Flagfox 5: can I have the old flags back?

Any feedback, suggestion, bug reports, problems....
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DaveG
Flagfox Developer
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Re: Flagfox 5: can I have the old flags back?

Post by DaveG » Wed Mar 12, 2014 12:46 am


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DaveG
Flagfox Developer
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Joined: Wed Oct 03, 2007 9:06 pm
Location: Philadelphia, USA

Re: Flagfox 5: can I have the old flags back?

Post by DaveG » Wed Mar 12, 2014 2:06 am

To those saying the flags are "dim" or the colors look "washed out" it might be due to your theme. If you use one of the Firefox wallpapers/skins, Firefox dims the address bar when not focused. Firefox doesn't do this when you're using the main theme, nor is this an issue for full themes. I think I'm going to look into overriding this effect to keep the colors correct.

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Rachmaninoff
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Re: Flagfox 5: can I have the old flags back?

Post by Rachmaninoff » Wed Mar 12, 2014 4:16 am

Well, I'm very, very disappointed that the developer isn't willing to implement the option to use the old icon set. Until I found another addon, the solution I found is downgrade the version (remove new, install old), which link can be found here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... ons/4.2.17

More information on the process here:
http://www.ghacks.net/2011/12/18/how-to ... x-add-ons/

Come on man, I'm also a developer... I understand that sometimes we get stuck with exciting new things, but it's tough to take the users out from their comfort zone. Give both options would be just fine.

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DaveG
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Re: Flagfox 5: can I have the old flags back?

Post by DaveG » Wed Mar 12, 2014 5:25 am

There are multiple new country entries that were added in Flagfox 5. Again, the old sets do not have any flags for them. They just don't exist. What you're asking for is for me to readd the old sets and mix in new flags resized to the small size, and also add in a UI option for this. It's just not worth it to re-add two sets of flags that would still have a laundry list of updates needed. It would take me days of work to even audit which need what updates to attempt to mix things together, and I would probably miss some. Then I would have to keep track of these and update more for two old sets as I provide future updates. The sets would just be a mix of old and new icons. Maintaining those old sets was a time sink that never resulted in a fully up-to-date set, and the custom ones I put in were crap at the size needed to match them. The old icons are an unmaintainable mess and I'm not including partially working things. This is not a trivial issue. My response to "just give me the out of date ones" is "no". I'm not going to bloat the installer up with two full sets of old flag images just for the couple dozen loud people who were really used to them.

The colors were just wrong in the old sets. People kept telling me that the Italy and Ireland flags were mixed up. They weren't; the colors and aspect ratio were just crap. You can tell them apart now. The new set is objectively better, even if you're used to the old ones.

olduser
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Re: Flagfox 5: can I have the old flags back?

Post by olduser » Wed Mar 12, 2014 3:43 pm

DaveG wrote:There are multiple new country entries that were added in Flagfox 5. Again, the old sets do not have any flags for them. They just don't exist. What you're asking for is for me to readd the old sets and mix in new flags resized to the small size, and also add in a UI option for this. It's just not worth it to re-add two sets of flags that would still have a laundry list of updates needed. It would take me days of work to even audit which need what updates to attempt to mix things together, and I would probably miss some. Then I would have to keep track of these and update more for two old sets as I provide future updates. The sets would just be a mix of old and new icons. Maintaining those old sets was a time sink that never resulted in a fully up-to-date set, and the custom ones I put in were crap at the size needed to match them. The old icons are an unmaintainable mess and I'm not including partially working things. This is not a trivial issue. My response to "just give me the out of date ones" is "no". I'm not going to bloat the installer up with two full sets of old flag images just for the couple dozen loud people who were really used to them.

The colors were just wrong in the old sets. People kept telling me that the Italy and Ireland flags were mixed up. They weren't; the colors and aspect ratio were just crap. You can tell them apart now. The new set is objectively better, even if you're used to the old ones.


What are you talking about? Complete nonsense man.

Let's debunk some of your comments:
They just don't exist
What countries are missing exactly? by diffing the old and new iconset i don't see any changes.
Are you aware of many countries that just suddenly formed?
The old icons are an unmaintainable mess and I'm not including partially working things.
Same as above
I'm not going to bloat the installer up with two full sets of old flag images
So why you did this from 2008? For 6 years you gave us the "crap" icons, and now suddenly you come to save us all? Yeah right.

People kept telling me that the Italy and Ireland flags were mixed up
Are them (or you) color blind?
Image
Image


Ah guys leave it, it doesn't go anywhere.
I think someone is just paying him to push those crap new flags, and later on that company will say "look how many users we have" and ask some royalties.

No other explanation could be found for this :
The new set is objectively better
Well how about a survey then?

He seems to protect those new flags like it's some kind of a holy war for him.
I say let's just fork this extension and backport the old good looking flags, whoever want's to use the new ones let him do it.

And Dave G, if you are a mature person, don't delete this post.

Mecki
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Re: Flagfox 5: can I have the old flags back?

Post by Mecki » Thu Mar 13, 2014 2:23 am

To those saying the flags are "dim" or the colors look "washed out" it might be due to your theme. If you use one of the Firefox wallpapers/skins, Firefox dims the address bar when not focused. Firefox doesn't do this when you're using the main theme, nor is this an issue for full themes.
I have no theme other than the default one. The default one integrates very well with the Mac OS X desktop style and many Mac users I known prefer a consistent desktop appearance over funky, colorful windows that look entirely different than the rest of the system. Though this may be a personal preference not all Mac users share, especially not those who migrated from other platforms or are still using other platforms on a regular basis. Also my past experience with themes was that even if they are available for OS X (most themes aren't in the first place), they usually don't work very well on OS X (they are optimized for Windows and either don't look very good or are even functionally broken because they seem to rely on missing functionality). I guess light weight themes (Personas) will work very well on OS X, but I don't have such a theme either.

I also never liked the dark glossy theme from the last version, however the brighter flat one was pretty nice IMHO.

Mecki
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Re: Flagfox 5: can I have the old flags back?

Post by Mecki » Thu Mar 13, 2014 2:44 am

olduser wrote:
People kept telling me that the Italy and Ireland flags were mixed up
Are them (or you) color blind?
Image
Image
Actually I think the problem is that most people have poorly calibrated monitors (and with poorly I mean "not calibrated at all"). Many cheap monitors tend to display colors very wrong by default and their idea of "white" is, well... rather odd. If you buy yourself a decent monitor calibration device and let it calibrate your monitor, you will see a huge difference. At first you will think "OMG! This is ugly! All my colors are so wrong now", but if you keep working with that calibration you'll soon notice that the colors are now much more correct than before. E.g. gray will look like real gray, it won't have a touch yellow (CCFL backlight) or blue (LED backlight) any longer. And if you switch back to the old colors after only using the new ones for a single day, you'll immediately see how wrong those were. BTW it's not just the colors, most people have never used the contrast or brightness controls of their monitors either and by default most monitors are set way too bright; and to compensate for the brightness, some users think it is a good idea to bump up the contrast instead decreasing the brightness, which makes the overall appearance only worse.

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DaveG
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Re: Flagfox 5: can I have the old flags back?

Post by DaveG » Thu Mar 13, 2014 3:09 am

olduser wrote:
They just don't exist
What countries are missing exactly? by diffing the old and new iconset i don't see any changes.
Added BL, BQ, SS, & SX, entirely. There's also a whole bunch of small nations that previously just had their (sometimes former) colonial power's flag in use, which now have their actual flags.
olduser wrote:Are you aware of many countries that just suddenly formed?
South Sudan. Sorry, I don't keep up on African politics. From my perspective that popped up out of nowhere.
olduser wrote:
I'm not going to bloat the installer up with two full sets of old flag images
So why you did this from 2008? For 6 years you gave us the "crap" icons, and now suddenly you come to save us all? Yeah right.
I'm not sure if you genuinely believe there's a conspiracy here or you're just trolling me.
olduser wrote:
People kept telling me that the Italy and Ireland flags were mixed up
Are them (or you) color blind?
Statistically, around 40000 or more Flagfox users are, yes. Some of them are also otherwise vision impaired.

Yes, sorry to break it to you, not everyone has perfect vision. Given the tiny space to work with, I need something that is clear and not easy to mix up. Even someone with perfect sight could have issues with the old icons simply because most people aren't that familiar with national flags (especially in America where people don't directly neighbor all that many countries).
olduser wrote: Image
Image
Yeah, to someone who doesn't actually have all the flags of the world memorized, those are the same thing. People screw them up when they're on the pole. Given 12 pixels high, yeah, people confuse them constantly.
olduser wrote:I think someone is just paying him to push those crap new flags, and later on that company will say "look how many users we have" and ask some royalties.
Ah, about 90% sure you're a troll now. This doesn't even make sense.
olduser wrote:Well how about a survey then?
I did one. I posted a survey to the 200 beta testers of 5.0 for a couple months. I got 5 replies, all positive. People don't respond to surveys even when that was the whole reason they installed the beta version.
olduser wrote:I say let's just fork this extension and backport the old good looking flags, whoever want's to use the new ones let him do it..
I'm not capable of stopping you from playing around with modifications. Posting them to Mozilla Add-ons, however, is explicitly prohibited.

I know I need to stop replying here, but if I'm honest I have trouble dealing with people like you. The amount of spite and resentment is something I just can't fully comprehend. I provided a free service to a million people for years, making a point to do it in a way that isn't spyware (unlike other addons of this type), and when I try to make improvements to deal with one set of user complaints I get utter rage from a small set of another. It's just the way of things, I guess.

I can't really separate in my mind the words someone says to me on a computer from the actual people. Most people seem to have the opposite problem. I am however one person sitting on an old couch with an old laptop typing some code in his spare time. I ask for you to attempt some basic human sympathy (empathy would be a stretch) and de-escalate your hostility. Of course, one thing I've learned over the years in dealing with users of all software, is that asking this almost never works. I still try anyway. :/

olduser
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Re: Flagfox 5: can I have the old flags back?

Post by olduser » Thu Mar 13, 2014 3:18 am

Mecki, to be honest I don't know what you have tried to say, I only understood that you like light themes and prefer the default ones.
I am an OSX user myself, but since most of my work are during the night I find it easier to use black themes wherever possible.
I don't think that those new flags will look good on a light theme either, they are just..colorless. Like somebody made them in Windows 98 Paint.

You seem to have a good knowledge of graphics and color related things, please tell us:
Do you really think the new flags are better? I try to find at least one person who will say they are, and many of my friends are using Flagfox.

olduser
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Re: Flagfox 5: can I have the old flags back?

Post by olduser » Thu Mar 13, 2014 3:29 am

DaveG wrote: I know I need to stop replying here, but if I'm honest I have trouble dealing with people like you. The amount of spite and resentment is something I just can't fully comprehend. I provided a free service to a million people for years, making a point to do it in a way that isn't spyware (unlike other addons of this type), and when I try to make improvements to deal with one set of user complaints I get utter rage from a small set of another. It's just the way of things, I guess.

I can't really separate in my mind the words someone says to me on a computer from the actual people. Most people seem to have the opposite problem. I am however one person sitting on an old couch with an old laptop typing some code in his spare time. I ask for you to attempt some basic human sympathy (empathy would be a stretch) and de-escalate your hostility. Of course, one thing I've learned over the years in dealing with users of all software, is that asking this almost never works. I still try anyway. :/

I really don't know why you take it so personally. I never tried to offend you. It's called a feedback, and yes, when you code software for someone else other than yourself,
there will be feedback. I am also a programmer, and my number one goal was not to break something familiar and warm for something that I think is "better".
Look at Windows 8. I don't ask here whether you like it or not, just take it as a design fail. Let's even say that 50/50 like it and not. At least they understood they have to give the power of the choice to the people, not to their management.
Then came Windows 8.1.
Actually same with iOS 7. So many critics made them revert that white-ish theme to something more contrasted.
Anyway, I am going pretty off-topic here.


I have only 2 suggestions for you, as an old Flagfox user and even older developer:
1) Don't take feedbacks personally
2) Don't try to force your opinions towards others, I cannot see examples in software where it actually worked.


You are right, it's impossible to put your plugin in the Mozilla Add-on's directory with only the flags changed, but it is very possible to have the same idea, and get the old iconset with Maxmind's GeoLite.csv and do something similar.
And instead of geotool.flagfox.net it will use whoer.net.
Read your feedbacks, no one will ever spend time writing one, if it didn't annoy them *that* much.

Cheers.

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