Television UIs
This morning I was watching a news program, and I stepped out of "brain-dead couch potato mode" into a more lucid awareness where I noticed all the graphics that are going on in and around the news items. (I think it was the caffeine kicking in...)
Has anyone ever noticed all that? All the graphics that fly around before commercial breaks, all the 3D imagery, pointers, icons, labels, graphs, charts, screen-in-screens, split-screens, fades, etc.? What does all that? How long does it take to do?
Seriously - for every little program there are now countless lead-ins and intros that come with it, and they're always changing. The 3D stuff is what really gets me because I have NO idea how to do all that and the last time I played with any 3D graphics stuff, I was completely lost (6 ways of moving using at flat-plane mouse blows my mind).
Are there teams and teams of people who create this stuff? Is it custom art-work or more like programming or somewhere in between? It can't take that long to do because much of the text being created and rendered is quite timely. And finally, how come PC user interfaces don't seem to have caught up with all this stuff we're seeing on TV. If you compare the graphics I'm looking at on the web with the colorful, textured imagery on television, it's a sad comparision. Not that I want my PC screen moving and gyrating all the time in some throbbing 3D world, but there's got to be some happy medium.
Just my thoughts... I've gone back to being brain-dead again.
-Russ
Later... You know, now that I think about it, maybe I'm finally grokking what Marc has been ranting about all this time. Ahhh... I get it now.