A quick thanks go to commenter and regular visitor Malc for pointing this one out to me.

Back in August of this year I wrote a little piece on search engine Cuil hoping that this might just be the one to stand up to the near monopoly that is the evil Google giant. I still like and use Cuil wherever possible but the publicity that was generated by it’s launch soon dissipated and the momentum seemed to be quickly lost.

One thing I have never done is enter my own domain name into the search engine. I have not done that with Google either come to think of it. And so it was left to Malc to discover the horrible truth. The illustration shows the top search result from Cuil and of the many hundreds of images sitting up on the server that have graced these pages over the years what one does it choose?

In the words of Malc… “I thought it a very appropriate example of how a search engine shouldn’t do things”.

Bloody right.

Apologies for banging on about Adobe again. (See The Black Elements). It’s just that next to Google, Adobe are the software company that annoy me the most. As I said before – they seem to have this arrogant disregard for standards, usability and support.

I have been using Photoshop Elements since version 2. I don’t much like it, but it is capable at what it does. Adobe introduced automatic update downloading several versions ago and every version has been crap. Witness the dialog box in the illustration…

Opened it up today and got a message: ‘Hey – we’ve got a real groovy update for you and to show how competent and user-friendly we are we can go right ahead and download it and then install it while you just sit back and be amazed at our technical wizardry’. OK says I.

it downloaded some 7+ megabytes – informed me it was now installing and then popped up the above message. Honestly – these people couldn’t find their…

For my photo and graphic editing needs I use Adobe’s Photoshop Elements. While Adobe have always annoyed me for their complete and arrogant disregard for UI standards, their Photoshop software has to be considered pretty good stuff and the trimmed down ‘consumer’ level Elements does more than I need. And finally, for the Mac, they recently released version 6 which runs natively on the Intel processor and has the speed and robustness previous versions lacked.

So far so good. Is there a negative coming up? Sure there is.

There is a growing tendency – and I believe Apple themselves started this trend – for a ‘black’ interface. Dialog boxes and toolbars are black with buttons and text being, well, nearly black. See for yourself on the illustration of Elements. It actually looks rather nice – I have nothing against black; I have a solid black desktop all the time. And when I am sitting in the office at my iMac with its great big screen, it is a pleasure to use.

When I use my MacBook Pro however, and this is the machine I use the most, I am usually out in the conservatory or on the patio under a sunshade. The screen is smaller. The ambient light is brighter. I load up Elements. And all I can see is… black. I can just about make out the text on that toolbar but there is no way I can see the textbox. Or the dropdown control. Or make out which tool is which in the tool palette. The very first time I installed and opened it up I was, in fact, outside and it was one of those ‘wtf’ moments as all I could see was black. Bloody black everywhere.

Take the test. See the bottom toolbar? Look along it until you find the word ‘Normal’. This is a drop down selection list so somewhere to the right is a little down arrow. Can you see it? Wait until night time and then turn out all the lights. You’ll be able to see it then. And if you can see it now tilt the screen to pretend you are working in a lighter room.

Professional software like this will go through hundreds of hours of design work and possibly thousands of hours of UI and usability testing. I am forced to assume that it was all done in a darkened room and nobody thought to turn the fucking lights on. Either that or everyone who works at Adobe has a mental age of 12.

And before anyone says anything – yes I have scoured the options, the help files, the documentation and nowhere does it say you can change it. ‘Bridge’ – the library program that comes bundled also has black on black and that can be changed. I even posted on the support forum and sent them a support request and guess what? Never even got a reply. That’s Adobe for you.

If you know how to fix this I will be indebted for the information. If you don’t, and like me prefer to be able to work at places of your own choosing, then I’d avoid this if I were you. Unless you’re under 12 that is.

Cuil: an old Irish word for knowledge. Apparently!

Anyone who knows me well may have heard my rant on the evils of Google. I loathe and distrust Google. They may well have started out as a nice little fluffy, ethical company – just like Adolf Hitler started out as a landscape painter, but, like Hitler, their status has almost grown into a religion and their power and stranglehold is beyond belief.

And yes – I use Google. It’s become a verb and you almost do it without thinking, the way Catholics genuflect and cross themselves. And yes – like a Nazi salute. You are so used to it that when you want to search the web – you just hit the ubiquitous ‘Google’ button that appears on every browser. But, at the same time, I have tried all the other search engines – and there are an astounding number out there – desperate to find one that stands up to the jolly blue giant.

Enter Cuil. OK – so some of the founders once worked for Google but this could just be the engine to give Google a run for it’s billions. (And yes – I know Google is now more than just a search engine but that’s the part I hate the most!).

You can find out more about Cuil here. I have been using it just for a day and I am already won over. At least give it a try.

Before I switched to exclusively using Apple Mac’s I thought that the only web browser available to those poor Apple folk was the – at the time – newly released Safari although I do recall knowing that an old and ugly version of IE (5.5) was also bundled. It was not, of course, true at that time and it is not true today. The Mac platform is as spoilt for choice as users of Windows. All the major browsers are available with the one notable exception of Internet Explorer – a demon which Mac users remain, thankfully, not tempted by.

Personally I have been a Firefox user since the Phoenix days and before the switch. Opera I find too confusing and idiosyncratic. Safari may be relatively fast but I find it’s dark grey toolbars and borders foreboding and just plain ugly and much prefer Omniweb which also uses the same webkit platform. But I have stuck to faithful Firefox partly because of it’s wonderful plugin architecture.

But therein lies, I believe, both the strength and the weakness of Firefox. It can not be denied that with every new update it gets just a little slower at core rendering and while some of the plugins become indispensable, each one adds it’s own overhead. I have found myself becoming increasingly frustrated with the need to reboot my Mac because Firefox has, to put it bluntly, slowed to a crawl. But I like it – it does what I need – one or two plugins really are indispensable – so I carried on using it.

And then I was talking just a couple of days back to a guy who mentioned Camino. Camino uses the same framework and engine as Firefox but is both optimised for the Mac platform and has dispensed with the plugin architecture. It is a plain and simple browser without all the bells and whistles of it’s bigger brother. I tried it once a couple of years ago and didn’t like it.

I tried it yesterday and was, to put it simply, quite amazed. My own site here was displaying in a fraction of the time Firefox takes to render it. Other sites I regularly visit were suddenly popping up while Firefox was still looking for the progress bar. And the good news seems to be that Camino is not suffering from the same degradation that Firefox regularly displays. This – to me – is a revelation of some magnitude. If, like me, you looked at Camino a few years back, thought the centrally located tabs were a little weird and then dismissed it… load it up and have a go with today’s version. It’s just like the weather here in England today. Hot.