Category: Design

Remove “Show all Menu Items” From Photoshop CS4

Update: John Nack from Adobe mentions a simpler solution for this particular menu behavior.

CS4 brings back the joy of the default ‘Show all Menu Items”.  As I’ve previously written when CS3 came out, there is a way to manually modify the Edit>Menu options to enable all menu items to be displayed.  It’s kinda lame that they enable this by default and offer no simple one-click solution to show all menu items.

I’m happy to report that my custom menu file works in CS4 just as well.  Just double-click the Everything_on.mnu file and Photoshop will launch, putting the settings into place.*

<rant>

As to why Adobe has this default probably goes into issues designing the interface of a complex application.  By hiding what they believe to be the least used items, it makes things appear simpler.

However, as a professional application I find this to be a bit oxymoronish.  Why not prompt the user on first run with a simple series of questions.

What do you plan on doing with Photoshop?

  1. I’m new here, just the basics
  2. Oh, you know, family photos, work on my personal site
  3. I’m a web guy, I usually start from scratch
  4. I’m a professional pixel wrangler, show me everything

Ok, while that’s by no means an ideal set of default options I hope you get the gist of what I’m trying to say.

Ask the user, don’t make assumptions and then make it possible to easily show all menu items.

</rant>

*With my limited testing this didn’t effect palettes or keyboard shortcuts, but YMMV.

Cars

This Friday my Dad, Marty and I went to the local car show.  It was a beautiful evening, filled with the smell of slow cooked turkey legs, funnel cake and exhaust fumes.  I brought the camera and took a few photos.  As the sun was setting I was able to capture some really good picutres.  That is, until the damn battery ran out. 🙂

 

 

For the full set visit my flickr.

Do No Evil Google Earth

So the recent 4.3 update to Google Earth brings some neat new features. But it also brings some not so great features. Most noticably is the fact that you must be an admin in order to install the latest version of GE. Old versions installed cleanly for any user. Not only must you be an admin, but you don’t actually install Google Earth from it’s own installer. No, now you must install Google Updater* in order to install GE.

I can’t find a simple link (one hosted by Google) to download just the GE installer. In fact the only way I found to get the GE only download is to be a non-admin user. The Google Updater will fail when you try to run it, and then give you the option to ‘download and install’ GE.

This is quite annoying and I hope that Google provides a simple like to download a stand-alone version of GE soon.

*Another pain is the fact that Google Updater installs a background service that runs all the time. iTunes, Adobe Reader, Google Updater, etc all have these little daemons running that added up bog down system resources. Bleah.

**Special thanks to Tim Snyder for pointing out the Google Updater background service. I didn’t notice that on the first draft of this article.

Not Home Again

An often overlooked design choice for mobile platforms is the Home button. Usually this button will instantly return you to the main OS screen for most major PDAs and smart phones. For as long as I can remember the most often used icon was that of a house.

And while the HTC Touch forgoes the Home icon on the ‘main menu’ button it does include it in the OS itself.

(update!) My good friend Josh tells me that the HTC Touch’s physical button is not a home button. It’s actually a big honkin’ Enter button. As in Select/Accept/Return. Wow. Even worse that I thought.

As you can see, even very recent devices use this house as a home icon approach. I understand where the designers are coming from. Humans are comfortable with their homes being the space that is their physical center. But it doesn’t make any sense from a UI perspective. (Or in the modern world where home takes on so many different shapes and sizes, not to mention the increased time we spend away from home, but I digress.) Home is where you launch everything from? Home is escape from this program?

Now let’s take a look at what Apple has done with the iPhone and it’s little brother the iPod Touch.

The icon used to return to the main OS screen. (Call it the desktop, springboard, etc) What does it represent? At first glance it’s just a trendy rounded-cornered box. Second glance, it’s a representation of the shape of the device itself. But even that is a bit off, as the device is rectangular and the icon is visibly square.

But wait, what do all the applications look like in the moblie OSX environment?

Small rounded-cornered boxes. Just like the main physical button on the device. Simple, clear iconography.