Greenies Blog

Hi all,

meanwhile I am kind of used to Ubuntu (though currently the PC is sent back due to what is most probably a hardware-failure). And while I still think that Ubuntu is far, far behind Apple when it comes to usability and other areas, I really don’t see a way for me to return to OS X. The reason: Apple itself, or better their behaviour regarding their Big Brother-like censorship in their appstore.

First of all, I love OS X, I really do, and the iPhone looks like possibly one of the most user-friendly gadgets made so far. But despite all of this, I think, the “price” I have to pay for Apples’ products is just too high.

While I never developed anything for the iPhone or iPod-touch, I have been annoyed for Apples’ dictatorship, its’ arrogant, usually illogical and incomprehensible behaviour, when it comes to disallowing apps to show up in their store. But this last thing they did (throwing out lots of apps with possibly sexual content) does it for me.

Not for the first time, Apple set up an highly discussable rule. And not for the first time, it did not even have the guts to follow their own rules!

While Apple wants us to believe that it is following requests of annoyeed women or worried parrents, that’s clearly not the case.

Obviously, in Apples’ eyes, showing boobies is okay, if your company is named “Playboy”, but it’s not, if you are a no-name developer. Huh?!?

Well, Apple, this is what I think about you at the moment:

Sorry Apple, but all you did in my eyes, was to show me what a totally hypocritical company you are. Seriously, currently I think your behaviour is nothing less than disgusting. Contrary to what you seem to think, it is not your job to teach me or anybody else moral standards. And even if it were, I think that you suck at doing so! Or, to say it in a clean language (let’s not forget, there are women and children out there who obviously get the shock of their lifetime when they see naked breasts): Apple, you have failed big time.

There are far more competent persons out there for teaching me moral standards, and I think most of us are able to find our own rolemodels, thank you. You, in the contrary, seem to think that your users are mindless idiots, who can’t make this decision.

But even if we can’t, it’s still not your job to teach us, Apple. And finally, I deeply believe that if I buy hardware, I am the only person in the world to decide what I do with it and what not.

Thanks, Apple, this will make my decision far easier to abandon your products from my shopping-list in the future (and to save a whole lot of money for not having to buy artificially and unnessarily crippled hardware anymore). And as long as you don’t change this behaviour considerably, your oh-so-shiny-products can go to hell.

Hi again,

I have been “playing around” with Ubuntu for maybe half a year now an it may seem a bit bold to state that I could teach the open source community what they’re doing wrong or where they have failed upto now. Anyways, I want to point out one specific point that is *highly* annoying, and this point is “consistency”. I guess I have to explain that a little more:

Coming from OS X, I remember one thing in particular that I liked about working with it. It’s the consistency in using applications. There are a few things you can rely on when using OS X in as much as maybe 99% of all the cases:

1) Shortcuts

On OS X, I can be almost as-sure-as-hell, that the key-combination of “Apple-Q” quits an application, for example. The same goes for other *very* common shortcuts, like “Apple-X” for “cutting”, “Apple-C” for “copying” or “Apple-V for “pasting” stuff. This is not true for open-source apps and it is a *very* bad thing imho.

The second part of “consistency”.

2) The position of certain menu-items.

In fact, I forgot two important menu-entries within OS X-applications. One is “Help” which is always found (if I remember right) on the rightmost-menu of an application and is most always accessed with “Apple-h”. The other one is “Preferences”, which (I think) is always in the leftmost main-menu-point and is most often accessed with “Apple-,”.

The point I wanted to make is: Even if one does not use these Shortcuts, on OS X one can be sure to find the Preferences in the same menu in almost every application. The same goes for the Help-function.

—

Yes, one can state that because of the nature of the open-source community, such a standard can’t be forced, but I think that’s untrue. The reasion why on OS X one can rely on these shortcuts is because Apples’ own functions automatically provide these shortcuts without the need for a programmer to specifically state that he wants it to have. If you use Apples own development-tools and use the standard menus that Xcode (Apples’ development tool), the shortcut is just there. This, imho, is what the Linux/Unix/Ubuntu-developers should do as well. A developer should not have to care for shortcuts for menu-entries that are as often used as Quit, Copy, Paste, etc. In fact, Ubuntus’ (or is it Gnomes’?) programming-libraries should provide a basic application-structure that already includes certain menu-items with an always consistent menu-shortcut, in always the same place.

While I do not like Apples’ paranoic tendency to try to control the users’ behaviour on too many steps, I *do* like the consistency of OS X. And *this* is definitely something, the open source-community should adopt, imho. Putting a certain menu-item in the same place in (almost) every application would be good for “newbies” or people who just do not like shortcuts, and using well-known standard shortcuts for commonly used functions would serve “geeks” who want to do things without the mouse. Until then, people in both groups will be annoyed by too many of these inconsistencies.

or

why the gaming industry destroys imagination

Hi all,

I guess after reading this article the one or the other may regard me as awfully old-schoolish, heh.
But I couldn’t care less .
Today, after a short conversation I realized what bothered me with a lot of “modern” computer games. It is that so many of them are destroying the players abilities to imagine. And there are three things I want to point my finger to, to illustrate my belief:

1) Graphics

Maybe “destroy” isn’t the right word. Maybe “hindering” is better. Todays’ games often hinder ones’ imagination to flow and grow. To explain why I think so, I have to go back in time many years…

My first computer was a C-64. It was released around 1982, was equipped with a whopping 1 MHz-CPU and its’ highest resolution was 320×200 pixels, showing 16 colours at the same time at best. If you look at the resolution of modern computers, you can probably imagine (if you *can*, heh), how tiny and blocky all the graphics on this old computer must have been. In fact, at least in the first few years of the C-64′s existence, so many games showed barely more than just a few obscure lines and weirdly coloured graphic-patterns. One had to use the own imagination to fill out the holes the graphics left in the world the game-designers created.

And this, imho, was the main reason for the need of using ones’ own imagination. The fact, that the graphics were so poor (though, on later developed games, graphic designers did brilliant jobs in creating oh-so-beautiful graphics, sometimes one wouldn’t believe that this was the same computer as the one on which a few dozen lines (or pixels) represented game-characters just a few years back). But sorry, I am rambling, so back to the point.

The problem I have with soooo many modern games is that they leave absolutely no room for imagination. *Everything* is shown in high-detailed brilliant graphics or (even worse) shown in lengthy video- sequences that show even *more* details and fill out even more “gaps” in the story. And in becoming more and more sophisticated, the game graphics gradually removed the need to imagine *anything* because *everything was presented on a silver tablet*.

2) Stories

Again, back to my C-64 days. I fondly remember text-adventures from a company named “Infocom”, which quite likely produced a bunch of the best text-adventures *ever*. These games were interactive novels in the true meaning of the word.

3) Riddles

This aforementioned point is highly connected to Riddles. Nowadays, even if there are “adventures”, they have “riddles” that are so often illogical (meaning: one can’t possibly think about the solution by thinking logically, without trying totally ridiculous things or trying all possible “combinations” (which often means: just click endlessly on everything you find until something works). Or, the other bad possibility, the riddles are laughably easy, so one can just run through and the game is over too fast. Now, I certainly know that especially the last point can’t be fulfilled satisfyingly for *everyone*. Tough puzzles could be way too tough for an adventure-newbie, but back in the times of the C-64 there was enough variety for everyone. Nowadays it seems, about the only type of player that is satisfied is the action-oriented type (and don’t tell me that looking for secrets in Doom or similar games is on the same level as solving a riddle in an Infocom text-adventure game. It’s not, it’s not the same level of complexity and it’s not even playing in the same *galaxy*, imho. And you do absolutely not know what you are talking about, sorry).

So what does all of this rambling boil down to? The thing is: I miss games that let my imagination flow, I miss games that provide a sophisticated story that truly represents the electronic equivalent of a books’ novel and I miss riddles that I can solve by thinking logically (or “logically” in the context of a game, meaning that ridiculous actions could be “logically” right because of a certain game-scenario).

That’s it, now tell me what an old fool I am, not appreciating nowadays oh-so-stylish game graphics and fast-paced action, heh.