On The Road with Vicky Lamburn

Arguably this happened before digital came along as some of the 35mm compact cameras from the ‘80s and ‘90s were pretty boring things to look at. A lump of plastic with some cheap chrome effect trims and buttons. Nothing to write home about.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that I tend to use things that get the job done above and beyond aesthetics and so forth so owning a Leica isn’t a fashion statement for me, it’s the tool that gets the job done. The fact that I still own, drive and run a pants car (a 1988 Ford Escort no less – and it looks a right heap) is a testament to the fact I couldn’t give a flying f*ck about keeping up with the Jones’ or indeed embark on a major binge of short term consumerist highs. I like nice things, I respect people who have nice things, but I’m no fashion victim myself.

In yet another conversation where I was told (no not asked, told) why I should dump my film gear I explained all the usual stuff – I like working with the aesthetic film gives, I like projecting my slides to family and friends, I enjoy developing and experimenting with processing my films and I adore working in the darkroom making prints. Then I thought of another reason.

It doesn’t apply across the board as this criticism applies to my EOS 3 and in fact most modern film SLRs too – but I increasingly don’t like the look, the feel and the actual usability of modern cameras. I like things to be simple. These days, EOS 3 included (so this isn’t an anti-digital rant, I don’t do those as they are futile) there are buttons and gizmos everywhere, it’s hard to use a camera sometimes without taking your eye off the ball. This applies less to SLRs as the viewfinder usually gives you all you need to know and a good one with good ergonomics will allow you to adjust the exposure, meter etc. all from your shooting grasp. Digital compacts less so.

 
Workmen (Leica M2, Summar f/2, Fuji Neopan 1600, Kodak Xtol 5mins 21C)

I hate all that clutter, it distracts you. A good camera can equally be one with all the buttons and menu options in the world, but also be one with a shutter speed dial, a shutter release and a rewind knob. Sure the latter is pretty basic (but also aptly describes the Leica M2!) but there’s little where you can go wrong or fumble.

The problem I have is that technologically you can’t fault the cameras. I might think that sounds a bit pap with regard to things like smile detection but if they help people who aren’t photographically adept take good photos then that’s a great thing. What I don’t like is the fact that there are heaps and heaps of options and buttons on many cameras now which really make the thing too complicated. It would be nice to also see a bit of older styling here and there. I prefer the way cameras were made to they way they are now made, although those barely 1” thick  digital compacts are pretty neat looking things.

Maybe Olympus’ Micro 4/3rds (Panasonic Lumix G1) for example will be a starting point for making cameras a bit smaller again and a little less cluttered?

There is of course the Epson (Cosina) RD1/s/x and Leica M8 but we’re not talking about a £150-200 compact camera there, we’re talking a lot of money, especially on the M8.2 at getting on for £4000 which is very questionable.

So that was my other reason, I like the feel and usability of older cameras more than the newer ones. Smile detection is great, but it isn’t necessary in the hands of someone who at least protests to know what they are doing!

Oh whatever can she mean? Has she in fact held hostage a talented and qualified web designer under her desk whilst passing off the work as her own? Or is she in fact stealing all of her designs from somewhere else? Maybe she has only been making websites since 2000 and not 1995?

Well none of those are the case. My first web sites were developed and tested using NCSA Mosaic on my Amiga in 1995, and all of my work is my own (except for the snippets of fixes that I occasionally need for Internet Explorer 6…)

My secret is in fact that very reason I have used a blog as my main website. I rarely come home these days and sit on my computers to do further website development. I get my quota at work 5 days a week. That’s not to say I am not interested in it really, far from the truth. I think the web is just about the most fabulous thing in the world. (Just think how different out lives are in the past decade because of the Internet and specifically the web.)

You don’t need a moving eulogy to the web though. What I mean is that since mid 2006 I have not maintained my own website, I use the blog as good way to get my work out on the web with minimal effort. I don’t run a CMS system (it’s only me after all, bit overkill) and I don’t run a web server.

Shadowplay Design Specification

Anyway I have knocked together my website over this weekend using a killer style that I have developed which I am going to be putting to good use elsewhere. This is my so-called Shadowplay design. It uses a number of things that I have wanted to achieve:

• Accessible design: First and foremost navigable easily with mouse, keyboard and other input devices.
• ‘Scalable’ in two senses:
  • Just as suitable for small sites and large sites alike
  • Increasing/Decreasing the font size yields a gracefully shrinking/enlarging ‘zoom’ as found in IE 7 and Opera and soon Firefox 3.  (NB: This is based on my flex CSS design idea but this is slowly becoming redundant with the majority of browsers having page magnification instead of vanilla text size increase. This is a back of a fag packet calculation that ~40% of users use IE7 and soon 15% of the public will use Firefox 3.)
• Little to no CSS ‘hacks’: I detest with a passion CSS hacks using commenting side effects. I respect these were once needed if you wanted your site to work on Gecko based browsers (Firefox/Netscape 6+), IE 5 (Mac and PC) and IE 6 but these days–no need if you know what you’re doing and your target is:
  • Internet Explorer 6+, Safari 2.0/Konqueror, Firefox (Gecko based browsers) and Opera.

  That is pretty much 99.9% of the web browsing platforms in use today (according my statistics.) The only ‘hacking’ is PNG transparency for IE6 via Javascript and the DirectX filter, and a couple of selective comments for IE6. That’s it.

  This is good because it means the core CSS file for screen output is clean and when IE 6 dies (hopefully a slow painful choking death…) I won’t be batting my CSS styles into shape with drastic surgery removing obscene looking CSS comment hacks that I will have long forgotten their function.

  That said I am still catering for IE6 as it’s the most modern Internet Explorer browser that can be run on Windows 98, 2000 and NT 4 (Of which cumulatively makes up ~10% of the browsing market) although I’m really hoping it’ll start to dwindle into 2008 allowing me to leave some of the slight IE6 glitches ‘unfixed’ as I think there needs to be an element of carrot in front of the horse here.

• Modern design that leverages the best of CSS based design, contemporary web design trends (the dreaded 2.0 aesthetic which on the whole is downright gorgeous in my book) and using ‘progressive Javascript’ that doesn’t break the site in its absence but subtly improves things without interfering with accessibility. (jQuery)
• Be a design that doesn’t shout about how good it is, but subtle and something you just appreciate its aesthetic without necessarily consciously acknowledging it as such. The same could be said about the commodity value of Helvetica as a beautiful design that’s just there.
• Small nimble size: How does 90KB in its vanilla form sound including jQuery! This includes all the graphics including gorgeous transparent PNGs.
• Valid XHTML 1.1, CSS 2.1 and up to WCAG 1.0 AA (Priority 2) spec.

As you can see the design brief was quite a tight one. And I am glad to say that I have met all the things I wanted to with this design.

Open Source

The other great aspect is that I developed it using open source free software. Virtually everything worked as well as it has done on proprietary systems in fact in most respects it was better as my humble T40 just soldiered through the work without missing a heartbeat. Whereas I would usually use Notepad, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator I used GEdit, Gimp 2.4 and Inkscape. Apart from one minor skirmish which infuriated me in Gimp it worked a treat. In fact I do have virtually whole hearted praise to the Gimp team as 2.4 is such a vast improvement in my book as a Photoshop user that it’s just not funny. It’s like using a new program with all the annoying as hell bits ripped out of it. The new design uses graphics generated solely with Inkscape and Gimp.

GEdit does some funny things though on occassion, pasting doesn’t always happen at the cursor insertion point but I just kept an eye on this and I was fine. I don’t know whether this is a bug or not?

Summary

Anyway I’m going to quit jabbering on and I’m going to upload my new website (which will be a companion to this blog, the blog remaining my main area of concentration online) and post the link here and then you can decide for yourself

The other good thing is I have a website of my own to brandish at Barcamp London 3 next weekend Fancy that, was I the only web developer at Barcamp Brighton without my own personal website that I had designed?

It’s often cited that Linux just looks bad put simply. A lack of ‘professional artists’ some might say even, but that’s a ludicrous statement. What Linux does well is promote absolute configurability with the user interface and the whole system. Counter this with Mac OS X’s default “Blue” and “Grey” theme, and Windows XP’s Blue, Silver and Green (Vista has a couple more options but they all look like ‘Aero’) and you can see that by default the interface on Windows looks much the same from system to system. In fact the basic window widgets of Windows haven’t changed since Windows 95 (Close is still an ‘X’ etc.)

In fact Mac OS X has elements from 1984 in it–the Apple menu for one and the window resize remains in the bottom right hand corner; as does the system menu bar at the top of the screen.

Linux however can with KDE and Gnome (and others) be configured so differently that what one person sees as Ubuntu can end up looking not too dissimilar to OpenSUSE, or Fedora, or not even Linux at all (which apart from the Jaguar-esque tabs is very close.)

The point is Linux can look pretty darn beautiful but the problem is that out of the box it’s very easy for someone with no sense of aesthetics to come in and change it all and whilst they think it looks good (they’ll change it again in a few days when they get bored) it often looks like a dog’s dinner. Mac OS X and Windows are good at being firm on the user’s shoulder saying, “We’ve given you a couple of colour variations but you can’t easily change this to something totally different.” Microsoft reputedly disabled skinning in Windows XP for this very reason as users may have ended up creating a Windows system that was inconsistent(…) and also couldn’t guarantee their apps on a third party skin that might be incomplete.

Linux has its inconsistent interfaces but on the whole most of them are up to scratch now. Again it’s a bit of a pain that there is more than one gadget (there’s an Amiga term if there was one) toolkit like GTK, QT etc. but overall the system looks more consistent than it ever has done. Windows has its fair share of inconsistencies too, the much vaunted ‘Add Fonts’ dialog in the Fonts directory that has survived since Windows 3.0 (1990), Windows 2000-eque 16 colour icons here and there and Win16 (WoW)/DOS windows uisng an old skin… Mac OS X with its Aqua, Staintless Steel and Plastic interface types (being refined in Leopard.)

Linux (or rather Gnome and KDE mainly, as Linux isn’t the desktop itself but for simplicity’s sake) isn’t therefore the only inconsistent user interface experience. The reason it can look so rubbish is the same reason most people’s Word documents look awful because they have found they have 50 fonts and 16.7 million colours to choose from and they want to use them all at once.

Some distributions look ‘just OK’ out of the box, Ubuntu and Fedora are in that for me. Some look drop dead neat like OpenSUSE 10.3 and Mandriva which just look great, particularly OpenSUSE’s green which is just fab. Some look corporate and steady like Slackware and so forth.

The point is Linux doesn’t look amateur because it’s Linux, but because the configurability of Linux allows for people without the sense of human interface design considerations and basic aesthetics to slap down a nasty theme with ease; where as Windows and Mac OS X need skinning engines, or system file adjustments.

Here’s my Ubuntu desktop (Gnome) with a nice background and a simple Window Border (Splint), Clearlooks Classic Controls and a green lead background – blues and greens are complimentary hues. No Compiz in action but I don’t need it and it’ll only slow down my Radeon 7500 (but it does work.)

My Ubuntu 7.10 Desktop with Tracker Instant Search

So food for thought, should some distributions limit the skinning capability to improve consistency, usability and the general professional image of the distribution for it to be perhaps accepted for a widespread corporate roll out?

I’m all for configurability; but you won’t catch me using a black user interface because it’s too much with my Thinkpad being black but I also find it straining on my eyes.