I am very pleased to report that DRWHOremixer’s YouTube account was taken down by YouTube; his channel and all his videos were removed. My sincere thanks to everyone who got the word out about this, and to YouTube for doing the right thing here and not allowing the brazen theft of the work of others. It seems things like this do work out sometimes after all.
Just as I thought the “theft of Whomix remixes” situation was drawing to a close, it seems that things are not so simple. An anonymous commenter left me the following message on my original post:
Youtube hasn’t taken the channel down. DRWHOremixer has just hidden it.
Without even digging any deeper, this rang true. After making no progress for over a week, I was not expecting a resolution to this. The way it finally came about seemed odd to me. The timing, the silence. I’m not sure it would have played out differently even if it were legitimate, but it all just felt off. Like it was too easy.
Another comment followed a few hours later:
Hi Danny,
My name is Matthew Haines, of YouTube Legal Support. I was notified of this theft of music from the Whomix website, and I thought that I would personally announce that DRWHOremixer’s videos have been removed and their account has been terminated and permanently blocked from using YouTube.
Kind Regards.
After receiving this comment, the situation got even stranger in my mind. Someone from YouTube reaching out to me via a public comment on my website? That seemed like a highly unusual development. Surely the people at YouTube have better things to do than take part in public discussion like this. They probably aren’t even allowed to do so, let alone having the time or inclination.
However, the poster had a seemingly legitimate @youtube.com email address. So I decided to do a test. I sent an email to the address thanking him for his help in the matter. The email immediately bounced back:
Recipient address rejected: User unknown in local recipient table
So much for that. I then dug a little deeper and found that both of the comments came from the same IP address, which I am going to share here to disclose as much information as possible.
So this situation has not been resolved as cleanly as I’d hoped. I haven’t had time to go any further with this yet, but I would be willing to bet that the above commenter is either DRWHOremixer themselves or an associate of theirs, trying to clear their name.I’m not sure the situation warrants any further digging, as long as the account and videos stay down. But if this is DRWHOremixer, surely there is a better way of going about doing this than all the deception and lies. I’m not sure what the goal of this deception is. Playing for sympathy? I doubt that will work considering the theft in the first place.
My advice to DRWHOremixer is simple. Just own up and take responsibility. Same outcome, but with a clearer conscience and having been a better person for it. I and others will respect you more for admitting that you made a mistake and owning up to it than just lurking quietly and pretending YouTube took you down.
A friend at work has generously allowed me to play with his new 11” MacBook Air for a bit. I’ve played with one at the Apple Store before, but this is my first time really sitting down with one for a while.
To be honest, I don’t think I like it as much as I thought I would. I love the weight, but I actually have a problem that I never thought I would have: I don’t like the size. It’s too small. I think I might actually opt for the 13” instead.
It’s not the keyboard; it’s the overall machine. There isn’t enough space around the keyboard to make typing feel comfortable. The keyboard isn’t cramped, but the machine is. And I think the screen resolution is uncomfortably low.
The speakers are also really tinny (but it’s silly of me to expect anything more). Startup is blazing fast, though.
So. Thoughts? It’ll be “my new laptop.” It’ll be tasked with doing everything I expect a Mac OS X machine to do. Is that a job for an 11” MacBook Air? Or should I move up to the 13” model?
I think full screen apps will be one of the unsung heroes of Lion. I’ve used them more and more, even on my 27” iMac, and while there are some apps that might be useful on smaller screens but less so on a 27” display (Safari, Mail, etc.), there are other things that just seem born to make full use of the display regardless of what size it is (iPhoto, iTunes, etc.).
Another big one is Logic. I’ve run Lion since it was available, and the one app I’ve hoped would integrate full screen support has been Logic. Somehow, without me noticing, that little full screen button appeared in the upper right of my Logic window (it must have been Logic 9.1.4). I’ve used it in full screen mode and it’s exactly what I’ve always dreamt of. On a 27” display, it’s just perfect. Flipping back and forth between my normal desktop and Logic is really what I’ve always wanted, and I had a jury-rigged solution on Leopard and Snow Leopard to do this (a dedicated Space for Logic). Now the time has come where I can truly give Logic its own fully dedicated workspace, and it’s better for focusing and remaining “in the zone.”
I just opened Dreamweaver CS5.5, and I literally got chills. Do people actually pay money for this, let alone use it to design modern websites? When was the last time it changed? 2003?
UPDATE: I visited Adobe’s Dreamweaver page, but I couldn’t figure out what they were trying to say because half of it was in Flash. I think Adobe needs to pull their heads out of their asses and bring their software into this decade (or in some cases, this millennium). They have some great software (Audition and Premiere, for example), but some of it looks like it came from Mac OS 9. By a 12-year-old. Even their flagship, Photoshop, still looks like ass. (Can’t speak for Windows, but certainly on Mac OS X.)
Color me impressed. Following my lash-out at Adobe over the UI in some of its CS apps (Dreamweaver and Photoshop in particular), I was contacted on Twitter by Adobe’s Dreamweaver account and asked for my input.
@dannystewart What about DW and PS do you think looks outdated? Any specific suggestions to improve? (cc @jtranber)
Let me just state for the record that I didn’t mean to be so harsh in my initial comment. It’s so much easier to treat Adobe as a big faceless corporation than to recognize that people actually make these products, but that’s no excuse to actually do so.I would like to lay out my response here, for readability, and to justify myself a bit further.
Hi. First, thanks for reaching out, and apologies if I was unnecessarily harsh with my comment.Hard for me to cover in tweets. DW: Aqua in the UI, imitation buttons/controls (non-native), text alignment. Gives it a feel of a very ancient (OS 9 era) Carbon port instead of a slick modern app. Example in PS: In tool palette, look at selected tool. That outline & the gradient behind it. Looks outdated. It’s so hard for me to cite specific things when the entire UI feels old. Not trying to be harsh. CS needs facelift. You guys are supposed to be the kings of the industry. In power, you are. But in UI, everything feels so contrived. It feels like everything is being built on top of 15-year-old code. I know it is, but it shouldn’t look/feel that way. Things are still aliased in the UI. I know fonts and icons are small, but everything should be smooth/antialiased. RGB sliders, for example, feel like old UI. Certain buttons, folder icons, pulldown triangles misaligned. UI needs to be complex, but don’t reinvent the wheel. Look at modern Mac apps. Acorn, Pixelmator, Espresso, CSSEdit. They’re not as powerful as CS apps, but they feel ten times simpler. Fewer things on screen, subtle UI animations. I don’t expect all of this, just kind of flowing from one idea to another. Sorry for flooding. In closing, your apps are supremely powerful, but are islands in a sea of UI guidelines. I would be super excited to see CS6 focus more on a UI refinement (and not just change for the sake of change). You guys already have virtually every feature imaginable under the sun. Don’t just pile on; refine. My two cents. Hope a bit of that was of assistance to you. I’m an Apple fan, but I want Adobe to ship great pro software! Thanks!!!
