[Geowanking] Turf Bombing

[Steve Lombardi]

How about planting flowers ;-)

That’s probably only funny if you’ve read this entertaining account of having to give minesweeper a facelift
http://shellrevealed.com/blogs/shellblog/archive/2006/09/26/The-UI-design-minefield-_2D00_-er_2E002E002E00_-flower-field_3F003F00_.aspx

…

There have always been a small but persistent group of users who disliked minesweeper as a concept because they felt it trivialized the problem of land mines.  For those of us living in North America, land mines are an abstract entity that you really only see in a movie, but in many parts of the world people are killed or maimed by mines on a daily basis.  Over the years, these users have repeatedly asked us to either remove minesweeper or change the concept from landmines to something a little less obnoxious.

One of the realities of making something with the reach of Windows is that it is almost impossible not to offend someone somewhere with anything you do.  (you would not believe how difficult it is to create default user tiles or desktop background images that are inoffensive to EVERYONE ON EARTH.)  We do our best, but we also accept that we can't please all of the people all of the time.

In the minesweeper case, since we were doing a re-write anyway, we thought it would a good time to address these concerns.  We added a preference that allows users to change it from looking for mines in a minefield to looking for flowers in a flower field.  Now, personally I am not a fan of using flowers here - I mean, you WANT to find flowers, right? - but this was an established alternative in the market and none of the other ideas we had (dog poo?  penguins?) could pass the legal/geopolitcs/trademark/etc. hurdles.  Here is the new options dialog:

From: geowanking-bounces at geowanking.org [mailto:geowanking-bounces at geowanking.org] On Behalf Of Randy Fischer
Sent: Sunday, November 16, 2008 3:27 PM
To: Che-Wei Wang
Cc: Geowanking at geowanking.org
Subject: Re: [Geowanking] Turf Bombing


2008/11/15 Che-Wei Wang <cwwang at gmail.com<mailto:cwwang at gmail.com>>
Thanks for the feedback!  In my head i was thinking more mobsters and gangs rather than terrorists.  But i see how it could be read differently.  Version 2 will definitely take the feedback into consideration.  so ghostbusters, earth intruders, and i was thinking maybe zombies and monsters. any other suggestions?


Sure, I was thinking about battling disaffected 50+ year old hippies with patchouli
bombs, myself..

-Randy "Disaffected" Fischer

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