taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Usability: So, I’ve just found out about a useless feature of my microwave oven the hard way. The microwave’s manual notes:

Demo Mode

The Demo Mode is ideal for learning how to use the microwave oven. When set, functions can be entered without actually turning on the magnetron. The microwave oven light will come on, the fan will run and, if on, the turntable will rotate.

To Turn On/Off: The microwave oven and Timer must be off. Touch and hold TIMER SET.OFF for 5 seconds until 2 tones sound and ‘d’ appears on the display. Repeat to turn off and remove ‘d’ from the display.

Great! How useful! What a friendly UI! A tiny ‘d’ that indicates that, although your microwave looks like it’s cooking away, it’s actually doing nothing.

If you ever want to prank a friend with a Whirlpool oven, I’d recommend this one ;)

Tags: demo, display, feature, light, magnetron, microwave, mode, oven, timer, usability, way

Linux: I’m really getting into KDE 3.2. I’ve been looking for a music player that is better at handling large collections of MP3s better than the venerable XMMS, without much luck:

iTunes is, of course, the ‘gold standard’, but is Mac/Windows only, so that’s not going to work on my Linux machine.

Rhythmbox is getting there as an iTunes clone, but right now is woefully incomplete. It fails to play lots of my music, has serious interface shortcomings — you can rate songs, but then there’s no way to use those ratings, and you cannot edit any of the tag metadata in the released version.

JuK is the new KDE music player app. Initially, I wrote it off — it uses the clunky interface of ‘one big list’, at first glance.

But after Rhythmbox managed to confuse itself sufficiently so that it would only open as a 3-pixel-high window (seriously!), I gave JuK another try. Summary: it kicks ass.

It turns out that the multi-pane ‘artists, albums, and tracks’ mode of iTunes and Rhythmbox isn’t actually necessary, since JuK improves on it using a very nifty dynamic ‘Tree View’ mode.

Another nice feature is the MusicBrainz integration; it has built-in support for querying MB’s servers to get correct tag data for your music. In fact, its tagging support is fantastic — this is unsurprising, as it looks like it started off as a tagging app.

Being a well-written KDE app, it exposes some nifty scripting support via DCOP, and a quick look-over with KDCOP reveals a nice set of APIs — for example, running dcop juk Player playingString tells me the name of the track and artist playing right now. I’m not sure if there’s a way to register for callbacks on events like ‘track change’ just yet, here’s hoping…

No sign of rating support just yet, though; my dream player would allow me to rate my tracks, and then make a dynamic playlist which selects tracks by rating, playing the top-rated ones more often and never playing the bottom-rated ones. Here’s hoping it’s in the pipeline ;)

All in all, though, it looks like I’ll be giving JuK a try.

Tags: app, interface, juk, kde, linux, mode, music, player, rate, rhythmbox, support

Web: More on the Firefox crappy-movie-now-web-browser thing, from Chris Blizzard:

• A mind-controlled UI: but it only works if you think in russian!
• Flashback mode: whenever you hear a helicopter overhead the browser will
  • redirect all page loads to web.archive.org, circa 5 years ago.
  • Stealth mode: using specially malformed headers, Firefox will load your web pages and web servers will be unable to log your vists.
  • Mach 6 Technology: advanced compression algorithms will make the web faster than it’s ever been before!
  • Arctic compliant: you can land firefox on an ice floe in the middle of the north atlantic. Not sure why you would need this, but hey, we had some extra bandwith.

Tags: browser, firefox, flashback, helicopter, mode, overhead, redirect, russian, thing, web