The use of Photoshop’s standard Drop Shadow effect is immediately visible. It usually produces unrealistic and dull shadows:

Here’s how the shadow is constructed: the object’s mask is put beneath it, blurred and shifted. Here are the parameters of the above shadow:

However to make a shadow look better, you don’t always have to draw it “by hand”. The “Quality” group of parameters will help.

Number one is contour. You can change it by bending this graph:

The graph defines the fade of the shadow. For some reason it’s reversed: the point farthest to the object is on the left, the closest one is on the right. In most cases dragging the midpoint down is the right thing to do: you want the shadow to be lighter halfway from the object.

Photoshop includes some crazy contours that make no sense at all. This adds to the relative unpopularity of the feature (see the first two rows):

The last four contours are mine. Don’t hesitate to save your good ones there so that you can pick them faster. Like this one:

The real shadow does not fade linearly because there are many light sources. Bend the curve until it looks fine.

Number two is noise. Just add noise at 2 to 3 percent:

Here’s the above button with adjusted contour and added noise (other parameters intact):

No doubt hand-made shadows are better (if made by a good graphic designer). But the production cost is also higher, sometimes too high. Here everything remains scalable and you can transform the button, clone it etc.

A possible shortcoming of this approach is that you can’t make this button with pure CSS. In some cases manufacturability is more important than beauty. And of course all this is about UI shadows (as in buttons, toolbars and such). When you want a real shadow of a real object, Drop Shadow is of no use.

There are many explanations to the fact that some prefer Mac to Windows. They suffer religious fanaticism. They worship Steve Jobs. They want to impress others with an expensive gadget. After all, no one argues the power of Apple’s marketing.

But the idea that Macs are of higher quality and reliability seems unfounded. Obviously this can’t be true. Those who choose Macs are fooled. Marketers make naïve people buy expensive things with fictional advantages. The members of the Mac sect aren’t intelligent enough to understand that Mac is just a dummy in a sweet box.

In the last couple of years five or six of my anti-Apple friends who loved to make fun of Macs, switched. Quickly their homes became full with Apple gadgets. And now they help their relatives and friends switch too. It’s pain to see how people become dumb and unreasonable. It’s pain to see how they lose their ability to confront the Apple Church evangelism. It’s pain to see them outsmarted and robbed by selfish “entrepreneurs” from Cupertino.

Once we were discussing Macs and fanboys with Evgeny Stepanischev, and he said: “When I used Windows I thought you were a fan, but I no longer think so”. Not long ago John Gruber gave a definition of fanboy: “Someone who began using Apple products before you did”. These are striking examples of previously normal people losing control of their action and mind. How to make these people regain reason and common sense? How to escape the terrible crisis?

John Gruber on irrelevance of tech specs today:

Spec-based reviews of computers and gadgets are inherently flawed, a relic of an era that’s already gone. Movie reviews are about what the movie is like to watch. Is it enjoyable, is it entertaining, does it look and sound good? Imagine a movie review based on specs, where you gave points for how long it was, whether the photography is in focus, deduct points for continuity errors in the story, and then out comes a number like “7,5 / 10”, with little to no mention about, you know, whether the movie was effective as a piece of art.

High tech specs sometimes say just how bad a device is.

CPU clock speed and amount of RAM is a measure of device’s ineffectiveness. Just think about a 350 hp car that gets to 60 mph in 30 seconds. Something is obviously wrong with it.

If some device has too much memory or too fast processor, two things follow: 1) it costs more than it could have, since you pay for unnecessary hardware; 2) the battery life is worse than it could have been, since all this hardware consumes power.

A company should tell us how awesome and amazing “as a piece of art” their new device is, and then add, just for the geeks, that it has just a single-core 500-MHz processor and 128 MB of RAM. Wow, such a cool device with specs this low? That might be interesting.

Following my post on the topic in Russian, Opera’s Vadim Makeev asked me to reproduce it in English so that other guys from Opera could fully enjoy it. So here are some screenshots from my dear Opera browser, which I’ve been using for years, and have just switched from to stupid Safari a couple of days ago. Safari sucks, as well as any other browser, but at least it looks good.

Here’s how Opera says it has to update:

Everything is just awesome. The copy. The order and positioning of buttons. The very existence of Help button. But the winner is the crippled glow of “Install Now”.

And here’s the update process:

This one is also great. The download speed is specified up to a tenth of a kilobyte. The progress bar has a custom glare. The percentage of progress is in the middle and is displayed as black on dark-blue, again with high precision. “Time remaining: 1 second” instead of “1 second remaining”. Charming selection of buttons, with “Cancel” as the main one.

But the sweetest treat here is that this window is resizable:

This one is from some other version (notice how the weird button is called Minimize To Toolbar here).

But update is not the only thing Norwegian designers are keen at. Here’s a window stating that Opera has crashed:

All measures are taken to make sure that the news freaks out the user completely. Nothing fits anywhere. The radio-button labels are centered (they should patent it!).

By the way, the default button is Send Report, which is an outrage on humanity: a browser crash is no fun in the first place, and then I have to send some crappy report? It’s kind of obvious that if you want a report, you just send it in the background and shut up. If you click the button, a page opens in the browser to imitate report sending, but in reality nothing happens. I’ve typically waited for some time, with a maximum of 3 to 4 minutes, with no success. Maybe by design it needed 15 minutes to send the report, who knows? Anyway, I got used to clicking Do Not Send Report.

The icon is nifty, but if you think about it, they have designed a custom icon for a browser crash. Crashes are important aspect of the user experience with Opera, so I guess that sort of makes sense.

Also, Opera is a unique application. After crashing it manages to do one impossible thing. It restarts and a new Opera icon appears on the right side of the Dock (while the old ones remains in the Dock). The new icon starts jumping happily, while the one to the left stays calm. How’s that even possible? I have no clue, but apparently Opera does. Because of this, after every crash it is necessary to remove the old Dock icon and then move the new one into its place.

One day the new icon didn’t appear immediately, so I clicked the old one. It started jumping, and then the new one appeared, also jumping, of course. That was real fun, since they both started to bombard me with error boxes, saying something about conflicting resources, and then they hung so I had to force quit both. Epic.

But hey, Opera has “Unite”.