welcome to friday, february 29th, 2012... :+) in light of the merry-go-round, today here i repeat the post which i made exactly four years ago today. for the 2012 update, see the end of the post... *** the 2008 post... welcome to friday, february 29th, a day/date which occurs -- on average -- only once every 28 years... if it's your birthday today, let me wish you a happy one... over the course of 28 years, of course, things can change. heck, over the course of a dozen years, things can change. and when those years are _internet_years_ -- which are akin to 1=7 dog-years -- those changes can be remarkable indeed. that's what i thought when i read this post in a d.p. forum today:
juliet said:
Very originally, before I arrived at the site, proofers dowloaded a tool to their computers that then worked with the site to provide the proofing interface. They quickly learned that trying to make the tool work (and then keeping it current) on all different operating systems and computers was a nightmare and abandoned that approach.
sometimes things that you "quickly learned" a long time ago are no longer applicable today. this is one of those things... desktop apps of the type juliet describes are common today. basically, to do the proofing job, the tool would download (1) the page-scan, and (2) the text. on the flipside, the tool needs to be able to upload (3) the corrected text. that's all... none of these 3 things is difficult. indeed, they are all trivial. they are done in r.s.s. readers, blogging software, and so on. this means the "lesson" d.p. "learned" about the "nightmare" of this approach isn't applicable now. it's totally out-of-date. it's simple -- even for an ordinary programmer like myself -- to create such a program. it would be cross-plat, and work, dependably, and it would not be difficult at all to maintain... the web is no longer in a state of flux. it has become stable. (and, truth be told, it was probably also possible to do this even way back, if the d.p. programmers had had the chops; but without having more details, i cannot say that for sure.) so, does that mean that d.p. should now use this approach? not necessarily. what they have seems to work well enough. at least for them. i wouldn't be happy with it (because the desktop approach has benefits), but if they are, that's fine... still, it's just silly -- and wrong -- to say that you _couldn't_ do it the other way, that it's a "nightmare" you'd "abandon"... -bowerbird p.s. thanks for all the black history books done this month... *** now for the 2012 update... in 2008, it wasn't surprising that d.p. didn't believe it was necessary to have an offline app to interact with their site. as i said then, it was understandable, and even acceptable. in 2012, however, when they still don't believe they have any need for such an app -- let alone _have_it_ already -- it is surprising, and more than a little disappointing too... it's also disappointing, to some degree, that they do not have an app that lets people proof using a smart-phone. and it's downright shocking that many people report that they can't even interact with the d.p. site with their ipad! that's a big-enough screen that it certainly _should_ work. so at this point, d.p. is definitely doing something wrong. but that will not be a surprise to anyone paying attention. -bowerbird p.s. my posts earlier in the month are interesting too. there's one on the 28th, in response to the d.p. test of "perpetual" proofing, where people were still finding (and missing!) errors even in a fifth round of proofing, with the p3 proofers doing no better than the p1 ones. (each side missed as many errors, just different ones.) and another message, on the 24th, where i explained how y'all botched the page-number/naming convention. as this evidence clearly shows, you've learned very little in the last 4 years, and i expect the next 4 are no better. but the lack of progress really becomes quite noticeable once you get out the calendars are track things directly.