I “upgraded” to Version: 2.9.9.7 Beta (955095) 64-bit - 13 Jun 2020 and now all the menu labels have been replaced with silly scifi stand ins. Is this someone’s idea of a joke?
The top menu is "Command, Maneuvers, Slice, Bridge, Mavigation, Mission, Data Files, Helm, Console.
Instead of “empty trash” we have “open airlock,” etc., etc.
It’s completely unusable and distracing–and a waste of my time. How do I make this gone?
Followup–After the update to 2.9.9.7 and the above mentioned problems, I uninstalled Scrivener and after refreshing the program list in add programs to find a Scrivener 2.9.9.7 entry that cannot be uninstalled (uinstall is grayed out).
Second Followup–Reinstalling 2.9.9.7 seems to have resolved it. Leaving the question here for informational purposes. Also for informational purposes.
Okay…I guess that makes sense…this happened after an attempt to run the “technology update” clocked for a couple of hours when we were having slow internet service, so I can well imaging that happened as part of the aborted upgrade.
The question is–and I ask this as a lifelong scifi fan and 30 year professional software developer–why the hell is that a thing that exists? Localization is important. Letting users make silly, pointless GUI changes that render the interface unusable is just dumb…which is what I said that time I had a client take a “Windows Class” and set their GUI to display white text on a while background.
A fair question, Stuart. My question would be, is this limited to SciFi, and if so, why? Couldn’t there be an interface “dialect” for, say, political conspiracy fiction (File = Top Secret, Edit = Encrypt, View = Eyes Only, etc.; Empty Trash = "Shred with Extreme Prejudice); or romance novels (I blush even to think about it ).
The answer is: many years ago, one of the regular users at the time—I can’t remember who—created it for fun and posted it for others to play with. I rather wonder if s/he’s still using it! But clearly, it’s still there as an option.
Using a “fake” language also makes it possible to test the localization mechanisms before the “real” translations are done. Using a clearly fake language prevents confusion: you might not know if you’re in the “test” or “actual” French interface, but Scifi is obvious.
Honestly, it breaks the monotony at times as it causes the mind to think more on what is what and where. It’s like how people would change the pointer to something different. It was their machine after all although I won’t go on about Clippy. Also you will be “Assimilated”.
Now about that StarWars layout. May the farce be with you.
The original joke was to have an option in the settings to engage “Sci Fi mode” and have the only difference be a single line added to the title bar that says “Sci Fi mode engaged”. Like many things, it spiralled from there. The interface has LOTS of sci fi references to classic movies and books, although some of my absolute favourites are embedded in the error messages so you’ll have to be having a pretty bad day to see most of them!
There (was? is?) a plan to update it properly for v3, but for obvious reasons that’s not something anyone thought would be a sensible distraction from getting v3 itself was ready for release.
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