It’s About Making Babies!

I just picked up Adobe Photoshop Elements 6. Where are the usability people at Adobe?

I am 55 this year. I feel more comfortable with letters just a skosh larger this year than 5 years ago. But apparently the monitor I have is as decrepit as I am. Because the menus and selections and stuff in PE6 are *smaller* than I can comfortably make out.

I used Photoshop LE. Photoshop LE 2.0. Photoshop Elements 3.0. Now, I can’t even see the blinking screen because Adobe apparently assumes I work in an unlighted blinking *darkroom*. Half-shade grey lettering on black background — did they run this one off 4 years ago while the geeks were distinguishing themselves with *certified lame* black backgrounds?

What a nightmare.

OK. So, my SwishZone flash maker has skins. It lets me select the color scheme. Windows for goodness’ sake lets me pick color schemes, etc. I search for ‘change skins’ on PE6 help, and get ‘no pages found’. Do they not have skins, or do they call them by some other name? The online resources I have found don’t seem to have more material than I have seen.

How does the application work? I don’t know. Until the blinking sun went down (what working hours??) I couldn’t read the screen, see the icons, or find the labels and borders!!

Umm - in case you wondered, I am a bit upset over what Adobe did to a tool I used to be able to use.

In Photoshop LE, they let you select and move icons on the toolbars around. Many other *fine* programs do, too, as well as the cheap, the open source, and the not-so-fine programs. So when I went to PE3, I was unhappy to find out that Adobe doesn’t think I need that ability any more. So instead of a push-button ’save a copy of image for the web’ function on the tool bar, I get to open the file menu, and hit the particular function I want. Two selections, each in the midst of other action areas. Instead of a nice sized button with inactive space around it. Hello-o! Even reading this the situation reads like a recipe for disaster — why would Adobe want to make a very routine function (for me) three to four times as likely to mean a mistake?

And I don’t see anything in PE6 that allows configuring tool bars. Oops! I can’t even change the background of the menus and such *so I can see the interface in normal daytime light!!*

Tres rude, Adobe. Tres rude.

Did I mention the Adobe web site is muchly Flash now, since Adobe bought the Flash product when it bought the Macromedia company? Yes. Now that even *Microsoft’s* IE browser has tabbed browsing, Adobe is adopting links in Flash. Which disable the right-click menu to ‘open link destination in new tab’. How fricking modern (neanderthal?) is that!

And get this. To show three pages on Adobe, looking (I think, I am still waiting) for support for this problem, my modem shows I have downloaded about 4 MBytes. Yep. I still dial up - the cable company will not run a cable to my street, the phone company will not run DSL. So I use dial up. And I *notice rude damn bloated pages*. Adobe.

And that is aside from the way Adobe products like Acrobat Reader acts like a vicious virus - I have to remember I want to read a *gasp* PDF file - that is why my computer seized up like some virus froze my screen while it is wiping my hard drive. Even Microsoft Excel doesn’t pull that kind of crap.

Tres rude, Adobe. Tres rude.

Sam’s Stories today has a poignant message - her husband is rooting for Ron Paul as candidate. And Sam is quite opposed to Ron Paul’s anti-abortion stand.

I recall the activism that got abortion legalized. The argument went that illegal abortions killed too many women. That unwanted births threatened women’s lives and the lives of their families.

I hope that no one I know ever needs an abortion, but I actively support the need that the choice be available.

I would be happier if every ‘pro-life’ person would sign up, to pay for the medical care and social disruption of every woman that would have chosen and abortion, and pledge to care for the resulting infant.

I have never believed that abortion was about promiscuous behavior. Abortion is about escaping poverty, about salvaging the lives of mothers and families. About letting young girls have a life, instead of derailing them away from school, away from friends, and away from family.

In 1982 I met a woman, then 29, sent by her parents to the Lutheran home for unwed mothers in Minneapolis. I know that two years ago the unwed mother program in the Ponca City School System was restricted to high school girls - there wasn’t room for the 7th grade and 8th grade unwed mothers. Or the 6th grade pregnant girls. I am not aware that the program, or the need, has changed any. While I am relieved that school girls are no longer banned from town due to pregnancy - I graduated high school in 1970, and recall a Sophomore year girl ’sent away’ because pregnancies weren’t allowed in school! - I haven’t seen any anti-abortion answers to the devastation unwanted pregnancies wreak among the young, the poor, the struggling, and the oppressed.

Using the snappy ‘pro life’ label for radical anti-abortion activism is probably good PR, but really misses the point. The anti-abortionists, too many of them, are *not* pro life - they have focused on a single, isolated, minuscule part of the problem - pregnancy and birth. Rather than deal with the way society, the law, the economy, and families impact the lives of those affected by an unwanted pregnancy, they lean on often perverted religion and on charismatic rabble rousers to do their thinking. In the real world there are life and death decisions. Only the willfully escapist will claim that such decisions have already been made, just deal with it.

About Ron Paul? I suggested Sam should look at all the issues and ethics involved, in each of the candidates. But an anti-abortionist gets a mark ‘against’ from me.