nevver:

Share the Fun

seldo:

This is genuinely Microsoft’s idea of a “streamlined”, “optimized” UI for Windows Explorer. They were so proud of it they wrote a blog post about it.

The post is a sort of masterpiece of crazy rationalization, but I think my favourite part may be this screenshot:

Here, they proudly overlay the UI with data from their research into how often various commands are used. They use this to show that “the commands that make up 84% of what users do in Explorer are now in one tab”. But the more important thing is that the remaining 50% of the bar is taken up by buttons that nobody will ever use, ever, even according to Microsoft’s own research. And yet somehow they remain smack bang in the middle of the interface. The insanity is further enriched by this graph:

Again, this is Microsoft’s own research, cited in the same post: nobody — almost literally 0% of users — uses the menu bar, and only 10% of users use the command bar. Nearly everybody is using the context menu or hotkeys. So the solution, obviously, is to make both the menu bar and the command bar bigger and more prominent. Right?

Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody.

nevver:

Word on The Street

jayrosen:

Could we please see this sentence in the New York Times more often?

It’s the one that goes, “This is false.”

Somebody on Twitter sent the link to me. They knew I would appreciate it.

Here it is in context, in an article on Ray’s Pizza (the real one) closing down in Soho. Some guy who opened another, fake Ray’s says (well, actually he said it in 1991…) that no one ever heard of the founder of the original Ray’s, Ralph Cuomo.

That’s when it happened. The New York Times reporter, Michael Wilson, actually typed into the Times system, “This is false.” And the editors? Why, they let it stand! Fit to print! Then the Internets lit up…

Don’t you wish you saw those three little words a little more often?  Some suit on the TV goes, “Every time we’ve cut taxes, revenues have gone up!” and the next day the New York Times calmly reports it, followed by the three little words… This is false.

Don’t be cynical. Don’t say never. It just happened with a random quote by a pizza guy from twenty years ago. 

It’d also be dandy to see that when, say, Michele Bachmann says that the Founding Fathers worked to eradicate slavery, or Sarah Palin says that Paul Revere rode to warn the British. It’s real easy! “This is false.”

nevver:

The Darkness, Dan McCarthy

awesomepeoplehangingouttogether:

Salvador Dali and Harpo Marx

Gets me high this one