I finally finished my Max OSX style skin! Head over to the options page and select “Aqua” from the drop down menu.
There’s only one catch. It won’t work right under Internet Explorer on a PC. Microsoft has this stupid bug involving transparent .png files, so it’ll look really weird on there. However, if you’re using Mozilla or IE on a Mac, you’re good to go!
You know, there’s a feeling you get when you know all a program’s features — including hot keys — that I think few people have experienced lately.
SuperPaint. A one-meg program from 1993. I know by muscle memory everything it can do. Vector graphics. Bitmap graphics. Transparency and fill-modes on both. All palettes accessible via hotkey. Filters. Vector textures. And, most importantly, drag-stretching a vector object is treated differently from other transformations. What I mean is this: In a normal draw program, if you stretch a 45-degree rotated square, you get a squat diamond shape. In SuperPaint, the “stretch” applies to the original square, before the rotation applies, so that you get an elongated, tilted rectangle.
This one trivial attribute of SuperPaint’s internal logic makes it the most perfect available program for drawing Isometric. No other vector graphics tool I have used works this way.
With online cartoonists, you can go back through their archives and watch their knowledge of their software get progressively cruder. While their latest work, if they’ve been doing it long enough, shows a really refined usage of their software. Assuming they’re not Steve. It’s like there are all these different media out there — the way traditional artists learn oils, acrylic, water colors, we learn PhotoShop, Flash, or whatever. Because it all comes out through the computer screen, there’s an illusion of unity.
Anyways.
So I’m at The Computer Store.
It’s 8:40 AM.
Saturday.
I’m behind the service counter eating Snak Pak Cheezy Bitz Peanut Butter Crackers.
Wearing an “X… The Future Is Here” T-shirt.
There are like 50 people in this small store milling around for the OS TEN RELEASE.
Floor manager has marked a printer-paper box as a ballot receptacle for the “Win A Copy Of Os X” drawing. He used not just a permanent, but an ultra-permanent marker. I can feel my face, my eyes and lips, burning from the toluene vapors. Neurons sloughing off my medulla and puddling around my brainstem.
So I’m coming live to you from the OS Ten release and I must say I feel sorry for all these people who got up at got knows what hour to queue up in front of the store at 7:45, eighteen deep, to come look at Ten. I mean, we should at least have some carnival clowns or a ferris wheel in here to liven things up, I mean at least a monkey grinder, come on man. OOH LOOK THE “DOCK” and “AQUA” ! THE ICONS RESEMBLE POLISHED GEMS!
My boss just told me he thought it was a bust. We weren’t selling very many copies. He wouldn’t buy OS Ten. It sucks, now. It’ll be great in six months. Shrug. He walked away. Then a gum wrapper came flying through the air, caromed off my thigh and into the trash can. “Ha! Bank shot off the knee!”
My coworker fears the “weenies” who are going to be bringing their sick computers in to us, having hosed the BSD-based installations of MacOS through their insistence on tinkering with THAT WHICH THEY UNDERSTAND NOT. The Terminal (a command-line interface to OS ten’s BSD foundation) provides infinite ways for them to mess up their systems.
With MacOS 9 or earlier, you could fix almost any problem with one of three methods short of a clean install:
With 10, excuse me, X, it’s going to be like, “Oh you’ve got malformed XML in your mtab which is causing your Zip disk to emit that horrible clicking noise. You need to renice your nohups to 0xfdeadbeef” and blood will start gushing from the customer’s ears. “What?? What are you talking about, you horrible technical person? I can’t understand you!!” Whereas before, we could just say, “reinstall the Zip software.” Well, I hope I’m wrong and you can still deal with things at that high level of installers and control panels, because otherwise the answer to every question is going to be, “bring it in. We’ll fix it.”
Whew… the very thought of building a consumer OS on BSD… it’s like some horror movie where a band of occultists form a corporation and start selling people demon powered cars.. only the customers don’t understand the black creeping power that lurks within their engine compartment and due to their throwing the salt over the wrong shoulder it bursts out one day in tentacular horror and devours them.
So yeah, I’d wait six months.
So I’m working at The Computer Store, that’s it’s name, just “The Computer Store” With underline and everything, relic of the old days of Macintosh arrogance.
Things behind the service counter:
“You can hang up drawings back here,” Mia is assuring me.
arg arg will finish post later
Ha ha! I might be getting out of retail and joining the Brotherhood of the Cut Thumb and the TORX wrench…
Wait. Let me back up.
On Wednesday, November 15th, I got a call informing me I was hired at The Computer Store. I commenced to work my retail position on the 20th…
After nine days of doing little besides answering the phones, while watching the computer’s service (repairs) department drowning in work, I received an email from the service manager looking for anyone who could fill the gap.
I fired off a resume and within 10 minutes he showed up and promised to talk to my manager and her manager and see if we could work something out.
r0x0r