Author Topic: Industrial design Picasso style  (Read 10611 times)

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Offline BudTopic starter

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Industrial design Picasso style
« on: August 16, 2014, 02:15:49 am »
Just got a Microchip ICD3 programmer and still cannot wrap my head around its enclosure "design". I wonder what that designer idiot smoked before going to work that day. Neither I understand a connection between hockey and microcontroller programming, nor what convenience or benefits a roundly shaped enclosure provides on the bench. It does not save space, it is too light and does not stay where you put it, and the USB and programming cables going in and out at 120 degree angle make it even worse in terms of taking bench space and seem inconvenient for operation. Oh man, I hope it is just me and there may be someone in here in this forum who loves hockey pack shaped programmers.

Feel free to share your cases of similar industrial design stupidity in this thread. I guess this kind of distorted reality things might be OK for a desk speaker at home but as an electronic tool is an absolute waste of efforts. 



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Offline ivaylo

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Re: Industrial design Picasso style
« Reply #1 on: August 16, 2014, 07:02:59 am »
C'mon dude, loosen up :) Why do all things electronics have to be square and black? Still don't understand why Fluke patented the yellow, no one would have used it anyways...
 

Online bookaboo

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Re: Industrial design Picasso style
« Reply #2 on: August 16, 2014, 07:46:47 am »
I went for the MPLAB Real Ice mostly because it was a rectangle.

Joking aside thats a gimmicky design, looks kind of cheap, probably adds cost and no benefits. Not a deal breaker if the kit is what you need but still strange selection.
 

Offline andersm

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Re: Industrial design Picasso style
« Reply #3 on: August 16, 2014, 10:02:33 am »
Reminds me of the people who had a shitfit when Windows XP came out because it dared to not be gray on gray.

Offline igendel

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Re: Industrial design Picasso style
« Reply #4 on: August 16, 2014, 03:23:13 pm »
Rectangle, hockey puck, a pig standing on its hind legs... whatever shape it takes, my only wish is that it would work without complaints (unlike my *cough*AVRISP MKII*cough*)
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Online T3sl4co1l

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Re: Industrial design Picasso style
« Reply #5 on: August 16, 2014, 03:56:38 pm »
Reminds me of the people who had a shitfit when Windows XP came out because it dared to not be gray on gray.

Which promptly got set right the hell back to Windows Classic as soon as it reached my hands... :P
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Offline dannyf

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Re: Industrial design Picasso style
« Reply #6 on: August 16, 2014, 05:42:31 pm »
Quote
*cough*AVRISP MKII*cough*

and continued support, for a reasonable period of time, :)

Dragon is actually a better programmer in my view. But it dies too easily.
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Offline zapta

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Re: Industrial design Picasso style
« Reply #7 on: August 17, 2014, 07:02:41 am »
...my only wish is that it would work without complaints (unlike my *cough*AVRISP MKII*cough*)

What kind of problems do you have with it? I never noticed any.
 

Offline mikeselectricstuff

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Re: Industrial design Picasso style
« Reply #8 on: August 17, 2014, 08:41:08 am »
This sort of thing is annoying - it's not the sort of product that anyone makes a buying decision on based on looks. All it does is increase cost unnecessarily - custom case, multicolour printing, wasteful circular PCB.
What pisses me off even more though is that after they've gone to all that expense, they don't even bother printing useful stuff like pinouts on the case.
 

 
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Online tszaboo

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Re: Industrial design Picasso style
« Reply #9 on: August 17, 2014, 09:23:26 am »
It is called macisajt design.
It is a creme chese, no idea what it has to do with bears.

[SAD] pictures not working [/SAD]
« Last Edit: August 17, 2014, 09:28:55 am by NANDBlog »
 

Offline igendel

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Re: Industrial design Picasso style
« Reply #10 on: August 17, 2014, 01:44:07 pm »
...my only wish is that it would work without complaints (unlike my *cough*AVRISP MKII*cough*)

What kind of problems do you have with it? I never noticed any.

There are some mysterious issues with the drivers (Win7 64-bit), causing the Atmel Studio not to recognize it at all, or to mess up its clock speed (I know of several other people who encountered this). After a long, exhaustive dialog with the support, they acknowledged there's an issue - were even able to replicate it - and suggested I wait for a future version of the IDE that will have it fixed.  :palm:

Some further experiments revealed that if I disable the driver authentication on Windows, things do work - but that's a very dangerous thing to do, and it has to be done manually on each reboot of the system.
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Offline zapta

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Re: Industrial design Picasso style
« Reply #11 on: August 17, 2014, 04:52:27 pm »
...my only wish is that it would work without complaints (unlike my *cough*AVRISP MKII*cough*)

What kind of problems do you have with it? I never noticed any.

There are some mysterious issues with the drivers (Win7 64-bit), causing the Atmel Studio not to recognize it at all, or to mess up its clock speed (I know of several other people who encountered this). After a long, exhaustive dialog with the support, they acknowledged there's an issue - were even able to replicate it - and suggested I wait for a future version of the IDE that will have it fixed.  :palm:

Some further experiments revealed that if I disable the driver authentication on Windows, things do work - but that's a very dangerous thing to do, and it has to be done manually on each reboot of the system.

Thanks for the explanation. I use avrdude on Mac OSX so this may explain the experience difference.
 

Offline BudTopic starter

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Re: Industrial design Picasso style
« Reply #12 on: August 18, 2014, 05:59:13 am »
... whatever shape it takes, my only wish is that it would work without complaints

I started using this ICD3 and have figured out this is not the case with it - when in Debug mode, if I move the programmer or the target circuit on the desk, the programmer crashes it MPLabX session. Cable connections are solid, why the damn thing does not like physical movement I have no idea.
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Offline geppa.dee

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Re: Industrial design Picasso style
« Reply #13 on: August 18, 2014, 11:45:30 am »
Reminds me of the people who had a shitfit when Windows XP came out because it dared to not be gray on gray.

Which promptly got set right the hell back to Windows Classic as soon as it reached my hands... :P
For me, even Win7 (when I finally had to start using it) got the same treatment.
I'm not a luddite, many times I'm an early adopter of new tech but I hate "technological progress" that only amounts to (subjectively) annoying visual changes that at best bring nothing to the table from a functional POV, or worse, hinder functionality (fat quasi-transparent window borders f.e.).
 

Offline andersm

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Re: Industrial design Picasso style
« Reply #14 on: August 18, 2014, 01:27:36 pm »
I'm not a luddite, many times I'm an early adopter of new tech but I hate "technological progress" that only amounts to (subjectively) annoying visual changes that at best bring nothing to the table from a functional POV, or worse, hinder functionality (fat quasi-transparent window borders f.e.).
Switching to the classic theme disables hardware window compositing, so you're just making your system slower.

Offline sunnyhighway

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Re: Industrial design Picasso style
« Reply #15 on: August 18, 2014, 02:19:32 pm »
Just got a Microchip ICD3 programmer and still cannot wrap my head around its enclosure "design". I wonder what that designer idiot smoked before going to work that day. Neither I understand a connection between hockey and microcontroller programming, nor what convenience or benefits a roundly shaped enclosure provides on the bench. <snip rambling>...</snip rambling>

I don't understand how you even got the cables connected to the round box.  :-//

Maybe this image explains a bit how it was intended.
« Last Edit: August 19, 2014, 05:16:18 pm by sunnyhighway »
 

Offline BudTopic starter

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Re: Industrial design Picasso style
« Reply #16 on: August 19, 2014, 02:21:22 am »
sunnyhighway, nice!
 :-DD

I think I know what happened - the Microchip guy used a shoe polish can for the prototype, then he got some more his smok'n stuff and watched a hockey game on TV, and when returned back to Earth his boss told him they go to production tomorrow, so no time left to design a proper enclosure. So he decided not to bother, just used plastic to make it even cheaper.
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Offline SirNick

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Re: Industrial design Picasso style
« Reply #17 on: August 19, 2014, 07:41:49 pm »
Switching to the classic theme disables hardware window compositing, so you're just making your system slower.

Not to mention that Win7's 2D theme makes 9x's gray-on-gray look positively stunning by comparison.

Mostly, I just don't like that OS upgrades feel the need to impose a new look upon you.  It's like having someone come in to re-paint your house if you want the furnace to keep working.  You get a chartreuse accent wall now!  Don't like it?  Why?  Afraid of change or something?  No, I just have preferences and there's nothing at all wrong with that.

FWIW, XP's look grew on me.  Still unsure of Vista/7.  I really prefer the flexibility of e.g., StyleXP and a vast collection of contributed themes though.  That should have been stock behavior.  Similarly, the whole iOS 6 to iOS 7 thing sucked for many reasons, one of which was that I happened to like the old aesthetic.  I'll take new kernels and my choice in graphics, please.  Would that really be so hard?  (Enter Linux ....)
 

Offline geppa.dee

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Re: Industrial design Picasso style
« Reply #18 on: September 06, 2014, 12:13:57 pm »
I'm not a luddite, many times I'm an early adopter of new tech but I hate "technological progress" that only amounts to (subjectively) annoying visual changes that at best bring nothing to the table from a functional POV, or worse, hinder functionality (fat quasi-transparent window borders f.e.).
Switching to the classic theme disables hardware window compositing, so you're just making your system slower.
Realy? Hmm... I might be wrong (its been a rather long time since I was concerned with how the internals of MS Windows worked) but I'm under the impression that no window composition is faster than hw accelerated window composition. It's actually one of the reasons to disable it for me. I don't need it. I'm perfectly happy with apps handling the painting of their respective windows by themselves as log as they're still able to. Windows has had 2D hw acceleration for both the GDI and the GDI+ since... I think win95. As far as I know that hasn't gone away and in this case, that's all is needed.
My system is mostly busy with other things (even when booted to windows). I couldn't care less about what DWM (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ff468822%28v=vs.85%29.aspx) brings to the table.

Not to mention that Win7's 2D theme makes 9x's gray-on-gray look positively stunning by comparison.

Mostly, I just don't like that OS upgrades feel the need to impose a new look upon you.  It's like having someone come in to re-paint your house if you want the furnace to keep working.  You get a chartreuse accent wall now!  Don't like it?  Why?  Afraid of change or something?  No, I just have preferences and there's nothing at all wrong with that.

FWIW, XP's look grew on me.  Still unsure of Vista/7.  I really prefer the flexibility of e.g., StyleXP and a vast collection of contributed themes though.  That should have been stock behavior.  Similarly, the whole iOS 6 to iOS 7 thing sucked for many reasons, one of which was that I happened to like the old aesthetic.  I'll take new kernels and my choice in graphics, please.  Would that really be so hard?  (Enter Linux ....)

Win7 classic theme looks exactly like the WinXP classic theme in almost all regards (that is to say, a little better than 9x's in my opinion). Once you get rid of the big, goofy, half link, half icon, thingies they put on the taskbar by default and bring back the proper "quick launch" toolbar it's hard to visually differentiate it from XP. 
 

Offline andersm

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Re: Industrial design Picasso style
« Reply #19 on: September 06, 2014, 12:37:58 pm »
I might be wrong (its been a rather long time since I was concerned with how the internals of MS Windows worked) but I'm under the impression that no window composition is faster than hw accelerated window composition.
Without compositing, an application must redraw its window contents when obsured by other windows (those white blotches you get when eg. dragging a dialog across a window). With compositing, the window contents are drawn into an offscreen surface, and the window manager can repaint the exposed portions using the graphics hardware essentially for free. Because of hardware compositing, effects like window shadows and the Windows 7 translucent title bars also cost nothing.

Offline geppa.dee

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Re: Industrial design Picasso style
« Reply #20 on: September 06, 2014, 02:34:39 pm »
Without compositing, an application must redraw its window contents when obsured by other windows
You're not telling me anything new, I've been writing software professionally for about 15 years now. :)
(those white blotches you get when eg. dragging a dialog across a window).
Nah... you only get those in edge situations:... the app is borked (message pump and/or main thread blocked), Windows is borked (multitude of possible reasons... ), no graphical drivers installed... all situations in which desktop compositing (let's call it what it is :) ) won't help much anyway.
With compositing, the window contents are drawn into an offscreen surface, and the window manager can repaint the exposed portions using the graphics hardware essentially for free. Because of hardware compositing, effects like window shadows and the Windows 7 translucent title bars also cost nothing.
I agree but I think it's a moot point in real life. Like I said before, my main (and only one that has Win partitions) machine spends very little time redrawing parts of windows that get shown by other windows moving away. With 3 full hd screens (1horiz + 2vert), I have very little need to move windows. Or to even overlap them too often. I remind you that my argument was subjective from the very beginning. I was talking about my situation.
As for window shadows... don need or want them. As far as desktop shadowing goes, I only want it under the mouse pointer and that's hw accelerated, DWM or not. About the window chrome translucency... it might be free (or at least very cheap) computing wise but it's ugly and wasteful in screen real estate. So again... I don't want it.
To summarize: the argument was subjective in that it applied to my situation and preferences and no... I don't think I'm making my system slower. :)
« Last Edit: September 06, 2014, 03:38:04 pm by geppa.dee »
 

Offline andersm

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Re: Industrial design Picasso style
« Reply #21 on: September 06, 2014, 04:39:49 pm »
You're not telling me anything new, I've been writing software professionally for about 15 years now.
Things have changed since then.

Offline geppa.dee

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Re: Industrial design Picasso style
« Reply #22 on: September 06, 2014, 05:44:40 pm »
You're not telling me anything new, I've been writing software professionally for about 15 years now.
Things have changed since then.
About your link target: please tell me what new information it brings to our conversation, I see no points that I haven't addressed. I do see a bit of snark with a dash of egocentrism (presuming that we should all find pretty what he (an apparently you) find pretty and that we should also prefer it. I remember when Raymond used to be funny and insightful... now I don't know about insightful anymore because like I hinted before... I care way less about Windows than I used to, my development these days is mostly for big, hunking and graphicsless Linux servers) and the funny... hmm... Ctrl+F didn't find it on that page. :)
On top of that, I already explained how even if you consider something pretty (which is highly subjective) and it's not that computationally expensive, it can be expensive in other ways and so counterproductive, depending, again on one's POV.

Now regarding your anchor text... I see what you did there. Also, I did say "for about 15 years" not that I was doing it then and have been growing bees ever since (no disrespect intended to bee keepers).
Cheers.  ;)
 

Offline SirNick

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Re: Industrial design Picasso style
« Reply #23 on: September 09, 2014, 07:34:32 pm »
Point is, looks are subjective.  Why is it necessary to force changes to the UI along the way?  If I find a window manager I like, there is no reason in the world I shouldn't be allowed to use it forever.  If I really, really liked Win 3.x's line-drawn borders and gray space-bar control menu icon, my Windows 8.1 kernel should be able to cope with that fine.  Instead, someone else decided I should be using Metro tiles now.  Nope, let me off at the next stop, please.

Seems to me, adoption of a new OS would be trivial if a) your critical apps still work, and b) there's no need to play "find the control panel applet" every couple years.

AND... the new DirectX stack broke Starcraft.  That's just unforgivable.
 


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