If this works, I’ll be so mad

September 4, 2020 3:43 PM

‪Julia Minamata ‬is drawing each pixel of The Crimson Diamond, an EGA graphic adventure, by hand. Little did she know that one Photoshop setting could have saved her quite some time… (Twitter video)
posted by adrianhon (44 comments total)

Ooof. Watching her reaction got me feeling sympathetically emotional. I have felt her pain many times with almost every large piece of software I've used. Gimp, Blender, Unity, Visual Studio.... the list goes on. I'm at the point now where I'll simply clench my fists and howl to the heavens: "Why are you making my life so difficult"!! It changes nothing, but I feel better.
posted by SonInLawOfSam at 4:02 PM on September 4, 2020 [5 favorites]

all those unnamed layers, aaaaaggggghhhh
posted by egypturnash at 4:07 PM on September 4, 2020 [4 favorites]

I definitely feel her pain. Art programs are much better nowadays, but I remember realizing years ago that the people building these programs are probably barely treading water themselves, and they just keep tossing in features willy nilly to give value to the next version release. I'm mainly speaking of Maya. Menus inside of menus inside of menus, and you just have a computer science/lighting/physics background to know how everything relates to each other. Again, it is much better than it used to be.
posted by ishmael at 4:17 PM on September 4, 2020 [1 favorite]

This is precisely why sometimes it's good to make something "the hard way", not just to appreciate "the easy way" better, but in many cases why it's easier and how to maximize its effectiveness.

In my case, that translates to writing lots of small utilities for myself and then finding out that There's an app/pip package/CTAN package for that!
posted by andycyca at 4:24 PM on September 4, 2020 [1 favorite]

Oh so much sympathy.

I think this resonates with a lot of people because it's a natural part of the creative/learning process - you bumble around figuring out how to do stuff, and everything always is a bigger pain in the ass than it should be anyway*, and you're really just trying to get things done, not refine your process, so sometimes you get stuck with remarkably clumsy ways of doing things.

* Not just creative and learning stuff, I mean everything.
posted by aubilenon at 4:24 PM on September 4, 2020 [4 favorites]

Joining in the chorus of "have been there." I once learned a step that skipped painstaking hours of keyframing and was like "Oooof, I need a beer."
posted by history is a weapon at 4:31 PM on September 4, 2020 [1 favorite]

I know about this, and I think I know why they didn't:

Never did they paint a mask by hand. Maybe they never did that because they never worked with quickmasks. That may not have happened, because they always used a version of Photoshop that supported layers.

(Just a guess, though.)
posted by alex_skazat at 4:50 PM on September 4, 2020

Man, when I first started using Excel a lot this happened to me every other week. What do you MEAN you can just use a FORMULA to split a list of full names into a first name and last name column?? What do you mean you can add line breaks with the alt key???
posted by showbiz_liz at 5:20 PM on September 4, 2020 [7 favorites]

You can do what with the alt key?

At least I knew how to split text with formulas already
posted by jeather at 5:25 PM on September 4, 2020 [3 favorites]

Her game, btw, looks really exciting and stylish if you are into that type of old-school adventure game. For people like me who know next to nothing about game art I also think it’s cool she’s been live-streaming her process — links are on her Twitter page.
posted by en forme de poire at 5:44 PM on September 4, 2020 [3 favorites]

BIG OOF. She is very charming in her way of expressing such a universal feeling and allowing her angst to be shared on twitter, so kudos to her.

I think this captures a mood that's relatable on a lot of levels. Like ... "Wow, if I'd known this thing earlier it would've saved me so much time and pain! I'm glad I know it now, and glad my path has brought me to knowledge, but ... gee whiz! I really wish I had known earlier!" is basically how I felt upon figuring out I was gay in my mid-20s lol.
posted by Emily's Fist at 5:48 PM on September 4, 2020 [9 favorites]

Once upon a time, before I knew about photoshop or scanners, I got a piece of art into a computer by tracing it onto graph paper and then drawing it in like paint or something a pixel at a time, so I feel a tiny slice of this kind of pain.
posted by Mister Moofoo at 5:51 PM on September 4, 2020 [3 favorites]

A few months ago, my mind was blown when I learned the iPhone has a way to use the camera to scan documents to PDF squirreled away in the Notes app!
posted by chinesefood at 6:01 PM on September 4, 2020 [6 favorites]

My first day as a technical writer in the days of windows 3.11. I painstakingly recreated a terminal screen in Word art, only to learn, days later, about the print screen key.
posted by Sparx at 6:44 PM on September 4, 2020 [11 favorites]

I feel like just because it’s on a computer there’s this feeling of not being smart enough or doing it wrong, but she’s an artist so she figured out a way to do what she wanted without the “right” tool. I love the part of being an artist that’s becoming an expert in doing something totally wrong.

Anyway, I loved all of the Sierra games so I am going to buy this.
posted by jeweled accumulation at 6:46 PM on September 4, 2020 [3 favorites]

The true test of the creator is to know how to unlearn, so you can learn better ways to do things.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 6:55 PM on September 4, 2020

What do you MEAN you can just use a FORMULA to split a list of full names into a first name and last name column??

I can whaaaaaaat

(I literally retyped 104 names this morninng jajaja oh well it was actually relaxing)
posted by Rora at 6:55 PM on September 4, 2020 [2 favorites]

Huh, I just had almost exactly the same problem in GIMP recently, but at least I wasn't actually dealing with a limited palette so using the soft edge erase when I wanted hard edge wasn't a big problem. But of course I just now loaded up GIMP and dug through the erase tool settings and sure enough there's a "Hard edge" checkbox.
posted by ckape at 9:27 PM on September 4, 2020

What do you mean you can add line breaks with the alt key???

You best keep quiet about this and never speak of it again. The CSV mob knows about you now.
posted by benzenedream at 10:50 PM on September 4, 2020 [6 favorites]

What do you mean you can add line breaks with the alt key???

I am now seething.
posted by tofu_crouton at 11:09 PM on September 4, 2020 [4 favorites]

When I told someone in our graphic department (senior head, 20+ years experience) about the alt key return in Excel, the convoluted happy/sad face they made remains a high/low to me to this day.
(they were often forced to make Excel sourced docs into marketing pretty versions)
posted by mephisjo at 11:18 PM on September 4, 2020 [3 favorites]

I don't experience the anger stage for this kind of discovery very often, and when I do, it's always because the UI in question has not been built in such a way as to make whatever timesaver I now know about discoverable in any reasonable way.

This is precisely why I loathe, detest and despise touch-screen devices. Because the choice of physical controls on a touch screen device is so utterly impoverished, almost all the controls on these devices are forced to be in some way gestural; the potential for inventing new gestures is essentially unlimited, so designers do; and the only way to find out what gestures I need to know to use any given product is to look them up. I can't just spend my familiarization time poking around in menu trees any more, because we don't have menu trees any more. And I can't RTFM either, because nobody bothers writing those either.

The flip side of this is that touch-based devices will quite often misinterpret some way I'm executing some gesture I know about as if it were a gesture I don't know about, and do something completely unexpected and weird. My next door neighbour's Macbook, for example, tries and fails to open some kind of dictionary every third or fourth time my fingers go near its touch pad. Neither of us can work out why. It wastes a lot of time when I'm trying to do anything tech-supportish over there.

When I first picked up a "smart" phone and had to be told that the way to get rid of an unwanted app involved doing a long-press on it first, after having wasting god knows how much time faffing about trying double and triple taps first, I was just enraged. And that feeling has never gone away. It's even worse when I watch somebody older than me getting just ruined by being unable to execute a tap that's short enough not to be misinterpreted as a long press.

Give me a UI with discoverable controls, and I'm a happy camper even if it's taken me ten years to discover whatever. Because at least it shows you tried.
posted by flabdablet at 11:43 PM on September 4, 2020 [5 favorites]

What do you mean you can add line breaks with the alt key???

There are lots of examples of this kind of Modifier-Enter pattern. Word uses Shift-Enter for a forced line break (as opposed to an end-of-paragraph mark) and Ctrl-Enter for a page break, if I recall correctly. Keybase uses Enter to send the message currently being typed, Shift-Enter to put a line break in it. Always worth trying out.
posted by flabdablet at 11:54 PM on September 4, 2020 [1 favorite]

PSA: in case you have lived a life of woe as you fail to position your iPhone's cursor where you want it with cursed fingers, hold your finger on the virtual space bar and the keyboard will become a cursor trackpad.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 12:51 AM on September 5, 2020 [8 favorites]

@Jpfed: Two fingers anywhere on the iOS keyboard makes it act like a trackpad for the cursor position.

One of the best ways I've seen to make things discoverable in a GUI is to add "action palette" dialogs. JetBrains family IDEs, VS Code and to a lesser extent Alfred/Quicksilver let you type something you want to interact with or do after popping up a search box with a hotkey.

In JetBrains IDEs, tapping shift twice and typing "ignore" will give entries for any files with ignore, any symbols with the word Ignore, and any actions or settings with the word ignore in them. For example, you can open .gitignore, jump to your project's IgnoreErrorSetting type, or change the setting "Version control: Ignore file duplicates" with only one shortcut to memorize! (And if there was a more specific shortcut, it's listed right next to any actions.)

In Mac OS X in general, there's a search box in the Help menu which will search across all menu items (including deeply nested ones).

(For voice recognition, I bind these to "please". So "please open recent" does an "action search" for "open recent".)

My pet peeve lately, beyond needing to try single tap/double/swiping in all four directions/long press/longer press/force press on mobile devices, is having some setting buried in the deepest place imaginable, or having the settings split between two generations of interfaces. Like Windows 10 having half the settings in the old control panels and half in the "I wanted to be an iPad" interface, and having a search that only gets the newer interface.
posted by Anonymous Function at 1:16 AM on September 5, 2020 [3 favorites]

My next door neighbour's Macbook, for example, tries and fails to open some kind of dictionary every third or fourth time my fingers go near its touch pad. Neither of us can work out why.

flabdablet, I looked it up for both of us. This is due to "force click". It happens when you single click a word, with extra force. You can turn it off with the "Force click and haptic feedback" checkbox in the "Trackpad" settings.
posted by Axle at 5:11 AM on September 5, 2020 [3 favorites]

Fuck's sake.

Thank you.
posted by flabdablet at 5:38 AM on September 5, 2020

If I even suspect I can do something more efficiently in a program I will spend hours trawling through Google trying to find out how. Even if I have to phrase the question 30 different ways and put every other word in quotes. Sometimes it bears no fruit but often it does. There will be some obscure forum post buried somewhere where someone has provided an answer.
posted by rubber duck at 6:04 AM on September 5, 2020 [3 favorites]

Another discovery-promotion trick I use is believing that if I find myself repeatedly striking some tedious issue while using a software package, especially if that issue involves a perceived need to re-enter the same data in multiple formats, then I'm not the only one who would have this use case so there must be some facility built in to handle it less painstakingly. Then I ask myself where I would have had to put that facility if it had been my job to build this software.

This works surprisingly well surprisingly often.

My implacable loathing for touch controls stops the trick working well with those, unfortunately, because in general the answer to where I'd have put it starts with "behind any other control but this fucking thing".
posted by flabdablet at 7:20 AM on September 5, 2020 [4 favorites]

I remember in the 70s reading an auto repair book for women that has a phrase that I've carried with me since: "If something seems a lot harder than it should be there's probably a tool you don't know about. "
posted by cccorlew at 7:34 AM on September 5, 2020 [13 favorites]

Just for the hell of it, here is a thing I learnt after about eight years of using Illustrator that sped me way the fuck up:

Double-click on the pencil tool; turn on 'fill new pencil strokes' and 'edit selected', turn off 'keep selected'. Now you can quickly knock out tons of filled shapes, which I find to be a major speedup. And more mundanely you can actually make a rough sketch now without it constantly trying to edit the last shape you drew in the same area. It's a crucial component of the workflow that lets me draw graphic novels directly in AI rather than futzing around drawing stuff on paper first, scanning it, and slowly pen-tooling over it.

I type that so often in the Illustrator subreddit that I made a keyboard expansion shortcut, all I have to do is type 'pencil101' and all that pops out.

And while I am sharing this hard-won knowledge, here is what I get when I type 'clipping101':

Ways to put one thing inside another thing in Illustrator:

* clipping masks
* draw inside (technically just a slightly different interface to making clipping masks)
* turn the thing you wanna put inside another thing into a pattern fill, either use pattern fill straight up on the containing thing, or use the appearance palette to stack that pattern fill on top of the containing thing's fill - hold down `/~ while using rotate/scale/direct selection tools to transform the pattern fill within the shape, free transform tool won't do this
* use the thing you wanna put stuff into as an opacity mask for the stuff you wanna put inside it, I mostly like to apply opacity masks to layers (click circle to the right of a layer's name in the layer palette, then make opacity mask) for organizational reasons but whatever works
* fuck around endlessly with the pathfinder palette (the noob way, not recommended, tends to result in permanent edits you have to re-do from scratch if you want to change things)

----

I don't think the moment when I realized that the pencil tool was only garbage because of the terrible ways its defaults interacted was necessarily one of anger. Maybe there was some. I dunno. It's so long ago and I can't actually remember it, it just sorta happened somewhere around the time I finished drawing my Tarot deck with the pen tool, and my entire approach changed forever.
posted by egypturnash at 7:59 AM on September 5, 2020 [4 favorites]

Another discovery-promotion trick I use is believing that if I find myself repeatedly striking some tedious issue while using a software package, especially if that issue involves a perceived need to re-enter the same data in multiple formats, then I'm not the only one who would have this use case so there must be some facility built in to handle it less painstakingly. Then I ask myself where I would have had to put that facility if it had been my job to build this software.

This approach is why every one of my bosses has wrongly believed me to be a computer genius: if something in a program annoys the fuck out of me, I google essentially "how to stop this thing from annoying the fuck out of me" and there is almost always an existing solution. And then my resulting ability to, say, rotate a single page of a PDF makes them think I'm a badass hacker.
posted by showbiz_liz at 9:45 AM on September 5, 2020 [4 favorites]

>What do you mean you can add line breaks with the alt key???

>>You best keep quiet about this and never speak of it again. The CSV mob knows about you now.

Oh I know it's wrong. But you know what's worse? My old coworkers' solution: to add spaces at the end of a word until the cursor jumps to the next line. Then the second you adjust a column width you just have sentences with anywhere from two to fifteen spaces between random words.

"But Excel isn't meant for multi-paragraph-length chunks of text in the first place!" Yes I know. I know. Tell it to every federal government and multinational body on Earth, cause they ALL want your grant proposal results matrix in Excel and they don't care which hapless office drones they hurt in the process.
posted by showbiz_liz at 9:50 AM on September 5, 2020 [2 favorites]

Ooh, I just remembered one.

In windows, if you're renaming a file, you can hit tab to rename the next file. Pretty trivial, but blew my mind none the less. Again, found it by accident.
posted by ishmael at 9:54 AM on September 5, 2020 [3 favorites]

Or SHIFT tab to go the other way in the list. No sweat.
posted by ominous_paws at 9:59 AM on September 5, 2020 [1 favorite]

This approach is why every one of my bosses has wrongly believed me to be a computer genius: if something in a program annoys the fuck out of me, I google essentially "how to stop this thing from annoying the fuck out of me" and there is almost always an existing solution.

Obligatory xkcd 627
posted by flabdablet at 11:50 AM on September 5, 2020 [1 favorite]

Which reminds me again of how I managed to develop such a distaste for Windows. I have lost count of the number of times I've found myself googling for a workaround for some particularly boneheaded flow blockage in a Windows facility or MS application, only to end up at a Microsoft support page that describes my issue exactly and then says:

This behavior is by design.
posted by flabdablet at 11:55 AM on September 5, 2020 [3 favorites]

What do you mean you can add line breaks with the alt key??

You mean you don't keep a Notepad++ tab open with things like linebreaks in it that you can copy and paste everytime you want a line break but you can't figure out how to do it in random app?
posted by MrBobaFett at 6:46 PM on September 5, 2020 [1 favorite]

That trick is good for pasting tabs into

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			Metafilter.

posted by flabdablet at 8:25 PM on September 5, 2020

Somewhere I have saved text files that contain only hints. Like “when trying to fix that file you deal with once per year, hold down this obscure key combination and then hit enter to fix it” because I know darn well the things I figure out by accident won’t speed up my workflow if I can’t remember how I did it the next time. Stuff I do daily? No problem. Stuff I only rage-googled because I have to do it once in a blue moon and get frustrated every time? Write that shit down.
posted by caution live frogs at 9:36 PM on September 5, 2020 [4 favorites]

caution live frogs, me too. I have several "how to" files that I have written up in plain language, with screen shots pasted in and marked up, with click-by-click and keystroke-by-keystroke instructions for how to do these really obscure but necessary things we do maybe once a year. And then a month later, the software vendor makes a silent design change that makes my instructions utterly useless.
posted by xedrik at 7:14 AM on September 6, 2020

In my years with computers, it seems that users usually blame themselves when something either goes wrong or they find they can’t do something. Now that app developers no longer actually write good user manuals with indexes that let you look up things you are trying to do and that the apps themselves are no longer user tested, or follow good user interface design guidelines, they are the ones to blame. Gaming, it seems, has taken over all computing. Apps are now ridden with blind alleys, traps, ludicrous puzzles, and so on. Why do we put up with this shit?
posted by njohnson23 at 9:31 AM on September 6, 2020 [1 favorite]

Any large application greater than 20 years old is going to have many barnacles on it from catering to past ages of users and metaphors.

User manuals seem to have been supplanted by the forum model where you let the community fumble its way around the warts of your program.
posted by benzenedream at 6:34 PM on September 6, 2020 [1 favorite]

Why do we put up with this shit?

The way I see it, basically because Steve Jobs was the best monorail salesman the world has ever seen.
posted by flabdablet at 7:40 PM on September 6, 2020 [1 favorite]