• 6 Posts
  • 60 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: December 27th, 2023

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  • I think a second machine is way better than dual booting. Dual booting is a pain in the ass. I try to avoid rebooting the machine for any reason, its disruptive.

    Better get an old cheap thinkpad or small PC. And you dont have to take the risk of learning about partitioning on your primary machine as first baby step. Keep your important stuff where its safe until such time as you are comfortable switching over.



  • Can’t think of any better designed and built software package I ever used than sketchup desktop. I wasted soooo much time making needlessly detailed 3d renderings of things around me. I sort of specifically dont want anything that good because it was way too engaging and a real time sink. So fun though. I miss it.

    Its criminal to throw that much good code in the trash. If the companies don’t want it it should revert to worker control or go to an archive/conservation organization. Another great product destroyed by capitalism.

    I now need the try the various viable programs that have been recommended.





  • I’ve been hoping for inkscape to get usable for ages. I will always give it another shot.

    So after trying it out, I will say it has improved a lot compared to 5-10, even 2 years ago. Some strange and unconfigurable UI decisions that waste huge amounts of screen space— it takes about 3x as much as it should for what is displayed. Only my small laptop display the interface takes >25% of available screen real estate. It would be impossible to do anything substantial. They’re still working out how to implement pallets-- but at least there are pallets now.

    For this basic application I can deal with little odd stuff; every program has them.

    Small problems for the question I posed: No unit of feet, but does have inches. There is a way to type the dimensions tho it’s not as smooth as Sketchup and it sometimes adjusts the values — I entered 58" but it became 57.570".

    Main problem: Terrible stability. It has required hard reboot of my computer twice and killing the application numerous times. They have some documentation about how to avoid these problems but none of them apply here. The first time it crashed all I had done was draw 2 plain rectangles. I have a pretty stable system, this is very unusual.

    Also here is something fun: Preferences don’t appear to be saved unless you properly exit. So when I spent time setting things up, then it crashed, everything went away. I experimented by setting a pref then quitting vs setting a pref then killing. Killing results in reset of the pref.

    Crashing and stability aside it is massive improvement.






  • If I had to make a general rule I would say relative dates for recent but precise for older. “1 hour” is good enough in a lot of cases but “2 years” is too vague.

    A fancier UI could have a user setting for what dates to display, or if you click the date it changes to the other format. Maybe even for all dates on the page so it could be quickly toggled. Or clicking the date selects/copies it.

    Admittedly a very marginal use case so for a small software, might not be a good use of time.

    I think text on the page should be selectable but tooltips should not. Although I do generally appreciate lemmy’s overall use of user-select: none because it omits all the little icons like voting and reply which are unlikely needed and clutter up destination text file. I don’t always love how it skips the link icon because then I need to copy it separately. (Combining the timestamp with the link in the way of old blog trackbacks is still logical.)


  • I disagree that this software could be functional without some way to show the date. That is a basic functionality.

    Having to hover over each individual comment or post rather than displaying on the page means it’s obscured. You can’t see it unless you do something, and then you can only see it for a moment. Even if you want to manually transcribe the date, you can’t type in one window and have that tooltip active in the other so you need to go back and forth unless you can memorize the whole thing at once.

    Whether it is a good design decision as is another matter, I can see why you wouldn’t want the full date/time displayed in all situations. Maybe I’m just a freak for wanting to copy the dates.