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GTFO of my menu bar

zacbowling.com

71–80 of 92 posts

Re: GTFO of my menu bar

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on the verge of setting up my MBP to double boot to Arch or Debian and slowly moving as much as possible to Linux. Unfortunately, neither Illustrator or Photoshop are available on Linux. Are their open-source equivalents anywhere near the quality of their Adobe counterparts yet? I've yet to try InkScape, but I know that the last time I used Gimp, it was excruciating. I would rather work via ImageMagick, RMagick o…

> the last time I used Gimp, it was excruciating. To be fair, it's a LOT better since they added the single window mode. I've been using it since then and I am quite satisfied (although I am not a heavy user). Maybe you should give it a more serious try. Inkscape is also pretty good I think.

Apparently you can get Gimp to look almost like photoshop[1]. You can see it's a fairly simple interface. The screenshot actually makes it look fairly clean.[2]

[1]http://elementaryforum.org/forum/how-to/customization_aa/des...

[2]http://s16.postimg.org/nbs29omth/Gimp_Like_Photoshop.png

Re: GTFO of my menu bar

#72

Isn't the better option to just not install crap on your computer? This sounds like complaining that you don't like television shows on a certain channel when you have a thousand to choose from...

Not everything that puts crap in the menubar is crap. The Google Chrome Notification is an egregious offender - it appeared without warning, ugly and unretinafied, and can only be (temporarily) removed by (1) doing everything it asks, (2) then quitting and relaunching Chrome. It's highly-visible systemwide placement for minor system-oriented tasks, and unnecessary given how much interface Chrome already has to work w…

I remember when it first showed up on my machines, nothing at all would happen if I clicked on it. I only found out what this icon belonged to by successively quitting apps. It's the single most useless icon in my menu bar, it feels almost malicious. This prompted me to finally try and go back to Firefox...

Re: GTFO of my menu bar

#73
post #33

One thing Microsoft learned is to empower your developers...but also assume they're absolute dicks. Since Vista, MS has learned to make the OS work around all these terrible habits. Tray icons auto-hide. The start menu is scrollable and searchable and actually digging through it is kinda discouraged. Apps that require admin permissions get annoying uac pop-up messages.

One of the biggest requirements iOS was designed around was "don't trust lazy or shitty devs" and people still freak out about the huge amount of restrictions placed on apps. I'm not sure there is any winning.

I think a decent solution is to allow users to give apps permission to do things like that, but not have them by default and make the app work even if it wants those things. For example I had some browser extension that wanted to have access to my entire history, even though it didn't need it at all. If you said no it wouldn't work at all. As opposed to giving it some default value for history like "the only site I've ever been to is google.com."

You should be able to have control over small things too. Like "allow this app internet access" or "allow internet access only when in use" and stuff like that.

Re: GTFO of my menu bar

#74

Skype on Android has a permanent icon there. That team should be ashamed of themselves.

Nope. On Android, unless you keep a process in the foreground (with an ongoing notification), the system can kill it at any time. So that's perfectly reasonable on Android.

Right. And even then, if you open a resource intensive page in Chrome, it will often kill processes that have ongoing notifications.

Re: GTFO of my menu bar

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on the verge of setting up my MBP to double boot to Arch or Debian and slowly moving as much as possible to Linux. Unfortunately, neither Illustrator or Photoshop are available on Linux. Are their open-source equivalents anywhere near the quality of their Adobe counterparts yet? I've yet to try InkScape, but I know that the last time I used Gimp, it was excruciating. I would rather work via ImageMagick, RMagick o…

Just run those apps in a Windows VM. VirtualBox seamless mode is quite nice.

It is if you don't use it on Ubuntu+Unity. It's totally unusable on that on 12.04 at least.

Re: GTFO of my menu bar

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the last time I used Gimp, it was excruciating. To be fair, it's a LOT better since they added the single window mode. I've been using it since then and I am quite satisfied (although I am not a heavy user). Maybe you should give it a more serious try. Inkscape is also pretty good I think.

Apparently you can get Gimp to look almost like photoshop[1]. You can see it's a fairly simple interface. The screenshot actually makes it look fairly clean.[2] [1] http://elementaryforum.org/forum/how-to/customization_aa/des... [2] http://s16.postimg.org/nbs29omth/Gimp_Like_Photoshop.png

Hadn't seen that before. Kicks the crap out of GIMPshop! Impressive.

Re: GTFO of my menu bar

#78
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you get to complain about these sort of things when you make the choice to use OSX.

I'm on the verge of setting up my MBP to double boot to Arch or Debian and slowly moving as much as possible to Linux. Unfortunately, neither Illustrator or Photoshop are available on Linux. Are their open-source equivalents anywhere near the quality of their Adobe counterparts yet? I've yet to try InkScape, but I know that the last time I used Gimp, it was excruciating. I would rather work via ImageMagick, RMagick o…

GIMP is easy to use once you adjust to its peculiarities. Blender is the same way, even before it got a facelift.

Re: GTFO of my menu bar

#79

I make Coffitivity.com and our Mac App is a menu bar app, and people love it. I'm not here to talk about that - we've never had a complaint about where it lives, where it lives is (as far as we can tell) is flawless in the menu bar. What is shocking is how many users report bugs about the app because they think nothing happens when they open it, even though we alert them precisely to where it is with a dropdown. To a…

I hadn't seen Hush before -- neat idea! I only wish it'd let me silence notifications forever, or for days at a time.

You can! Just hit "continue without timer" and le poof!

Re: GTFO of my menu bar

#80
I develop in Qt4, and when you want to use cross-platform notifications without packaging the Growl API within your bundle, it is easiest to use the QStatusBar class. I haven't found a more reliable way to display notifications on all three major desktop platforms.

Unfortunately it clutters up your status bar.

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