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Previous: Francis X10 switches | Main | Next: Yahoo Personals ad
February 26, 2005 12:01 AM
Broken: "The Eye" in Compupic
Mike Mesenbring writes:
"I was fooling around with the preferences on Compupic Pro 6.2, a photo-viewing program. One of the preferences, however was strangely and unexplainedly disturbing..."
[Yes, I know there may be a reason for this. It's "broken" because it *sounds* unsettling.]
Gasp! Compupic has allied with Sauron! All hope is lost, unless Photoshop can deliver the one patch to the Mountain of Recycle Bin!
"Photoshop" is not alone in its quest, "PSP" and "MSPaint" lend their aid in the terrible journey, facing the perils of the "blue screen of death", and the "popup wall of destruction", they carry on, through the caves of "Program Files", bearing the gifts of "Hidden" and "Read Only" but are so easily thwarted by "Access Denied" But then "Administrator" lends his aid with his "Full Access" command line, and they reach the summit of "Recycle Bin" and hurl the "Patch" into its pits, but their quest is not over, they must "Empty Recycle Bin" before all is complete.
wow, my entire computer is actually an epic quest... i never knew... but yeah, i like that, not broken... but funny... if you right click on it does it say "Ouch" instead of "What's This"?
That UI is broken, or at least needlessly gimmicky. Is it really _that_ important to show off your graphics skillz? And then show off how you can turn your fancy graphics on and off at the flip of a checkbox?
A simple dialog without all the fluff works just as well.
This isn't so much broken, as just plain stupid. The program, not the poster. It does what I suspected it might, allow the little eye up in the corner to follow the mouse. Here is the explanation from the online users guide (PDF_
Allow the Eye to watch you work - enables the animation of the CompuPic Eye in the upper right corner.
Why would someone waste the time to program a moving eyeball into the program. (This is probably the same reason you can turn on and off their graphical features in the menu. Too much time on their hands and thought it was "cool"
Two reasons, take your pic:
1] Sometimes people like gimmicks. Sure, not serious users, but they may be trying to endear themselves to younger or less computer-savvy users. As to whether this works, we'd have to ask them.
2] Some applications (at least used to) have a feature that lets users know where the mouse is. This (used to be) a problem on older laptops, with poor brightness and worse response. The mouse was too small to show up merely by waving it around. There were various ways of highlighting the position of the cursor (such as tapping a key to produce a targeting-like effect), but an arrow (or any kind of pointer) onscreen is one way of letting the users know *continually* where the mouse is (at least approximately).
User: Allow the Eye to watch you work...off.
( o )~ I'm afraid I cannot do that, Dave.
User: Why not? Also, I'm not Dave.
( o )~ This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
User: What mission? I have a mission?
(Mission Impossible theme starts playing)
Fuzzy, you have a better sense of humor than I do!
(notices "Shadow" on the list)?!?!?In the immortal words of Sonic the hedghog, FAKER!!!!!
(I hope you get that...)
Guess no-one got my joke. Play Sonic Adventure 2: battle. Play hero side. beat metal harbor. Watch the cutsceen, and as Sonic talks to Shadow, take a look at the coment he makes. On-Topic: "the eye"? Disturbing.
Now that Dan Rather has retired, is this what he is going to do in his retirement, still working for the Eye? Making sure those Word Dox are authentic?? Maybe Mr Mesenbring is the real source of all Rather's reports! Mike, I think Dan shorted you some pay!
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Previous: Francis X10 switches | Main | Next: Yahoo Personals ad
Yikes! Sounds like something Microsoft would do.
Posted by: Ryan Heneise at February 26, 2005 12:35 AM