Urgle. "Just draw it." Aimee'. Cartoons.

[elfs]

Growl. I tossed and turned for three hours last night, not actually getting to sleep until 1 a.m. or so, and then I spent the rest of the night dreaming in code. Not good code, mind you.

It is a tenant of web developers, perhaps less rigid today than in 1997, that "Photoshop is not a web development tool!" The reason behind this tenant is simple, and tragic: in 1997, clients would come to developers with a photoshopped picture of what they wanted the website to look like, the developers would strive like Hercules to make it so, the limitation of HTML would make that development impossible, and the client would get pissed off and renege on the contract. So developers got smart: no more photoshop for layouts and they, not the client, would do the prototyping to get buyoff.

I hate this part of my job. I'm not a good artist by any stretch, and now my boss wants me to "do it in photoshop, show us what you want the system to do for the next rev. I don't want to see you running anything except photoshop for the rest of the week."

And a photoshopped image doesn't do anything. It doesn't show the liveliness of the system, the intense use of dymanic screen real estate, the ease-of-tranformation or any of the accessibility issues that the text document. It just sits there. And it is with these that I must get acceptance to do a new rev.

There are two kinds of people in the world: the literate and the visual. Those who watch TV, and those who read. While I do both, it is in reading that I get the most pleasure. Linux is the OS of the literate-- one must be able to read, and write, and think complex thoughts, to get it off the ground. Not so true anymore, but it was never true of Windows and Macintosh-- those are for the TV generation, who just want to watch the show. I can write specifications and write code that creates the imagery and functionality I want, but when I'm asked to "just draw it, it'll be faster--"

Bleah.

---

On the other hand, I have written nearly 6110 words into chapter two of Aimee': The Bones of the Dragon, the second Aimee' novel. I'm aiming for 30,000 words with this one, so that's not technically a novel, but it's gonna be close. I'm retconning the universe a bit; Barraminum is the capital city of a five-century-old colony of the Empire of Cortane. This gives me room to make the universe more interesting; there's more stuff in it than the totally trad extruded fantasy product that was the first novel.

I finished the love scene in this chapter and then (speaking of television) pulled up the Teen Titans season 2 episode 5, Fear Itself on my laptop while I waited for the bus. Billions of dollars in hardware, millions of miles of cable, three billion CPUs performing a billion operations a second each, and my cadillac laptop tricked out with the latest and greatest drivers-- all to get caught up on a cartoon I missed the first time around.

Comments

Re:

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

You might consider the same courtesy.

Sorry, Elf, I thought it was locked.

a prototyping trick

[shemayazi.livejournal.com]

A useful prototyping trick we use is to simultaneously have photoshop and dreamweaver open. Do layout in dreamweaver and cut and paste screenshots pieces/text into photoshop. This way you can be using css (and menu lists can be developed using some keen cut and paste css)for your UI elements and just use photoshop for large blocks of color/images. Flip between them whenever someone stops by so you can "appear" to be using photoshop while creating something real and usable for a wireframe click-through at the same time. Not necessarily dreamweaver / personally I prefer homesite, but it comes integrated with dreamweaver so you can switch views and still cut and paste into photoshop. Might help with your visually challenged management.

Re: a prototyping trick

[elfs.livejournal.com]

That's mostly what I ended up doing. Since I needed volumes of charts, I wrote quick scripts in Perl to spew out table rows, pulled them into an editor to decorate them with CSS, then screenshot them to edit them with a vector drawing tool (Inkscape).

hmm html tools

[warstoke.livejournal.com]

i was wondering if there was a tool for posibly automaticaly cutting up jpgs and generating html acordingly cause i have tried to do this my self buy hand and it never looks rite when done

[(Anonymous)]

I think you are making too much of the distinction between operating systems. I don't think it's a matter of one being for "literal" users and the others being for "visual" users. Rather, I think it's about single-mindedness versus compromise. I would argue that Linux/UNIX is single-mindedly literate, which makes it ideally suited for applications which function on that level. I haven't seen much of OS X, but Macs' previous operating systems have historically been single-mindedly visual, which, again, gives it the edge for artists and the like. Windows is a bit of both. It is visual to the extent that you want it to be (which most people do), but also has the potential for stuff as complicated and low-level as you need. As a result, it's not as good an environment for either of them as a dedicated platform would be, but gives people who like to work in the middle a good mix. The Microsoft world domination crap and security incompetence are valid concerns, of course, but that's not intrinsic to the style of the OS.

A programming analogy might make sense. UNIX would be like C -- efficient if used well, good for detail-oriented people who like to build their projects from the ground up. Macs would be like old-school Visual Basic: somewhat limited, but pretty and easy to use if you have a clear picture of the end product. Windows would be something like Perl or Python: you can hammer out quick scripts if that's what you need to do, but you can also get more in-depth and write something hugely complex. It's not as good as C for that kind of stuff, nor as good as VB for something quick and dirty, but it works.

Also, please forgive a spelling flame -- I'm not normally a spelling Nazi, but this one drives me absolutely nuts every time I see it, for some reason -- it's "tenet" (Latin for "he holds"), not "tenant."

Jeremy