Special Effects

Brace yourself, it's rant mode time. What!? Again? Yeah - this time it's those cute little effects that seem to be sprinkled liberally throughout just about every new piece of software. Menus that have shadows, and fade in, and fade out. Annoying little splat-the-rat status boxes that slide in, announce something, and slide back out. OK, so maybe some people like them, but some people don't. The particular focus of my ire today is the fact that a lot of things now just don't give you the option to turn them OFF. Why is it, that some otherwise great piece of software, such as 'picasa', won't clue in to the fact that I have all those things turned OFF in my system, and follow suit? Hey, if there's a menu item to turn them off (in Picasa, say) that I missed, let me know! In fact, someone ought to put up a page for stuff like that. Well, enough said on that topic for today, I guess.