WE RECEIVED the details of our home and office this week, currently for sale here. Apparently, we have five bedroms, fully tilled walls and our eves have cuboards, to name just a few features. The amazing thing is that this corruption of the English language was done on a computer, complete with smell czecher and all the other on-line aids.
Hyphen nation
Talking of which, it was as if hyphens do not exist and especially not between ‘double’ and ‘glazed’, nor ‘built’ and ‘in’ and definitely avoiding ‘hole’, ‘in’, ‘the’ and ‘wall’. It took an hour to proof the details and phone them to the estate agent who will pocket quite a few grand for his work.
There, the nice young man chosen by my wife to sell our gaff, was out of the office. His mum fixed the details for us and said they had been keyed-in by their young office junior and schools don’t teach korect speling and puntuashon any more. Which explains two of our pet hates: exclamation marks at the end of sentences to try to add emphasis to dull words; and using a series of full stops to represent an ellipsis which is a grammatical mark in its own right and looks a little like three full stops (never four or more).
Look and steel
She also told me about the software they use – an integrated package for creating the sales sheets, Internet ads and pictures for their shop windows. For all its features the real problem is the software gives them no chance to divert from the templates. This explains why the design of estate agent details are so mundane and pedestrian. The look and feel of their advertisements has been created by an Excel programmer rather than an XPress designer.
Crash test funnies
QuarkXPress was also updated to version 7.3 this week. We had taken part in preliminary testing so were familiar with the changes. However, the real thing seems much less stable than beta versions. Within 15 minutes of installing the update, XPress crashed, the first of at least half a dozen and all when doing innocent actions such as cut and paste. Sometimes the cut items refused to paste.
There is a problem with on-screen display with one section of text stubbornly refusing to show on the screen unless it was highlighted. Then, for no obvious reason, the text reveals itself. The long-standing glitch remains where shadowed boxes sometimes lose the connection with their shadows. The box moves but the shadow remains behind. This is usually a pre-cursor to another crash.
If I didn’t know better I’d say QuarkXPress was a Microsoft product.
The weak ahead
Apple are riding on a high at the moment, despite questions about the iPhone. Real users, such as Ian Wrigley and Number One Son cannot rate it highly enough, even suggesting it will take the place of a new laptop. Hmmm, I’d like to see them play Quake 4 on a telephone before I’ll believe that heresy. Next Tuesday invited journalists will be treated to an Apple event, coincidentally in the same venue they announced the iPhone. Better still, CIO.com have found that in their research of operating systems, OS X is ‘the most cost-effective of them all’, here. While in the same week, forthcoming version of OS X, Leopard, has gained certification as a fully compliant Unix, on a par with AIX, Solaris and HP-UX.
It almost makes us feel sorry for users of wannabe Linux or that proprietary, closed system made by Microsoft.