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Thursday, March 11, 2004 |
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One of the things I'd like to do, now that I'm a grumpy old man, is take a lot of designers to task. So many of them give us products that look good, but which don't do the job quite as well as their looks would suggest. They suffer from what I call the Italian Engineering Syndrome - it has been my experience that Italian engineering is always a triumph of style over substance. Okay, I realise that I'm offending all the Italians out there, so from now on I'll just refer to this condition as ToSoS; Triumph of Style over Substance. What I'm going to do is regularly feature a product that I think might qualify for the ToSoS label. I'll say why I think it qualifies and you can leap in to defend it or bury it. Of course, if you have any nominations just let me know and we'll see what everyone else thinks of them. Remember, there has to be a hint of pretentiousness about the piece, some indication that the designer is getting carried away with him/herself at the expense of the item's functionality. Simply being cheap and nasty doesn't qualify. Tonight's Cadidate is the 'Juicy Salif' designed by Philippe Stark for Alessi.
This one might be fairly controversial. My wife and I don't quite agree on whether its style has compromised its ability to squeeze the juice out of lemons or not. I think that it's height and the skinniness of its legs make it a nuisance to use standing on the counter. The best thing to do is to plunge your hand into its crotch, holding it like a make shift weapon from Blake's Seven and ram it into your fruit. Let the juices drip directly into a bowl. Don't bother sitting it on the counter, putting a little bowl under its bottom to catch the drips and trying to squeeze an orange its head without the whole lot skidding across the counter and puncturing someone's lung with its pointy legs.
If you really want to squeeze the living daylights out of your citrus, use a potato ricer. They are merciless and fast to boot. |
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Just to prove that I'm not a button bigot, here's a list of all the mousing gadgets that I have
I've just switched to the MS TrackBall and adjusted almost instantly to it, though I haven't used it for over a year. They've all got their advantages, but I think that the ability to vary what you use, so you don't trash your tendons, is the biggest advantage of all. |
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There's a barrel load of comments on the old One Button Mouse issue. Every one seems to have their own personal preference, from the wrist-friendly one button to the awesome Aorta Personal Wireless Mousepad, which I want now that I've seen it. I think the definitive answer to who's mouse solution is best has to be... everyone's. Everyone is operating in a different context so different options will suit them best. Robert's right; he's operating in the expert Mac user zone, so he's learned the chords. I learned them too, eventually. Buzzy's right; a struggling newbie giving up looks like a case of narrow-mindedness. I remember that day and I reserve the right to be narrow minded late on a hot, sweaty Friday afternoon and I think it was a huge mistake coming to work for this company because they are all so boring and they've got poor bloody Mo writing Java Bundles by hand twelve hours a day for two weeks when they could just generate them with an awk script in half a day but that's to bloody visionary for them and how could they give a job like that to a fellow human being and I just want to get on my bike and go home and this FileMaker crap is for amateurs and why isn't there just one copy of Access in this whole company and Apple are always crowing about how easy it is to use their oh-so-superior Mac's and I can't get the bloody disk out of their oh-so-easy-to-use bloody Mac and no-one else around here seems to know how to get the bloody disk out of this oh-so-easy-to-use Mac and I'll be glad if I never see another f*cking oh-so-easy-to-use Mac again in my life. Apple and their fan club set my expectations way too high, then they picked a really bad day not to meet them. Well, I'm in the fan club now and even so, I have to say that the first few weeks were a very frustrating time. I think there was a time when the Mac was way ahead of the PC, but it got stuck in its own groove for a long time there. Little by little, Microsoft stole its cloths and now with the advent of XP, I think that Windows has slightly better usability than the Mac. Jim's right; the mouse is no basis for selecting a platform. Jef Raskin's right; it probably would have been a better idea to have two labelled mouse buttons, isn't hindsight a great thing. Mark's right; I agree 100% with him that the single button, and especially the body button Pro Mouse is super-kind to your tendons.
Barney's right; logically, one button, two button and n button are pretty much the same and there's a flavour to suit everyone. |
Last update: 3/4/04; 12:43:39 pm .
