agitcraft

I was reading somebody’s Flex blog the other day and noticed they had a Share Widget at the bottom of the post.

I’ve seen this widget around town. It’s a fairly popular way to share content with other networks.

When you roll over the widget, it animates, with a slide reveal effect, to this state:

When you roll over individual icons, they pop out almost all the way.

It’s a neat widget, but I have a few criticisms that seem obvious to me:

1. Sharing is not sexy, even if we’re just trying to be playful and clever. I challenge you to find me even one person who finds sharing obscure posts about Flex to be sexy. I challenge you.
2. The interface is slow. I don’t mean the transitional reveal is slow, but rather my experience with it is slow.

What do I mean by slow? Let’s play a game: Pick a sharing service off the top of your head, and see how long it takes you to find the correct button for it in this widget. Need I say more?

Dear Adobe,

I don’t know how else to say this, but I believe we have a problem. This has been troubling me to the point of, frankly, insanity for some time. I’ve struggled with this issue and tried to hold my chin up. I thought that I could just ignore the issue, or even find ways around it, but now I’ve had enough. We have a serious interface problem.

Consider the following as a general overview of what’s wrong:

The other day I was working on a project that called for some italicized text.

The font my designer chose, unfortunately, had no italic face available.

Of course, the PSD comps I received showed italics. Faux Italics that is. Because Adobe makes both Photoshop and Flash, I figured I could add faux italics to my text just as easily as my designer did.

Hmm….That’s unfortunate. Kerning. Color. Size. Anti-aliasing. Even (Bad) Superscript! No Faux Italics? Sorry Designer. Of course, for legal reasons we had to have italics.

How did we solve this problem? Easy (Tedious)! We exported every block of text from the PSD to a transparent .PNG file.

This was not a small project. We’re talking well over 30 screens of content.

It was only the other day that I discovered this:

Hey! Adobe! What the font!? Really? Why doesn’t this live with the rest of the font controls in the sidebar? Why do you maintain submenus for font family, size, and letter spacing when superior controls are available on the right in the more obvious sidebar location. Are you trying to drive me insane? Do you have any idea how much time has been wasted exporting transparent .PNGs because you decided to hide this obvious text control in the never-used-by-anyone-serious menu bar?

This demands a petition of some kind. I’ve submitted the following feature request to Adobe.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE consolidate the controls for Text Fields. I had no idea that Faux Italics and Faux Bold still existed because you buried them away in the menu bar rather than putting them in the sidebar with all of the other font controls. Why even have the text menu bar? Can we please move on?

If you agree, you can also request this change here: https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform

A while back I sent a video around the office (this one about Molehill) and received a confused response from a coworker:

You might think I’m completely stupid, but what is an API?  I was at the Flash in the Can Conference a few months ago and have been hearing that term ever since.  I assume it’s an AS3 thing?

I explained it as follows:

API means Application Programming Interface. It basically refers to a set of procedures and protocols for getting things done. For example, you could say that things like waving hello, handshakes, speech, and meetings are part of a human communication API. When we talk about new APIs, we mean that either the set of things we can do in a specific sphere has expanded or become more powerful. If you can imagine people who are only able to do things like wave and shake hands, an API upgrade might then allow them to truly speak, or maybe shake hands more vigorously.

It’s often challenging to explain things like this to non-programmers, but this seemed like a very useful metaphor to me. Would you agree?

I just read a great article explaining the use and implementation of marking menus in AS3. This may be just the kind of interface I’m looking for for my long overdue portfolio relaunch. Check it out!