Tag: Design

VS Minimalism

I’ve been trying to become more and more minimalist with my use of panels and toolbars lately. I realized I do almost everything with the keyboard and the few things I can’t do are in the main menu somewhere anyway. I never use those toolbars and they just add a lot of clutter. There’s also a host of other panels I never use (especially the TFS panels, which I hate). I do have an Expression Dark theme applied but I’m still decided whether or not I like it.

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  • No toolbars
  • No main menu
  • No Solution Explorer (Solution Navigator instead)
  • No Toolbox or Document Outline
  • No left panels
  • TestDriven.NET
  • No Resharper

 

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Photoshop Usability Complaints

I’ve been using Photoshop CS2 a little bit lately for a project I am working on and I have come up with a few complaints about it already. For being so famously the defacto graphics editing standard I am really dissapointed in the quality of the user interface and the usability of the application in general. Perhaps I am a little biased since I was forced to use Adobe Framemaker not long ago (which is an atrocity of a WYSIWYG editor) and now I can see similarities between Frame Maker and other Adobe products and it scares me.

For example when I try to open a particular PSD I get this screen:

Photoshop usability

I realize I’m just an idiot user but what the hell does the button “Read composite data” have to do with having an error? Clicking ok or “Read composite data” seem to have the exact same results. Ugh. A little help button or mouse-hover tool tip would be useful here.