Facebook has launched Facebook Deals

Thema Allgemein | Karl Geiger | Kommentieren 04/11/2010 | 23:32

… so you can see places nearby that offer you a deal. This might be a good idea. It also adds yet more advertisement to our lives.

 

Oh dear.



Oh please, it’s the 21st century.

Thema Allgemein | Karl Geiger | Kommentieren 27/10/2010 | 23:25

Dear Microsoft,

for about 20 years now, users have learned that the rightmost button takes you forward within a process, while the leftmost button takes you back. (Unless your writing system is right-to-left.)

I understand that time-honoured applications such as Editor, which date back to about 1937, do not adhere to that rule. But I do not understand why applications touted as modern, such as OneNote 2010, retain that misleading and  irritating mis-guidance of the user: I instinctively click the “cancel” button as it’s to the right of the “OK” button.

Killer UI This is killing me.

Will you please, please, please hire a UI expert and have that person go over your software’s UI?

Thank you.

Maybe in 2037.



Windows 7: Change input language without changing the keyboard layout

Thema Allgemein | Karl Geiger | Kommentieren 07/10/2010 | 09:33

For a number of iterations, Windows has had a feature by which you can change your input language. Such a change causes all programs that support the feature (eg Office) to adapt their spell checking dictionary to the new input language. There is one caveat: When the input language is changed, the keyboard usually changes to the new language as well. Language selector

For  instance, the keyboard on my trusted MBAir would always switch from DE to EN when I changed the input language from DE to UK (or US) via the input language button in the task bar. Whenever I’d press the “z” key I’d henceforth type a “y”. This was frustrating: While I do want to change the input language, I only have one keyboard on my machine, and I don’t want the keyboard layout to switch with the language. 

The problem: A very close look at the Clock, Language, and Region control panel, section Region and Language > Change keyboards or other input method > Change keyboards revealed that whenever I added a language, the default keyboard associated with that language was the “national” keyboard:

Keyboard Selection 

Someone at Microsoft must have had the brilliant insight that those who type in multiple languages always have a bunch of keyboards lying around, and whenever they’d switch the language, they’d hook up the matching keyboard to their machines. 

The solution: The “Show more” checkbox shown at the end of the list of possible keyboards then causes the list to expand so that all keyboards are shown. (NB: Checking a checkbox causes a list to expand…? That’s taking a lot of UI liberties with the checkbox metaphor… but I guess they haven’t gotten around to fixing that part of Windows yet. There still is a lot to clean up since Windows 95 came out 15 years ago).

More keyboards

Somewhere in that list I found my own keyboard, the one I use for my default language. I selected that keyboard, hit about 300 OK buttons, and since then I’ve been happily switching between input languages without keyboard layout frustration. Hope this helps!



Antique computer games

Thema Allgemein | Karl Geiger | Kommentieren 19/04/2010 | 22:11

Fallout small I am a great fan of antique computer games. Those from an era when most computers didn’t have separate graphics cards, and when you were the envy of all when you had a Voodoo card. Remember Baldur’s Gate? Icewind Dale? Myth (not Myst!)? Wing Commander III?

However, the best of these was Fallout (and its sequel, Fallout 2). Now the Mac OS X versions of these beauties haven’t been running for a long time on modern Macs, but there is a way to get Fallout to run in Windows Vista and 7 – and, thanks to Parallels, on the Mac as well. Since Fallout is ancient, it runs only with 256 colours (8 bit) in 640×480. And in Vista / Windows 7, the colours are pretty messed up.

To play the games, you’ll net to get timeslip’s Fallout 1 extension in version 1.18e here. This only works with a US 1.02 release of Fallout (which can be found as part of the so-called “Blood patch” here… it gets rid of any violence-level-limits imposed on some localised versions of Fallout, too). For Fallout 2, use version 1.29d, available here. The extensions also add some additional capabilities such as mouse wheel scroll in the inventory, play-in-a-window, and more.

Enjoy!



London’s going to the pots

Thema Allgemein | Karl Geiger | Kommentieren 28/03/2010 | 09:34

Report a pot hole Whenever I visit London these days I’m surprised at the grittiness that appears to have taken hold over London life. Panhandlers & Potholes, that’s what it boils down to. While the hotels still have shiny lobbies and beautiful doors, the receptionists are tired, the flowers have wilted, and the hotels are overbooked anyway so you end up in a basement room 50 yards down the street.

The roads are not in very good shape. To avoid the panhandler who’s waving his tin cup under your nose, you have to jump into the street, and chances are you’ll end up in a pot hole filled with oily water. Taxi drivers need to think about adding extra layers of suspension to their cabs as the ride can be quite unpleasant.

Trash is in the street, being blown this way and that, in front of Tiffany’s in Sloane Square, and half the underground lines don’t run, either because there’s a strike going on or because one of the cars has derailed.

In short, London is beginning to remind me of that other favourite city of mine, New York as it was back in the late Eighties, when the mayor was Ed Koch, and “Save water – shower with a friend” posters showed him and the police chief together behind the shower curtain.

So take an extra cushion and don’t forget your wellies when visiting London this year.



IE 8 and popup woes: fix

Thema Allgemein | Karl Geiger | Kommentieren 20/03/2010 | 14:54

I’m running Windows 7 via Parallels on my MBAir. For some reason IE 8 started to misbehave recently: Certain links just wouldn’t work. These were links that tried to open a new window, usually a pop-up, via JavaScript. IE tells me that a script error occurred, and that it is “No such interface supported”.

The solution (again, Google, not Bing was my friend): There’s a collection of scripts that re-register all dlls for the various IE 8 versions in the registry. Get the scripts here: iefaq.info/index.php?action=artikel&cat=42&id=133&artlang=en. Applying the script fixed my problem.



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