prog | (no subject)

The SVG editor Sodipodi looks intriguing, and I'll try installing it tonight. (It'll be from source, so, it's an intense, hit-or-miss sort of operation, will involve installing fink's xfree86 binaries, and so on.) Meanwhile, the website is very bad, and I will amuse myself by picking it apart before I go home.

Page title "cleverly" rendered in non-Latin alphabet, even though everything else is in English... it took me a couple of moments to figure out what I was looking at, sure that this couldn't be the correct page. (It looked like I was at the page of "Coanoanh" or something.)

The front page doesn't have any obvious text about what Sodipodi is; it instead shows the latest news from the programmers, which is pretty weak without context. (Today, I know that sodipodi has something to do with pirate flags.) The 'about' button is simply a link to the site's front page, and therefore a no-op. This was annoying to be becuase I came to the page from a friend's link, so I really didn't know what it was.

I find this alone to be worth noting, since I frequently run into software package homepages that make this same error.

Screenshot page rife with images from Sailor Moon that the page author finds charming but most of the world (yes, even "geeks") probably finds creepy. Also flavor text that's meaningless to anyone but anime fans.

Conclusion is that this person is either an insane creep, or too young and socially inept to know better (i.e. "looks like something I'd have made 10 years ago"). I will favor the latter explanation for now.

Threaded | Flat

Not that I want to defend them but...

The page title is written in the author's native language, Estonian.

I fail to see how the screenshot flavor text is anime related:

"This is the official screenshot of sodipodi 0.32. As you can see, sodipodi now uses Gtk stock icons for standard toolboxes, and has brand new SVG icons for more specialized actions."

"This is the second bugfix release of Gtk+ 2.0 based Sodipodi. The minor enhancements are dropper tool and some SVG icons for toolbox."

The site reminds me a lot of many foreign based development sites, actually.