When I plug in headphones, the Realtek HD Audio Manager shows this informative alert:

I created Twittch 161 days ago. Shortly after launching the web site, I added the Google Friend Connect social bar, allowing people to “join” and leave comments.

So now, 52 comics later, the statistics are not impressive:

• 38 total comments
• zero spam (great!)
• 9 of the comments were from me, replying to other comments
• 1 comment was along the lines of “where did my last comment go?”

So basically, after 5+ months people left around 28 comments. Here are the Analytics stats:

• 167,728 visits
• 145,880 absolute unique visitors
• 412,014 pageviews

I’m not sure how to explain it, because I receive far more comments here with Wordpress and an annoying CAPTCHA that probably deters a lot of people from commenting. I considered replacing the Friend Connect Social Bar with their Comments gadget instead, but ultimately I decided to give Disqus a shot instead.

I will follow up after a few weeks (and some new comics) to let you know how it goes.

I’m finding Adobe Illustrator to be quite inefficient and hard to learn. In comparison to Inkscape or Xara, Illustrator seems to require more keystrokes for similar tasks, and the GUI feels very picky about where I click. It is hard to explain, other than to say my mouse hand gets very sore when using Illustrator. I spend a lot more time very precisely trying to move the mouse to the right location, which is very tiring.

Today, I wanted to learn how to adjust Illustrator’s default marquee selection mechanism. In other drawing tools I’ve used, you drag a rectangle around a part of the drawing to select objects. The tool then selects whatever objects are completely enclosed in the rectangle.

Illustrator is different, however. Instead of selecting enclosed objects, it selects every object you touch with the rectangle. When I make comics, this is a constant irritation. I find myself dragging around a character’s whiskers, for example, and his whole head ends up selected. So then I have to painstakingly Shift-Click on other objects to de-select. This comes up repeatedly, and contributes to my hand getting so damn sore with Illustrator.

I’m not the only one to notice this behavior:

Another baffling omission in the product: A way to select multiple objects when they’re amidst others, by NOT having the marquee select everything it touches. There should be an option to select only the objects that are fully enclosed by the selection rectangle.

Corel Draw has always offered this, and in practice I never needed to turn it off. I can’t think of another UI feature that enhanced productivity more. What are Illustrator users doing as a workaround? Shift-clicking on things one at a time? Tedious and omission-prone!

I assumed this was a configuration option that I could switch, but as I learned, there is no way to change the behavior!

For now, I think the best workaround is to use layers more heavily. There are also some scripts that provide a way to de-select partially selected objects, though this requires digging through some menus for each selection, or setting up a custom keystroke (and remembering it).

Maybe I should switch to Windows 7 so I can use Xara. Or Linux so I can use Inkscape. I’m very frustrated that all of my favorite tools require specific operating systems. ** update: Unless one is willing to suffer with a less-than-ideal port, which I am not. **

Here is a little Java program that creates a JComboBox with three identical “Green” items:

public class ComboDemo extends JFrame {
    public static void main(String... args) {
        SwingUtilities.invokeLater(new Runnable() {
            public void run() {
                new ComboDemo().setVisible(true);
            }
        });
    }

    public ComboDemo() {
        super("Duplicates are Dumb");
        setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);

        JComboBox combo = new JComboBox(new String[] {
                "Red", "Green", "Blue", "Green", "Yellow", "Green"
        });
        add(new JLabel("Choose your favorite color:"), BorderLayout.NORTH);
        add(combo, BorderLayout.SOUTH);
        pack();
    }
}

As you can see, the user really has no way to know which “Green” is the correct selection:

Some people want to display multiple identical items in combo boxes. I’ve had customers ask me for this feature — and I refused. If memory serves correctly, they were having keyboard navigation problems because focus would get stuck on the first of the duplicate items. Their database contained duplicate descriptions, and they wanted me to fix the alleged focus “bug” in the combo box rather than eliminate the duplicate descriptions in the database. (eventually, reason prevailed and we made the descriptions unique).

This has even been reported as a bug, and the ensuing comments are interesting to read. For example:

Good God sun!!! Just because you dont’ see why people would use the same string more than once in a JComboBox, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t need people like us!! Fix it please!!!

Yikes…imagine a GUI with these choices:

a) Yes
b) Yes
c) No

Um…

Apple’s Swing implementation has an interesting approach. When you click on one of the identical items, they are all selected:

This seems like a reasonable way for JComboBox to behave when given unreasonable data.

Is this when I chant It Just Works?

*** UPDATE: See my next post for two proposed solutions

Dear Movie Theater Owner,

Your web site sucks. When I go there, I see:

• A big, slow, Flash “welcome” page
• When I click, you do something bizarre and make little stars follow my mouse around the screen
• Everything on your web site blinks. (maybe your “designer” is a MySpace fanatic?)
• Your site sets cookies, but doesn’t bother to remember my ZIP code…seriously, WTF?
• After I enter my ZIP and search for show times, you put the results in a tiny scrolling frame that does not print correctly

Try to think of your audience! When we go to your page, it’s because we want to know show times. Your web site should display this information immediately and in a plain, easy to read and print format.

Yes, you can also provide additional links to purchase tickets, view trailers, and get directions to the theaters. Simple hyperlinks are sufficient.

Is it really so hard?

Your friend,

Eric

I was hoping for a lot more than this:

I certainly hoped the Kindle 2 would be a LOT less than $359. It also seems like it wastes a huge amount of real estate on the keyboard, a rarely used feature in a reading device. A soft iPhone-like keyboard would be great.

I plan to wait for the Kindle 3. At the rate technology evolves, I expect them to create my dream device at my dream price in a few years.

This is the Keynote ‘08 theme chooser, shown when you start Keynote:

Here is the updated screen in Keynote ‘09:

Here are some differences I see:

• The “Open Recent” feature is a welcome addition!
• The “Close” button text changed to “Cancel”.
• The text “Choose a theme for your presentation:” is gone. Instead, the screen has a title bar.
• You can now adjust the preview size.
• There are more themes.
• The window corners are rounded.
• Components are less rounded than before.
• The scrollbar and buttons are less glossy than before.
• The slide size option is now right-aligned. Its right edge matches the right edge of the Choose button. Overall, component alignment and spacing seems cleaner.
• The background is black.
• The previews have reflections.
• The gray background seems to have a very subtle gradient.
• “Don’t show this dialog again” is gone.

Why did I do this? Because when I ran Keynote ‘09 the first time, I noticed the “Open Recent” feature. I couldn’t remember if the old version had that feature, so I decided to check.

The funny thing is, I didn’t notice anything else different about the screen. (Maybe that’s the whole point!) Seeing them next to each other, however, makes it obvious they’ve put a lot of thought into the details.

What font should I use in my comics? I realize people are passionate about fonts, but I doubt most people have the expertise to explain why one font is better than another.

I admit it, I do not “get” fonts. Most look the same to me, and I do not know what makes one font “good” and another “bad”.

Thus, I seek your advice. Leave a comment and tell me what font to use in the comics. Preferably back it up with some explanation. Without that explanation, I won’t know why your favorite font is any better than someone else’s favorite font.

I think I saw this on Digg a few weeks ago…or perhaps somewhere else. Anyway, I think this is a great idea:

Popup Scrollbar Concept Demo

It seems to address some very obvious limitations of scrollbars, I like the little triangle when the “thumb” gets down to 1 pixel, and I like that it’s easier to grab quickly with the mouse without having to very precisely point at the exact right spot. I suspect that GUIs supporting quick gestures are a lot more productive than GUIs requiring super precise pointing and clicking.

I do not have time to work on this, but I wonder if anyone out there is interested in putting together a Swing implementation of this component?

Next question…is this component a new innovation, or is this something that already exists, for instance, in OSX or some other GUI toolkit?