Oregon

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I am doing my best to be impartial. Here are the notes I made as I tried out this app for the first time.

• The first thing you see when you open the app is a message that the graphics will not work properly (and they sure don't) until the next OS revision comes out, whenever that is. It's really odd to me that Wil released this app now, with a degraded first impression and a promise that it'll work well on the next OS revision, after delaying for years while waiting for certain OS revisions to come out. Why the rush all of a sudden?
• The "Upgrading Library" message appears in front of all apps. Sure, it's movable, but couldn't it be a sheet or something?
• The shelves are the same old faux wood pattern that repeats unnaturally every couple hundred pixels.
• The initial sidebar width, at least on my MacBook Air, is so narrow that I couldn't distinguish the items from one another.
• If you already have a library, you can't even try out many of the new features, because you have too many items. So then you have to manually set aside your version 1 and version 2 libraries in order to try out the app meaningfully.
• Searching for anything in Japanese returns completely useless and unrelated results. For instance, when I searched for アルトネリコ, the first result on Amazon's site is the new design materials book, but DL's first result is a Harry Potter book, and none of the results are about Ar tonelico at all.
• The Action menu is weirdly unpadded, compared to normal menus.
• Hitting the weirdly-colored and sometimes-absent eye icon on an item, or the baffling "Play" command in the Action menu, when a Japanese book is selected, tries to open that item on the USA Amazon site, and of course fails.
• There's no documentation. The site and the app both just retain the old 1.5 help, so I can't for instance find out if the "dimensions" attribute is actually supposed to affect the item's appearance, like I have been wanting, or not.
• The default friends list based on my last name is kind of dumb: it contains all of my little nieces and nephews in Chicago (who I only have in my address book in order to remember their birthdays), but of course only the ones from my brothers' families and not my sisters', because of their last name. I guess it's just sample data, but it feels kind of awkward to have sample data that's actually clumsily harvested from my own family. I'd rather have nobody at all in that list.
• The background removal for toy images is kind of a cool idea, but it fails way too often and too easily with the types of images Amazon offers. I hoped there would be an interface for adjusting the transparent areas (or at least a way to open the image in Preview and do it there), but there isn't.
• The horizontal inspector pane is kind of awkward and bad. The three-pane-wide arrangement from before worked great; now my inspector has to be taller than my shelves view in order to see all of the details of an item.
• Maybe I missed some retraction, but wasn't the whole point of DL2 supposed to be social-networking type stuff? Where you could find other people who owned similar items or items you were interested in, get recommendations, and so on? None of that stuff seems to be in here.
• In preferences: "Subscribe to other's libraries". :\
• The shattering animation when you delete something (apparently replacing the burning animation in some previews) is pretty cheesy-looking: the shards shoot straight outward for a while, then fall straight downward, with no arc. That's nitpicky, but the whole point of this app is supposed to be visually rich, exquisitely detailed enjoyment, right? I'd rather have an item fade out gracefully than blow up crappily.
• More attention-to-detail nitpicks: the credits in the about box are tiny black text on a high-contrast wood pattern, making them really hard to read. That's a shame because they're actually pretty informative about the work that has been done on the app over the years. The badges on overdue items, with plain black text on colored blobs, are pretty ugly. So is the snarky "OWNED!" stamp on related items results. None of these things is deadly for an ordinary app, as they are just aesthetic shortcomings in a x.0 release. But they are examples of reasons I think DL doesn't really deserve the gushing praise about how gorgeous it is.
• Something I would normally ignore, if I didn't know what I know about Wil: I don't think the employee chosen to take the barcode-scanning screenshot, nor her wardrobe, nor the peripheral positioning of the item to be scanned, are coincidences.

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Hi, I just wanted to complain that:

1. There's a new clammbon tour documentary DVD coming out in a few days, and I'm not supposed to be spending money on frivolous things right now.
2. Shiina Ringo has a new CD and a new DVD coming out, and and I'm not supposed to be spending money on frivolous things right now.
3. The one frivolous purchase I was able to get away with last month, the Ar tonelico 2 Design Materials book, is still not in at Kinokuniya, four weeks and five days after I ordered it.

映画「たゆ たう　-GOOD TIME MUSIC of clammbon-」予告篇

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I had an item in my OmniFocus VOX project for a while: "Commend My Book". I'm kind of glad that I never got around to it. This Western Digital external USB/FireWire hard drive has a pretty pleasing and Applelike enclosure. But this week, after a year and a half, it abruptly stopped working and I had to tear it apart. I found out that the insides are also Applelike, in that there's a whole lot of creative engineering going on in there, and trying to disassemble the dang thing to get something out is a real ordeal. I can't thank strangers on the internet enough for all the information they offer; this guy and this guy had exactly what I needed to get the drive out so that I could put it in another enclosure and get my data back.

CIMG3636

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Hey, it just occurred to me that Vox does the right thing when it comes to pronouns in user interfaces! Instead of muddling about and mixing up the way it refers to the user (like Windows' "My Documents" versus "Which type of installation do you want"), you are always you. These days even Apple gets this wrong sometimes.

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Use your Unicode, people!

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The cover art (in the embarrassingly cheap gradient style) is up at Tower of the Hand, and the supposed but probably conjectural release date is September 30, my birthday!

A Dance With Dragons

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We have some video that we would like to burn to DVD for the lady's sister in Japan. We need to chop a very small amount of extra footage off the front of each one. iMovie '08 will import the files, but it says it's going to take 40 minutes to generate thumbnails for each 30 minute clip. This process can't be cancelled, and there's no way to turn off the thumbnails. That's stupid.

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Please don't use the stereotypical, Chinese chop-suey restaurant font for your anime button. Anime comes from Japan. It's a whole different country; look it up some time!

Anime!?

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...Am I the only one who doesn't totally dig the kind of commercials that are on TV now? Maybe barely watching any TV at all for the past 8 years prevented me from easing into it properly. I remember when a brash young company would come out with some dissonance-based commercial to grab people's attention and emphasize how rebellious and anti-status-quo they were. But now at least half of all commercials, especially commercials from established, supposedly respectable companies, use the shocking and disturbing approach.

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