Eyesight
by wjw on August 12, 2014
I’ve been trying to upload an ebook to the iBooks website through Apple’s software iTunes Producer, and it’s just like jabbing knitting needles in my eyeballs! The interface is terrible, hard to read and confusing, there’s a pop-up that keeps reappearing and you can’t get rid of it, and the results are often something very like gibberish.
Aw, fuck it. I’ll upload through Smashwords, because it’s worth paying them a cut in order not to have to deal with this.
Apple, if you want to compete with Amazon in the ebooks business, you’ll have to do a lot better than this.
And speaking of jabbing needles in eyeballs, that’s exactly what’s going to happen to be later this morning. I’m paying the penalty for living in a UV-laden New Mexico environment, and I’ve been developing a cataract— two cataracts, actually, though one isn’t as advanced as the other. So I’m having the worst of them removed in a few hours, and then I’ll have this weird colander-looking thing pasted over my eye for a few days.
I’m sort of regretting the lasik I had last year, because all I had to do was wait a year or two, and I’d have got new lenses anyway.
To the Apple fanbois, the user interface is probably gloriously intuitive.
Useability is very definitely a subjective thing. I’ve read a bunch of Don Norman’s stuff about useability and user interfaces, and either he’s from an alternate universe or has some really fine weed.
From what I’ve read, cataract surgery has gone from “not quite legally blind afterward” to “no big deal.” I hope things go smoothly for you.
I had some surgery a few years back. The surgeon was doing about a dozen of them that morning, and the hospital had patients on gurneys lined up in a corridor. Oddly, the assembly-line nature of it calmed my near-panic.. Nobody else was worried, maybe there was nothing to worry about. Sometimes being just another interchangeable part can be better than being a special snowflake.
You’ll get a lot of snarky ‘I am Borg’ jokes when you’re walking around with that thing over your eye. I speak from experience. I had both lenses in my eyes replaced. One eye got done by the NHS in the UK, the other got a better, more advanced lens in a private clinic in Taipei’s Shi-da District a few years later. I had it done under local anaesthetic, and it was pretty much walk-in, walk-out. I look forward to getting my next pair in twelve years time with integrated Google-patented Heads-Up display…!
That’d be really nifty… until the spammers found a way in.
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