with as five hundred dollars or more is quite a chunk of change to just be throwing around for something that can’t be justified with a viable use. This is true especially when devices he already owns fulfills the tasks it can perform. Even as a “couch computer” it still is a desultory purchase because dispensing with that much cash for the sole purpose of being able to browse while lounging on a couch is just absolutely silly to me. In an article for Ars Technica John Timmer describes the complete void of usefulness the iPad exhibits:
When I leave the apartment for anything beyond local errands, I’m almost invariably carrying both a cell phone for communicating and a laptop for getting work done. A truly useful device would be one that could let me leave one of those devices and its added bulk, cables, and worries about charge status at home. The iPhone went a little way towards that dream—it was a phone, but its ability to handle a bit of web browsing and some light e-mail meant that leaving the laptop at home was possible in a few additional circumstances—but, for the most part, I’m still stuck lugging two devices.
The iPad doesn’t fix that. It’s clearly not a phone, so my phone would still have to come with me. It would do a better job of e-mail and Web browsing than the iPhone, but if I’m carrying one of those anyway, that’s not a huge help. On the other side of its category divide, the iPad might add a few more cases where a laptop is unnecessary, but very few. I’m a touch typist; I take notes on presentations while watching the speaker, and I am often writing in one application while looking over a document in a second. With no physical keyboard and no multitasking, the iPad simply wouldn’t work for me. It’s just too limited to mean I could leave my laptop home any more often than I already do.
That just about sums it up, and so far I’ve come to a conclusion that at present it has really no practical use. It’s a device for impulse purchasers like John Gruber to snag up. There’s a market for it to be used like Amazon’s Kindle, and I’m sure people who have wasted their money on a Kindle and people who have been considering purchasing one are giving the iPad a consideration. My perceived usefulness for this product perhaps might change in the future say if developers were pushing out many games with the same caliber as the Nintendo DS or Sony’s PSP. Its larger screen and resolution that comes with it along with its capability to still be portable would make it a device for gamers to enjoy. The rest of its functions would be only an added benefit when the device has a use as a gaming machine. Even then less than $500 could buy you a non portable console capable of high definition and incredible capabilities infinitely beyond anything the iPad can exhibit.
With all that said I would sure as hell purchase an iPad before I even gave any netbook, eBook reader, or tablet computer on the market any sort of consideration despite the caveats the iPad has after acquisition.
Caveats
The iPad is clearly shown to be in a category between a mobile phone and a notebook computer, and in being so it causes problems as people will tend to want to see it more like the latter. In my opinion it can only fit that bill if it is indeed more like the latter except with a multitouch interface and software which caters to the device’s distinct method of human interaction. It’s a personal computer no matter how you look at it. It has the premise of being that, yet it isn’t today.
Throngs of people have made up their lists of missing features and have checked them twice. The majority of the lists will most likely contain the following:
It doesn’t have either a front-facing or rear-facing camera.
The iPad doesn’t support Adobe Flash.
The aspect ratio of the device’s screen is ill suited for widescreen movie viewing.
There’s no CDMA support, so Verizon and Sprint are locked out of the party.
No 1700 MHz support for GSM UMTS/HSDPA, preventing T-Mobile in the US and WIND Mobile in Canada from utilizing the device.
All of these are what I would deem as nitpicks. The second complaint isn’t even viable in my book. My theory on Flash’s exclusion on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and now the iPad isn’t that it will invariably deplete the batteries of the devices and cause stability issues but because it has the same effect on the Macintosh. The Flash plugin for the Macintosh is comparable a pile of shit allowed to ferment for several hours from a horse who’s eaten too much limburger cheese. It’s neither stable nor efficient, so why in hell would Apple even attempt to let that smelly pile of manure be anywhere near its consumer electronics? Flash’s problems on the Macintosh are self-imposed and not created because of Apple; it started long before Adobe acquired Flash itself. Adobe’s just allowed it to remain a problem for the four years it’s maintained the plugin. If Adobe were to finally accept the mess their Flash plugin is on the Macintosh (all of this applies actually more so to Linux) and rework it Apple probably would be glad to work with them to get Flash on Apple’s consumer electronics like Adobe so badly desires. The rest aren’t even worth going into further detail about and should be obvious to anyone with a lick of common sense.
The device actually has some real problems. From first glance its first problem would be its name. Legal battles over the name aside, did anyone at Apple speak up about its similarity to the the maxi pad in name? Have they even seen this video prior to the iPad’s release? Does anyone from Boston with a thick accent work there? Bostonians have long said “iPad” to mean “iPod” because of the accent. Apple should have given the name a wider consideration internally before releasing the product; the legal battles over the name are the least of its problems.
Its largest problem software-wise by far is its lack of third party (and a lot of first party) multitasking. There’s some logic behind it when it comes to the iPhone and iPod Touch because it can severely drain the battery.10 If battery issues are the purpose for excluding multitasking in the iPad then why does the lowest end MacBook get a reputed 7 hours of battery life when it can effectively multitask? It’s just absolutely beyond retardation to release a product which has a 1 GHz processor in it without allowing it to multitask. This isn’t a feature request; it’s an absolute necessity. Hell, even the shittiest netbook is capable of some multitasking.
Perhaps its worst problems are the policies surrounding the App Store. Now the App Store has so far been the reason for the iPhone and iPod Touch’s success. There’s no denying that, but its policies have done nothing but the opposite. The App Store’s stringent, imperfect, and demeaning approval process has given it quite a bit of bad press. The approval process combined with the monopoly Apple places on application distribution is the main problem. On top of that Apple doesn’t like to approve applications which compete with their own. It’s a volatile development situation to be in as a developer, and many have refused to develop for Apple’s consumer electronics because of this. It is absolutely necessary for Apple to have an approval process for their store, but it doesn’t and shouldn’t be the only game in town for application distribution. The Mac works fine with multiple places for application distribution. There’s no reason why the iPhone, iPod Touch, and now the iPad couldn’t do the same.
I’m not going to make any predictions about the success of the iPad. I just think it is useless and misguided in its present state. People will probably buy them regardless. I just don’t see myself at this point purchasing one unless someone is able to explain to me a proper use for the thing. One good thing I can see to come out of this is Apple’s processor. It’ll be quite nice when there’s one in the iPhone.
Its name’s vulnerability to attacks is displayed by my titling choice for this essay. ↩
Although I believe multitasking could and should be added as a toggle switchable option. ↩
Recently both YouTube and Vimeo have announced beta implementations of HTML 5 video on their websites. Despite Adobe’s insistence to the contrary, Flash is a much despised piece of software and not just among web standards supporters. It’s hated by multitudes of people from different backgrounds as it does nothing but consume computer resources at alarming rates while being the primary cause of all browser crashes on any platform mostly due to how horribly programmed and maintained it is. For many years now Flash’s usage has diminished as the necessity to ensure functionality in every browser has become easier thanks to the widespread adoption of web standards by all browsers — even Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. However, it is still a necessary evil for video as there’s no superior standards-based method to replace it as video requires a plugin of some sort to function. Despite celebrating as people should of YouTube and Vimeo’s decision to support new developing web standards they have been expressing displeasure toward the two video online community websites’ choice of format which is MPEG-4 H.264 over their preferred format of Ogg Theora.
H.264
MPEG-4 H.264 is a proprietary format which is closed source, patented, and license-encumbered. Despite those setbacks it has been adopted by an abundance of devices and computing platforms as the format of choice mostly due to its astounding bitrate to quality ratio and the fact that many of the patent holders of the format are influential:
Apple uses it for QuickTime video, and on its Macintosh platform video is easily encoded in this format for distribution to all of its devices from iPods to the iPhone.
Blu-Ray and the discontinued HD DVD video are encoded using the format.
Flash video can and is mostly encoded using H.264 such as on YouTube and Vimeo due to its superior quality over Flash video’s initial encoding format.
A wide range of user friendly software across many platforms can be used to encode or convert video efficiently to H.264.
Hardware manufacturers have developed computer components with hardware support for the format, allowing all kinds of devices such as many DVRs and mobile phones on the market today to decode the format without the necessity of processor intensive software.
The problem with adopting H.264 for the web is that the format isn’t free and to put it quite frankly it’s controlled by a bunch of greedy bastards who want to nickel and dime everyone who wants to use their format. Another problem is that the format is locked in stone, and its upgrade — a potential H.265 — will not be backwards compatible with its predecessor; the format will not improve much. While it is vastly superior to Theora in terms of quality today it more than likely will not remain that way.11 A free, evolving, and backwards compatible video format would be much preferred.
Ogg Theora
Theora can fit that bill as it is free, open sourced, devoid of software patents, and can be actively maintained and improved upon by those who utilize it in their software. Its caveats are essentially H.264’s advantages:
For the large part user friendly software to encode or convert Theora video is nonexistent.
Theora encoders are generally slow and many available today produce sub-optimal quality video files compared to what the format is capable of producing, limiting their uses on video content websites such as YouTube or Vimeo as the ability to encode large amounts of acceptable quality video files efficiently is a necessity.
YouTube, Vimeo, and multitudes of other websites similar to them already have their entire libraries in H.264 which play both as standalone video files and within flash players. Having their entire libraries in a secondary format would both be excessive, costly, and would culminate in lower quality for the resultant format as a lossy video file is being metamorphosed to another lossy video format.
There are no hardware decoders for Theora, and specifications for developing one still is in development. The consequence is that there are no small devices such as mobile phones capable of viewing Theora video currently, and there won’t be unless specifications are completed and manufacturers have a need and a market for such encoders.
Despite YouTube and Vimeo’s decision to support H.264 competition such as DailyMotion and fresh websites such as TinyVid exist which have embraced the Theora format. Unfortunately DailyMotion uses browser sniffing to permit only Firefox users to view their HTML 5 content, preventing users of both Google Chrome and of Opera’s new 10.5 pre beta from having a Flash-free video experience. Nonetheless, I believe that perplexity won’t be permanent.
Fortunately for Ogg Theora all of its disadvantages can be remedied; it will take some time, but unfortunately for Theora I fear that H.264 could become a de facto standard for video long before Theora’s disadvantages setting it back can be effectively addressed. That’s not my prediction. It’s just that it would be a pity if that were to become reality because I believe Theora is a better choice for the long haul despite its damning present inadequacies.
Browser Support
The integral quandary here is that the major players in the browser market currently do not see eye to eye as to what video format to support. That is unfortunate, but everyone tends to my mind to have viable reasons for supporting what they do:
Opera supports Theora video only because they believe an open format is better for the web, and is adamantly against supporting H.264 simply because of its encumbering licensing fees and patents.
Apple supports H.264 only because they have put so much behind the format already, having multitudes of devices already in the wild which are devoid of any support for the alternative. Also, being in the business of providing professional high quality video they believe H.264 produces a superior quality product. It is largely not because they do own portions of the format itself despite conspiracy theorists’ and Apple misanthropes’ accusations.
Google supports both, but because of the excesses of storage that would be necessary to house multiple video formats and because of reservations about the quality of Theora they chose not to utilize it for YouTube.
Mozilla supports Theora video only because of similar reasons to what Opera gives, but there appears to be signs that they would consider attempting to see what could be done to support H.264 in their browser if it is in fact possible at all.
Microsoft is largely being left to twist in the wind on this situation. However, due to historical company practices assertations can be made to the effect that Microsoft would much prefer WMV to be the format. From what I can see they have no plans on adding support for the HTML 5 video element anyway.
Format War
H.264 is divisionistic because of its three main problems stated before, mostly the final two where software patents, ridiculous licensing charges, and asinine conditions are frowned upon for very good reasons. I am, however, not as outraged as many of my colleagues as despite my feelings about the entire ordeal I still see reality. The reality is that at present there is no HTML 5 standard video format, so squawking that neither YouTube nor Vimeo fulfilled their promises to deliver HTML 5 is irrational and childish because they have. Is the format a bad choice on their part? Perhaps, but neither YouTube nor Vimeo made the choice without even giving Ogg Theora any consideration. Vimeo even commented on the point in question:
Almost every thread on the internet about HTML5 devolves into some kind of flamewar. Please don’t comment here extolling the virtues of open source or unencumbered codecs. We know, it’s our job to know, and that conversation has been had a million times. If you really feel like you need to talk about it, please do so in the Feature Request forum. The simple fact is right now h264 allows us the most flexibility to display on many devices and many players with the same file. When that changes, so will we.
Considering Google supports both H.264 and Ogg Theora in Chrome I can almost guarantee they made identical considerations and come to the exact same conclusion as Vimeo did. Although I believe that Theora would end up as a better choice both Youtube’s and Vimeo’s reasons for supporting H.264 at present weren’t diabolical or the result of carefree planning as some would like many to believe.
Some delusional people argue this point, but they can kiss both sides of my ass and continue taking their LSD. ↩
Last year I decided to create a Christmas card. It was the first time I attempted something of the sort, and well I decided then I wanted to do it again. I vowed I’d start earlier and finish quicker. It didn’t quite happen that way. Imagine that.
Like last year I decided to do something humorous. Following the same theme as last year I did something I find equally so. I began this about a week and a half before Thanksgiving, and I didn’t finish it until Mid-December. I did start earlier, but it sure as hell took me longer this time around than it did the previous year’s. The illustration is of a redneck showing off his newest kill, Rudolph. I decided to make the redneck as nasty as I could. He had to exhibit a lot of the qualities people despise in Rednecks such as poor personal hygiene and exhibitions of sheer idiocy such as the case here of the necessity to mount dead animals on the wall. To add insult to injury he’s mounted Rudolph.
This wasn’t terribly difficult to draw for me, but it was indeed terribly time consuming so much that I actually never finished it. In my sketches I had Christmas lights hanging from Rudolph’s antlers, but I set myself an unchanging deadline of December 15th, and I just never got to painting the Christmas lights. Also I planned on a wood panel background as well. I never reached that point either, and if I did I think the picture would have better portrayed the idea that Rudolph was mounted on the wall. As it is it is a bit ambiguous; certainly it’s ambiguous as to where they’re at as it’s just a void of darkness behind them. I’m a bit disappointed in the fact that I didn’t get to finish it like I wanted, but I would still be painting it at this moment as I’d continuously make additions and improvements to it. I usually have to set myself a deadline on these things.
Unlike this year I didn’t have any emergency to attend to which diverted me from sending out the cards, but the process of getting them out wasn’t a smooth one either. Instead of printing the cards myself I decided to get them printed which was a huge mistake. The printing quality was complete garbage where the printers simply printed 11×17 sheets of paper of the image out on a laser printer. Last year I printed something like a 1740 dpi image out using a very high quality inkjet printer. I sent 600 dpi images to the printer to print this time where they downscaled to 150 dpi before printing. Much of the detail and color was simply not there where every minute detail could be seen on last year’s and even more with a magnifying glass. Needless to say I was greatly crestfallen in the quality of the card’s printing, especially knowing I could have done much better myself. I didn’t ship them out until the Monday before Christmas knowing full well foreigners wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell of getting theirs before the big day. Only one of the cards I sent to the United Kingdom has even arrived by the time of this writing which has been another disappointment. Canada’s post wasn’t much better either with cards arriving in Germany two days before they reached a house about 100 km from the US border. Two other packages sent there — one before the card was sent — hasn’t arrived yet.
Generally the response has been quite positive to the card. I was worried some people might be absolutely offended by it. In fact, the only people to be offended by the card have been family. One of my aunts thought I was angry with her despite the note on the back giving no indication of my being angry with her. Other family members weren’t so critical, but they all expressed a similar opinion that I should do something much less nasty next year.
