New Era

We are entering a new era - the era of counter-intuitive user interfaces.

Did you notice that every UI designer believes into wasting as much space on your monitor as technically possible? The panels that cannot be hidden or completely collapsed (Microsoft Office)? The toolbars that can no longer be docked where user wants or turned off (Adobe Acrobat Reader) etc.

What is the last 20 or so years of progress in software and hardware for then? I could dock Adobe Reader toolbar to the left side of the window in order to be able to view 2 pages side by side at 100% zoom in the versions up to 9. Starting with version X the toolbar is fixed. The effort to change the UI to fix the toolbar was apparently deliberate (20+ years of development experience tell me that). Just as deliberate were the efforts to introduce non-collapsible Appointments and People side-bars in MS Outlook.

The only question I have is when is KDE going to follow? They already screwed up the Plasma widgets such as panel settings and widget palette (with its horizontal scrolling design). Time will tell.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 08:13 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Apparently Linux can no longer print

Sent a couple of PDFs to my 2 laser printers: HP and Brother. Neither printed correctly right away:

• Brother flat out refused to print, displaying "Bad letter paper" error. The same file printed on the same printer from under Windows without issues the moment I sent the job.
• HP displayed "Load cardstock paper" even though I never ever used cardstock in my life. Same story - printed fine from the Windows machine.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 06:22 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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