UX Chat

@BenBrocka I always good some good advice from good-tutorials.com/tutorials/photoshop when I was trying to figure out how to do things in PS. Not sure it's still as good as it used to be though, but as a tutorial aggregator it's not bad.

Ben Brocka

2:51 PM

@JohnGB I don't know honestly. I just want to be able to do some basic graphic design in it, for instance I need a "channel art" banner for Youtube. And maybe mock up some pretty buttons or something for interface elements

rk.

nettuts+ have some free tutorials and stuff

Ben Brocka

@JonW Nothing that's a big time/money commitment for now. Just something to get me started so I can play around and learn more at my own pace after I stop wondering where the hell everything is

I currently know where the magic eraser is and that's about it

And cropping stuff

I used to know GIMP but nothing looks familiar

rk.

youtube.com/…

JonW

@BenBrocka I tried to switch from PS to GIMP a while back, but I was far too stuck in my ways with PS that nothing in GIMP made any sense.

Ben Brocka

@rk. oh, those look like they could be good

@JonW they don't seem to transfer as well as I'd expected. I just recognize some of the barebones stuff like "oh those are my layers"

JohnGB

2:55 PM

Adobe Photoshop CS5 The Missing Manual

JonW

Usually all I'd do with PS is just decide in my head that I want to do something, I dunno, like 'How to make a poster effect' or something. Then just google that and try out a bunch of tutorials.

I couldn't get on with videos, I like to follow written guidelines so I know how long it's gonig to take and if it's in my skill level. I don't want to get 20 minutes into a video before I find out that I have no idea what they're talking about.

Ben Brocka

@JonW I guess that's basically my learning process for coding

if you hate someone, endorse them on linkedin for SOAP APIs and waterfall methodologies

Tweeted by jessicard on April 3, 2013 at 6:22 PM

hah

I hoped it would be more like video editing where I just clicked through menus until I found something that worked

But there's like 18 billion menus so that's not going to work out

JonW

@BenBrocka Or just use my other tutorial approach I mentioned on here recently. Go to a PS forum and post something like "Photoshop is rubbish, it doesn't even have a Sepia effect' or something and then sit back and wait for all the 'advice' that'll come flooding in!

Ben Brocka

3:09 PM

@JonW heh

Did chat error out for anyone else?

JonW

Apparently so.

7

Q: Chat.SE is down

I get this when I open any page on Chat.SE: Could this be fixed?

rk.

@JonW nice approach :P I should try that sometime

Charles Wesley

3:30 PM

@JonW I didn't realize chat was .NET

or at least hosted on IIS

Ben Brocka

SE is mostly an MS stack

236

Q: Which tools and technologies are used to build the Stack Exchange Network?

Picking up from the blog, what are all the details on tools and technologies used to build the Stack Exchange Network? Return to FAQ index

support faq stackexchange technology tools

Charles Wesley

should I be surprised? i'm surprised. that's cool

Roger Attrill

4:05 PM

SE uses WMD! Oh Lor!

oh - ok - it's not this, phew!

Weapon of mass destruction

A weapon of mass destruction (WMD) is a weapon that can kill and bring significant harm to a large number of humans (and other life forms) and/or cause great damage to man-made structures (e.g. buildings), natural structures (e.g. mountains), or the biosphere in general. The scope and application of the term has evolved and been disputed, often signifying more politically than technically. Coined in reference to aerial bombing with chemical explosives, it has come to distinguish large-scale weaponry of other technologies, such as chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear. This dif...

JonW

@RogerAttrill You're thinking of North Korea

Roger Attrill

clearly!

(nu)clearly! haha!

JohnGB

4:44 PM

@JonW That website is indeed a live webcam

People are working now, but the refresh is slow

Charles Wesley

5:56 PM

Does anyone have a particular browser-based markdown editor that they prefer? I just got back from doing a usability test with a user and I'm really thinking for this group WYSIWYM is going to be better that WYSIWYG.

JohnGB

For WYSIWYM the best is WYMeditor

but that is fairly different from typical markdown

It's more for ontological markdown

Charles Wesley

my use case is older office workers who are not confident technology users who need to create simple web content where being limited to h1, h2, h3, bold, italic, bullets, and the occasional image embed is perfect

@JohnGB looks interesting

JohnGB

Then straight markdown is better than WYSIWYM

What platform?

Charles Wesley

I was thinking the same wrt straight markdown

it is a custom web based app so i'm looking for a javascript/jquery solution

back end is .NET however my need is pretty much just client side

Billy Moon

Codemirror does syntax highlighting for markdown, and is an excellent editor

More focussed on text editing, but has a great API, and loads of projects are based on it

You can find projects on the net that have added buttons to codemirror for the usual bold, italic etc...

Also, I saw one mode where the styles of the headings were large, and the hyperlinks were underlined etc...

not very polished - and I think currently impossible to differentiate different levels of heading

but getting close to being the nice middleground we have all been waiting for... WYSIWYMAMOLWYG (what you see is what you mean and more or less what you get)

JohnGB

6:10 PM

@CharlesWesley I would use what SE use

it's also .NET and JS

also open source

Charles Wesley

@BillyMoon Thanks, i'll check that out!

@JohnGB I was reading about that as well. There are lots of choose from so I was wondering if anyone had direct experience with any. I think i'll try a few and then see if the users give me any feedback one way or the other.

i'm curious if they would find syntax highlighting helpful or not. it's harder to guess what they will do since their technology comfort level is much lower than I normally design for

JohnGB

I've used some backend ones to handle processing and conversion to html, but nothing in js

Or just steal what Wikipedia use

Easier to explain to someone that you edit it like you would in Wikipedia

Charles Wesley

With these users that would elicit a blank look lol

:)

JohnGB

Give them plain text then :)

Like what you had back in 1970

:)

Charles Wesley

if i could :) i'm sure they would prefer that actually

it's interesting working with users that have successfully avoided technology to this date. i feel like an evangelist bringing the good word to the frontier

thanks guys!

Ben Brocka

9:19 PM

This is a pretty good example of why I hate hunting down new versions of PHP extensions

Misha Scholte

Should't the 'k' be next to 23?

Ben Brocka

@MishaScholte Still a stupid question

assuming that's this

72

Q: Is coffee a good excuse for a slow application start-up time?

I was dragged into a meeting with a client to consult on any usability issues as we watched a user performing day-to-day operations with a software application. The first thing that happened was that after the client double-clicked the app's icon we waited around 8 minutes for the app to load. N...

response-time

@MishaScholte Oh. Yes, I think that ship has sailed though

Misha Scholte

10:16 PM

@BenBrocka Yes, I agree. Pretty weird question

Transcript for