Adobe UI Gripes

Adobe UI Gripes is an awesome kvetch-blog with plenty of screenshots of the funny things that happen when Marketing makes the decision about when the software is ready to ship. I can already think of an error message dialog I need to screen capture next time I see it.

Ridiculously Lean

Xerox brags about how much time they're going to save P&G:

Using Lean Six Sigma-based methodologies, Xerox Global Services will deliver an enterprise-wide strategy, expected to free up hundreds of minutes of employee time annually.

I can't figure out any way to legitimately read that sentence to mean "hundreds of minutes of time per employee," can you?

So it's time to get out the calculator.

Given that P&G has 138,000 employees, even if we're as generous as we can be and call it nine-hundred and ninety nine minutes, that still works out to less than half a second per employee, per year...

But how much time is really spent waiting for laserprints of regular Office documents anyway? Not much, compared to how much time a large design firm spends spooling gigabytes to presentation printers.

I hate refill streams

Painfully familiar rant at Gizmodo called Why I Now Hate Epson Printers, and the answer boils down to, they've taken the refill stream of ink cartridges to an almost DRM-ed level of insanity.

Familiar for me; I just trashed my Canon and replaced it with a $150.00 networkable black and white laser printer. At 3,500 pages between cartridges, I hope to go many years without having to suddenly run out to Staples in the middle of a print job.

Visualization

In which I start out talking about decision trees, and end up talking about shelf sets.

Matt Neuburg has an interesting writeup at Tidbits of a decision making tool called Flying Logic. The program creates "intelligent" decision trees that provide visual feedback as to how to navigate the complex web of dependencies required in order to get to a goal.

Yes, you can do this with a whiteboard (or Omnigraffle), but those don't let you offload logic out of your head.

This is a tool that's probably only worth checking out for major initiatives, but more broadly, the power of visualization in aiding group decision-making can't be overstated. Without visual reference, planning meetings are essentially Socratic dialogs, which is unnecessarily hard work.

Even in the world of brand design, I am often sitting in a meeting talking about "the chosen design" and what needs to happen to it... without any visual reference. Looking around the table, you can see everyone's eyes focussing off in the middle distance as we recall what that design looked like. More unnecessarily hard work.

Think ahead about what needs to be in your library of visual reference material, and keep it at hand in your team's public discussion areas. For CPG design, this means comprehensive shelf sets, and reference for visual equity elements and physical materials. Don't have your meetings in conference rooms, you'll just have to bring your stuff there, and that's too much work, so you won't.

Yes

It's really true about surgery these days; everyone shows up asking you for your full name and birth date, and why you're here today, and which knee it is that they're going to operate on.

And someone really did inscribe the word "yes" on me, like a charm, to affirm to all who could see that I was going to get arthroscopic surgery on my left knee. Without seeing the charm, the surgeon cannot make the cut.

it takes a village.

Time for my story about how when I was a kid I lived in Pakistan for a year, and saw that road crews consisted of a lot of men, some donkeys pulling wagons with truck tires, lots of gravel, and a few shovels.

There was this technique they had where one man would hold the shovel normally and do the downstroke, and a second man would then pull on a big rope attached to the shovel shaft, to actually toss the gravel.

Seemed odd but I'm sure it makes sense in a world with more men than tools.

This picture takes it to a new extreme. I found it on a google search as I was trying to explain the concept to a team mate.

The particular circumstance that led me to be sitting in air conditioned comfort, using Lotus Notes to compose an explanation of the "two man shovel" technique is not interesting enough to be described here, but I do find enough need for the picture to keep it around.

desert of the real, part two

Same story in Italy; In 1997 and 1998, olive oil was the most adulterated agricultural product in the European Union... Even Carapelli; I quite like the Carapelli.

We'd just have to fix it all the time

That's the story about why IT won't tell people that they know why Illustrator gets the "can't find any linked images in any of your documents anymore" error periodically. This is a very annoying issue, as it means that one person on a team is creating files that nobody else can open without having to relink to all the placed images. And every file everyone else creates is similarly broken for them. It's kind of a waste of everyone's time. We've been dealing with it since we upgraded to CS2.

So the issue is that when a mounted volume disappears while Illustrator has files open, it recreates a "phantom" volume in which to store the files. This phantom volume is actually a subdirectory of the /Volumes/ directory. Then, when the mounted volume reappears, the OS says, "hmm, I already have a volume named "The Server," I think I'll refer to this one as "The Server-1." From that point on, an image that I put on /Volumes/The Server/will be linked in to an AI file at /Volumes/The Server-1/...

Obviously, that's a dumb thing to do, and it's related to the change in CS whereby you can't rename a folder containing a file that's currently open in Illustrator. If you do... Illustrator recreates the old folder hierarchy so that everything can be as it was when the file was first open. In a networked workflow, this sucks because you may not know what files your team has open at any particular time. The version control issues are nasty. Compare this to how a nicely written app such as Omnioutliner handles it.

It was kind of a surprise when I emailed IT saying I thought I'd figured out what caused the issue... only to find out they already knew how to fix it, but weren't publicizing it, because "we'd just have to fix it all the time."

So believe it or not, I'm not actually interested in making IT run from floor to floor manually fixing the issue. I don't want them to waste their time any more than I want my team to waste its time.

But until Adobe fixes the issue, somebody could write a simple little shell script to periodically check for and correct it on the user's computer.

Then all of us -- IT and the rest of the company -- could stop wasting our time today.

So somebody should do that.

the desert of the real

There was a lot of chat about China in the office this week -- the Mattel recall, the melamine in the pet food, et cetera. Since this town is the former home of Hasbro, there are a lot of connections to the toy industry, and of course we make our living embellishing the brand promise for the Consumer Packaged Goods sector.

But the China story that got me was the one about the counterfeit NEC factory -- not just an anonymous building secretly turning out fake NEC electronics, a fake NEC factory turning out fake NEC electronics.

To the extent that consumer brands form the epistemological bedrock of a consumer society, this pretty much undermines everything. It's like the Ship of Theseus which sailed out on a long voyage, over the course of which, every plank and rope was replaced... with cheaper components of unknown origin... sourced from the global marketplace...

I also dug this one up out of my del.icio.us tags, the story of a simulated Disneyland in China. Funny that one of the complaints the Japanese had about this simulacra was that the talent kept taking the giant heads off of their costumes, breaking the fictive dream.

worst of both worlds

Here's the progress window from the printer software installer from Canon. It manages to combine 8-bit Windows 95 style iconography with OS X "Panther" style brushed metal. Icky.