Martin Ebourne wrote: > On Wed, 2009-03-18 at 11:02 +0000, Peter Corlett wrote: >> On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 10:43:50AM +0000, Nicholas Clark wrote: >>> On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 10:38:16AM +0000, Peter Corlett wrote: >> [...] >>>> Have you ever actually *used* an OSX-era Mac? All of the usual useful >>>> RISC OS features appear to be present and correct. >>> Except the drag-to-save. >> Nope, OSX has that. >> >>> That's something still hateful to this day on every (other) OS - I have a >>> Filer/Finder/Explorer/whatever window open, and I can *see* where I want >>> to save the file to. A nice, clear to use, icon based system. >> If you see a file icon in a window title bar, that's a proxy icon which can >> be dragged and dropped just like Finder items. These may also be dropped >> onto file dialogs to prefill the location. > > How exactly do you choose the name of the file before you save it in > this manner?
I keep trying to use Skitch, this clever little image editing application targeted at the sort of things Joe Average wants to do on the Internet: namely scrawling captions on pictures of their cats and posting them somewhere on the web for all to see. And it does that really well, I like using it for putting nice looking captions and arrows on pictures for slides rather than my usual hand scrawled crayon drawings. But it does some things horribly. You can't CUT AND PASTE a portion of the image. There appears to be no way to do this ADVANCED IMAGE EDITING CONCEPT FROM THE FUTURE! http://help.skitch.com/topic.php?id=http://api.getsatisfaction.com/topics/42121 To crop, instead of rubber banding a portion of the image you instead grab the edges of the image and move them in. I find this sort of nice except there's NO WAY IN HELL I'D EVER HAVE FIGURED THAT OUT! Which is one thing going for the menu and hotkey paradigm. You can look through the menus. To find the crop tool necessitates a sort of "Where's Waldo" of the interface using the mouse to look around. Which brings me to the point, once you've made your lolcat masterpiece, how do you save the image? There's a button called "Save->" right next to a button called "History". Ok, a save button, great! Click it and there's this little animation of something moving into history. Apparently this saves the image to the Skitch history. So you're not really saving the image so much as taking a checkpoint. A sort of image version control. It's clever, but it's not what anyone else would call saving! How about Cmd-S? Nope, save to history. Let's check in the File menu... "Save As"! Ok, good. We'll do that and wind up with... a .skitch file. Thanks. No "Export" either. So how do you save a fucking image with this thing?! There's a little tab hanging off the bottom. It says "drag me" with a little image on it. Mouse over it (there's that Where's Waldo interface again) and you get a tooltip saying "drag me to the Mail, desktop, anywhere!" ...and then what happens? Well, you guessed it, this is how you export an image. Now instead of going through the file dialog with a file simple keystrokes (cmd-S, cmd-h, "Pictures", <enter>. Look ma, no mouse!) I have to switch to Finder, open a new window, cmd-h, "Pictures", switch back to Skitch, maneuver the Windows so I can see them both and drag it in. When you do, you get something like "skitched-20090318-174903.jpg" so now I have to rename it. There is an interface in Skitch to name the file and even change the format, it's a little textbox and drop down menu just above the tab. It's the right place to put it if you follow the whole crazy logic of this thing, but why is it sucking down my application space at all times? What if I want to save the file again, there's no hotkey! ...but WHY not have Export in the File menu as well? Is it not CONCEIVABLE that BOTH might be useful? That sometimes one way works well and other times the other does? That users might interact with an application differently? That it might be less frustrating for users to find their comfortable, expected interfaces (which in this case costs nothing) and allow them to discover your new (or apparently quite old) paradigm while still being able to get shit done? While I was struggling with all this, I downloaded and installed Gimp. It has its hate, but at least its a known hate. -- But there's no sense crying over every mistake. You just keep on trying till you run out of cake. -- Jonathan Coulton, "Still Alive"
