Colouring lessons page 2
This screenshots gallery generally relates to screenshots of graphical interfaces. The fundamental nature of a graphical interface is colouring in the screen with lots of pretty pixels. And for some reason, we still cannot seem to even get that much to work reliably…
I cannot tell what the following is about. For reasons best known to someone else, every now and then a random taskbar button caption ends up scrawled over my Firefox toolbar. And only Firefox.
The 1.x gaim series (I have yet to tell if this affects 2.0 beta) has a peculiar problem when your MSN Messenger connection drops. All MSN users with no buddy icon have their generic icon adorned with random symbols:
Proving that it is random, here is a screenshot of the bug open when it recurred; note the different mess made the second time around.
Such is the permeating evil of MSN that it won’t even work inside gaim. So why am I using it? The highlighted PhotoPro SQL icon during alt-tab is me exploiting the combined dreadfulness of PhotoSQL and Windows as the only way to get a screenshot of alt-tab. If PhotoSQL and Windows worked properly it would not have been possible to do that without specialist screenshot software!
Another timeless woe is the GNU toolkit (MSN+) and its interesting inability to scroll a window properly. Surely this is one of the basics?
Further examples: screenshot 2 and screenshot 3.
The following picture is actually one of mine, from my beloved lili_Pad program, during implementation of the vertical pane divider between the topics list and the current topic. I think I had as little idea what I was doing then as I do now :)
Almost there:
I must be sad. Here is me receiving a rather seedy and interesting ICQ message; I tried to select it to copy it and show someone how dumb it was, and ICQ barfed.
The following pie-faced girl (and note how convincing it looks!) is supposedly something to do with the encoding, known as burn
. But since I have several videos that do this, I find it hard to believe that it is really a fault of the video and not just of my player, but I am no expert.
The following screenshot from Shinaku shows iTunes after a game of Worms. It is a nice case study for why graphical interfaces need multiple managed framebuffers for entertainment software.
Under Mac OS 9 and earlier, Apple’s approach to drawing selected text was to swap every background pixel (typically white) with a new colour, and back again when done. Aside from being insanely stupid in general on a fast machine, it goes spectacularly wrong if you try selecting text underneath a toolbar:
Finally, this Java applet has a chip on its shoulder against redrawing in its background:
