Easily Distracted

(Had this sitting in my drafts for about a week… time to finish it up and push it out!)

After setting up my Wacom Graphire tablet on my laptop (copy-pasting some xorg.conf stuff) I decided to leave it on my bed. If I leave it on, with the Gimp (graphic application) open and the tablet plugged in, I will often do a little doodle before going to sleep. So these have been done while lying down, usually in (much) less than 5 minutes.

One thing I really like about comics is the expression (often exaggerated) portrayed through the characters’ faces.

This is something I don’t really have much practice with, so I started looking at some online comics that are good at it (and that I read): Penny Arcade, Octopus Pie, Butternutsquash, C&H… (Note: xkcd is excellent but obviously doesn’t even use facial expressions.)

And this will be a good test of wordpress’ new gallery functionality combined with my hacky theme: I present, doodle gallery!!

An online comic is something I would love to do, but I would need to develop characters and story and be committed. Trying to illustrate different expressions is fun. Now accepting ideas.

(Online) Comics I’ve been reading

• Butternut Squash – Start at the beginning. Polished style. Crude humour. Hilarious. (Thanks for pointing this out, Jon!)
• Kukuburi – Start at the beginning. Elaborate style. Adventure. Bit of a slow start. Actually the plot’s still unravelling, but the art is pretty and the story is getting interesting. (By the same guy as BNS.)
• Octopus Pie – Start at the beginning. Well written. Funny. Simple style.
• Basic Instructions – Start Anywhere. Sterile “instruction manual illustration” style. *gasp!* Kinda wordy, but has its moments.

Some fascinating TED videos I’ve been watching

• Colour and pattern changing sea life (the octopus is amazing!) All the following videos were in the “related” section.
• The Mantis Shrimp will kick your ass. I remember my diving instructor pointing one of these little guys out to me, but warning not to get too close, because it could crack my mask. Very cool.
• The odd Mola Mola fish. Great presentation and presenter.
• The life of ant colonies from someone who’s been studying them for 20 years.

Some books I’ve been reading

• Python – Essential Reference by David Beasley: This book is exactly what it says; an essential reference. The first section is an incredibly concise introduction to Python and should be read by everyone. The rest is nice to scan over to see what’s available and keep as a reference. I’d compare it to the K&R C programming book. This book is meant for programmers.
• The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman: Pretty much considered required reading material for usability folk. Well written, lots of examples, and often entertaining.
• Character Design for Mobile Devices by NFGMan: I’ve looked at every beautiful, full-colour page. Some great pixel art and history in here. But I’ve read almost nothing. I didn’t really get it to read, I guess. Makes my desk look h-a-w-t.

A while ago (a year?!), I made this cute little bug graphic for Nemiver, a C/C++ debugger for GNOME.

Nemiver has since changed icons. More recently, Shirley pointed out to me that my bug had been used on a Mac site! (Of all things!) Heh. I only posted the graphic on the Nemiver mailing list, so I was really curious how the author of the post on the Mac site, Tanya Palta, managed to find my graphic. I’m guessing it was a Google Images search for “dead bug”. I’m actually rather flattered that my graphic was picked for this post, but it’s worth mentioning that the license wasn’t followed – which is par for the course with the Internet. The image and it’s source was (and remains) released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License (It’s a mouthful, but it’s pretty simple).

The bug originally started with this:

I remember Jesse commenting that it looked like a barbeque. Hah… so it did! I went through lots of different iterations:

And ended up with the graphic at the top of this post. I also tried simplifying it and making the eyes bigger to support lower resolutions, but I didn’t really put any effort into fitting it within the Tango guidelines.

Anyway, that’s this bug’s life story.

All images and SVG source available in zip file (dead_bug.zip – 330KB) under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. Images created in Inkscape, an excellent opensource vector art program.

I’ve removed a lot of the noise from the theme. This includes all of the gradients and many of those nasty, sharp lines. Put Categories and Time at the top of each post, with Tags and Comments at the bottom. Made both smaller. Put everything on search results page. Added links to Technorati and del.icio.us from Tags and Categories pages. Changed the gradient images for header and footer (reminds me of rust).

Screenshots of some of the changes:

Original and loud:

Removed gradients:

Added solids:

Changed colours:

Some more touch-ups:

What you should be seeing now:

Comments / suggestions?

I finally updated the theme on my blog. Please take a look and try various things (in different browsers, if possible) and report any bugs in the comments section. Suggestions welcome, as well. Demands can go elsewhere… (you know who you are!)

This theme isn’t 100% done, but it’s functional and I wanted to get it up. The only thing I really miss is the turtle. But he could come back. Or something else….

If I was just writing a theme for Gecko-based browsers (Firefox, Mozilla, Epiphany, etc) I would have been done ages ago. And if I do more wordpress theme stuff in the future, I vow to follow the KISS principle at all times. Would have saved me much time! Rather than try and figure out what’s wrong and how to fix it, just do something simpler! Maybe my next theme will be plain text. Probably not, though… I’m a sucker for tinkering.

Update: I forgot to mention, my goal with the theme on IE was simply getting it to display reasonably well (no giant bugs, and can be viewed). It will, in fact, look and feel better on Firefox. (I have been using ies4linux to test it for IE 6 on on my computer.)

Quite a lot of UI modifications have been made to Pidgin since 2.0, in a relatively short time. I’m happy to say, it’s gradually getting better. The window has a minimum size which prevents UI elements from being cut off, the text formatting has been collected into a drop-down menu, and it generally looks much cleaner.

I’ve been lurking on the pidgin-devel list keen on UI discussion, as I think it’s an area where pidgin can improve greatly. I spent an admittedly long time in The Gimp illustrating a couple UI ideas in the form of mockups.

First, this is the target conversation window mockup, done by Hylke Bons.

Now, this is what the conversation window currently looks like (minus the comments, of course).

I’ve basically modified the target UI slightly.

Full-size user avatar

It’s nice to see the avatar how it’s meant to be seen. It makes the conversation more unique for each individual. I think the vertical space will eventually be needed as pidgin implements more protocol features, anyway. Some people complain that too much space is occupied by such an infopane, but a button which toggles full-display and no-display (or small-display) could easily be implemented. I was thinking you could just double-click a tab, but when I tried it to see if that did anything, it let me give my contact an alias within the tab! Feature discovery! heh.

Selectable text

Something that has always irritated me with nearly every modal window: why not make text selectable? I can’t think of any reason why not to do it. It doesn’t change the UI at all, and will make it more useful to those copy-paste users – there’s a lot of them. (Get user info – which is terribly delayed, and fails often – should only be needed when the user wants to select information that is not displayed right in front of them.)

Clickable links

Any email links should behave like a mailto: link, displaying a menu with the options of writing an email to that address or simply copying the email address. The same should be done for links inside the chat window, “open in browser” and “copy link location.”

Protocols

Pidgin handles many different protocols: MSN, Yahoo!, ICQ, IRC, etc. The idea is that you can use a single IM client to communicate to all of your friends. Many people use multiple protocols for whatever reason (some of my friends are on MSN, the rest on gChat, a couple on ICQ). But really, having a bunch of accounts for the same person cluttering your contact list does more harm than good. A good way to overcome this is to use the “Expand” item in the contact list context menu: right click on a contact, and select Expand in the context menu, then drag all this person’s different accounts into this expanded contact. When in a conversation window, you can change the active protocol used to chat with your friend by using the Send to menu item. But the problem is, you have to go up and check the menu to see what the active protocol is.

The entire Send to menu can be replaced by a protocol button in the infopane that acts as both the protocol indicator and selector. The space to the right of the protocol button can be used for protocol specific functionality, as they become available (video, voice, whiteboard, etc). Using the button to change the active protocol could change the available actions to the right of it.

Tab size

A lot of discussion/debate/flame is going on with the purpose of reducing tab-size (removing the status, and close icons). Personally, I think the status icon in the tab is very useful for seeing the status of the people you have open conversations with and should not be removed. If you have 10+ conversations open, you can always right-click on a tab and get a nice list. Sean Egan (the lead developer) jokingly put forward the idea of having the conversation tabs on the side, which actually doesn’t look bad. Maybe the format-bar and info pane would have to go on the right of the chat window… not sure how that would work.

Update Aug 5th

• First of all, if you want the developers to hear your thoughts on this issue, you should discuss it on the pidgin-devel mailing list. If you just want to follow any discussion from the list, you can browse the archives.
• I noticed this post has been dugg.
• After a little feedback on the mailing-list, I’ve got another mockup. I’ve added a dropdown indicator to the button when the active conversation-buddy has more than one contact, and put example contact lists for clarity.

  

Update Aug 14th

It’s true. Pidgin doesn’t have a Send button. I had no idea this bothered some people, but I guess it could be made more obvious.