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Top Ten Persistent Design Flaws
jlouderb writes "Bruce Tognazzini former human interface evangalist at Apple, and currently a principal at web design firm Neilsen Norman Group has begun cataloging the top ten design computing flaws that we just live with with, but shouldn't have to. Only seven are found at his article, and (not surprisingly) three are Mac related. My favorite: the mysteriously dimmed menu options. Why are those darned things grey anyway?"
...and some aren't.
Like the thing about disk removal. The only thing Windows handles being removed "gracefully" is a floppy (and I'd hardly say "gracefully", if you had a file open on the disk). And Mac OS could have done that, but the idea was to prevent the user from removing the disk until, say, its contents have been properly saved. So Windows let you remove a floppy. So what? What if you hadn't saved the file on it that you "meant" to? Then what? At least Mac OS enforced the proper order of operations, i.e., finish what you're doing with the disk first, then eject. To insinuate that Windows gracefully handles the unexpected removal of USB and/or FireWire external volumes is crap. Since Macs don't even have floppies anymore, and this argument doesn't apply to FireWire/USB volumes (though he implies that it does), this argument is somewhat moot.
And I can categorically say that his "computer not booting" story after he removed a FireWire drive is bullshit. If you remove the drive while it's asleep, yeah, it won't like that when it wakes up; usually, it will say a FireWire device has been removed before being unmounted. Worst case scenario would be rebooting the computer. But there is no way the computer just "wouldn't work" until the drive is plugged back in. That's just bollocks. Sounds like he had one bad/erratic experience that he thought was related to disk removal, and created this entire issue around it.
Other observations are kind of generic wishlists for the behavior of various features and functions. Some of them are frankly good ideas.
But when I read "Principle: The user is in charge and should be free to carry out any activity at any time without fear of reprisals" I just about lost my lunch.
/. effect
You can't handle the truth.
Not adding enough coolant to prevent the web server from melting down due to the /. effect.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
http://www.asktog.com.nyud.net:8090/Bughouse/10Mos tPersistentBugs.html
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
that the option to view this article is greyed out.
If I wrote something witty, you would say I stole it from somewhere.
The bit where it says "(c) Microsoft"
Due to lack of disk space this user has been discontinued
KDE (gets coat)
Never have been
Never will be
Ninnle Linux forever!
Well here's the google cache!!
10 Bugs
"All Existing Browsers" indeed...
Buy the President
But google is, Google's Cache.
Often it is difficult to figure out why certain options are dimmed and under what context they will become active. I don't see a better alternative though other than better documentation, and since no one reads software manuals that wouldn't help much. I certainly don't want more text explaining the situation to clutter up menus even further.
Tight security where it doesn't matter and sloppy security where it does.
Inexplicable configuration. This is broad a broad item and includes buried preference settings where you'd never think to look, default settings to most frustrating (think Word), system settings under inappropriate categories and items with more than one relevence only found under one.
Pop-Up windows which steal focus immediately from whatever task has focus (active rather than passive bulletins) Ever been typing something, and hit ENTER just as something pops up? Gee, what the heck was that about?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I'm guessing one of them has to do with posting a link to a page that gets /.'ed before any comments even get posted. Of course, I'm just guessing since I can't read the page.
He mentions that computers shut-off without any juice. Not surprising that computers do that. I don't think this is a design flaw, simply because there are things in existence, known as UPS's, that are there to buy you time to save and close everything.
I've been trying to repair the boot sector on a HD with WinXP on it and the damn thing wants an administrator password for the damn disk. Wtf kind of logic is that?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
AC comments get piped to
...cataloging the top ten design computing flaws that we just live with with...
How about redundant words that are redundant?
Hope be with ye,
Cyan
The slashdot effect is reaching new proportions... Look at the server, it decided to eat 3 of the 10 bugs to keep up with the requests :D
SOATYPICALSENTENCEWOULDREADLIKETHIS!
How about combo boxes, that only show X number of items. and you have to scroll to see the last 3. Until recently, AutoCAD was one of the worst examples of this, with it's layers toolbar popup, that only showed 10 items and truncated them horizontally (even though most AutoCAD drawings have many more layers and they often have similar names, so they appear the same in the tiny list at the top of the screen).
Or how about non-resizable dialogs with a set number of items in a list which displays all of the items minus one. WTF!?!
#1-Removing power from a device that maintains his information on devices run by power (i.e. RAM)
#2-Thinking that computers do "magic", or at least should do to not have design flaws
#3
#4
#5
#6
#7
#8
#9
#10- Making top ten list without having 10 things to list
...but you presumably knew you WANTED to remove it.
- open, Apple just keeps the behavior consistent: the user should know they're done using the volume (unmount it) before they unplug it. This has been the behavior for 20 years. And no, I'm not saying just because something has been some way for a long time that it needs to remain, but I just don't see the problem. Not allowing a device to be removed, or "nagging", probably saves a lot of people from fucking shit up before they've properly saved and/or dealt with items on a removable volume, instead of allowing things to be unplugged wholesale. If the user unplugs something at an inopportune moment or with open files, how is the computer supposed to be able to deal with it? Cache up the changes and not tell you? Or tell you that something was removed when it wasn't supposed to be and tell you (and keep that behavior consistent even when you "might be done with it"), like Mac OS does?
What if a user has an open file, and yanks the drive? How does Windows "gracefully" deal with that? Answer: it can't.
You can pull the drive on a Mac, too - the difference is that the Mac will say, hey, you should have unmounted this first...hope you saved everything. And instead of doing something like auto-unmounting-without-nagging-when-no-files-are
The site isn't /.ed, it just hasn't been created yet. Or has it? Each bug has the following:
Bug on list since: List inception: 1 Dec 2004
Isn't it still november?
What about "Not being able to read the user's mind"?
...and even more ironic is that Tog already used the automotive analogy for his number one issue, i.e., "imagine if a car did this", and then turns around and says the user (driver) should be allowed to do anything at any time.
Not scaling up your webserver.
I remember seeing devices like this quite a long while ago, it must have been between '89 and '93, since I distinctly remember where I worked when I read the article.
As I recall, the device was an ISA card with power plugs, which was wired in-between the power supply and the motherboard.
I don't know why it didn't become a fairly standard accessory.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
Design flaw #11
Using very large golden gradient shadowed GIFs each worth over 4K to represent the numbers 1 - 10 in a "Top Ten Persistent Design Flaws" webpage. It not only looks ugly, makes the website slower consuming more bandwidth, but it also takes away a good chunk of the left side of the page.
Cheers,
Adolfo
See, for example, the linked sites for this article and compare to P2P technologies such as Bittorrent, which easily shares gigabytes of data amongst tens of thousands of peers (Matrix bootlegs, Half-Life 2, etc).
http://digilander.libero.it/chiediloapippo/Enginee ring/iarchitect/shame.htm
Free XBox, PS2
Alas, this site is no longer updated, but it still serves as my very favorite "UI Hell" page...
e ring/iarchitect/index-1.htm
http://digilander.libero.it/chiediloapippo/Engine
Check out the hall of shame section, it's hilarious!
PS - this link is a mirror of the original site
This sig is in Spanish when you're not looking....
It doesn't seem to include evil applications (or operating systems) that suddenly throw new windows on the screen to grab keyboard focus away from you just as you type something.
You lose your thread of thought AND the computer decides you said "OK" to "do you want to email your credit cards around the world" while you sit there wondering what just happened.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
Quote from the so-called URL Naming Bug, in which Bruce proposes to remove all spaces from user-entered URLs before matching them: This sceme is analogous with how modern systems handle case, allowing both supplier and user the freedom to use whatever case they want by converting everything to lower case immediately before matching.
Uh-uh? Aren't Unix-like systems "modern" anymore? Just the Windows-way is the Right Thing(tm) to do? That's a bit strange in my opinion. This case-insensitivity might be nice for web pages when people used to Windows don't really care about case but I think that's what e.g. Apache's mod_speling is for.
On the ASCII sort "bug", he writes dates have to be reversed to sort correctly. No, the correct way to write a date is 2004-11-29, what's the problem. That sorts correctly! ;-)
Mac OS 8 introduced Balloon Help. When activated and you point to objects, a tool-tip like balloon appears with an explanation of the item. When you point to a dimmed item, a properly written application explains what the item is and why it is not available.
No excuse for this one. If there's only one option, go ahead, auto-select it, and act on that option. Don't waste my time making me "decide."
Um, hate to burst your bubble, but MS GUI does not recover smoothly from such events, unless one considers a BSOD smooth recovery. Since Windows 95, and still today in Windows XP, removing a CD or floppy from the drive before Windows is finished with it will result in the system hanging at best, and BSOD at worst. Not exactly what most people would consider smooth operation.
Neither Linux nor Apple nor Microsoft correctly address the problem of removable media:
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Duration: [in years]: seems like a thousand centuries ago...
Supplier: Tog
Alias: "I have no concept of the difference between objective and subjective usability complaints."
Product: Tog's parents.
Bug: Tog's perceptual abilities.
Class of error: Intellectualy density.
Principle: "My opinions are holy."
Proposed Fix: Zoloft
Discussion: Some of the things he lists as flaws in the Dock are things that I acutally like about the Dock. It's a very subjective thing. Some of the things he laments losing from Mac OS 9 were not the bee's knees he seems to imagine they were. He was just used to them, is all.
Bug first observed: Can't check the date on the original Dock whinefest because his site is slashdotted. It happened some time after Tog ceased to be relevant.
Observer: Harvey Birdman, Attorney At Law
Bug reported to supplier: No. No point. You cannot argue with self-proclaimed learned wisemen.
Bug on list since: Whinefest first published.
--- Ban humanity.
Item 1; Power failure crashing
In my experience, this affected Macs much less in a brownout situation than PCs. The Macs (at the time, desktop G3 systems) stayed up after a power blink of 0.5 sec, losing no data. I think current Mac OS hardware is more robust in this area, but this is not really a fault of the computer or the OS. No power, no computer worky. Sorry.
Workaround in a mission-critical area: Buy an uninterruptable power supply, petition Apple to make a computer with very expensive (but non-volatile) flash RAM, or use an Apple laptop, which has its own battery that makes it resistant to brownouts and blackouts.
Issue 2: The Dock in Mac OS X.
Grousing. In the old Mac OS 9 days, there was a Dock analogue called the Launcher. It was ugly, and I rarely set it up for users, but it worked. Some people still use it for their Classic apps in OS X.
Workaround: Many, most third-party. Apple's interface, until OS X was icon-centric for launching apps, rather than menu-centric (in Windows Start menu). The Dock is no more perfect than the Start menu, but at least it provides a consistent launcher for common apps, instead of having the user search through folders for the right app icon to launch.
Better: Have installers ask user to add icon for applications to the Dock, which isn't done most of the time, forcing users to search about in the Applications folder.
Issue 3: Dimmed menus.
A bit of a grouse, but logical. Some OS X apps by third parties HAVE shown info in the greyed out menu as to why the option is not available. I believe it is more programming efficient to leave a greyed out menu than to attempt to hide it (affecting where and the order of menus on the menu bar from one moment to the next, which would confuse the hell out of me).
I believe Tog's thought, of adding a special option in a greyed-out menu as to why this command is dimmed, could be useful. Otherwise I think he is blowing the issue up. Of course, the more complex the app (especially with palettes and THEIR commands, the more weight his argument holds.
Issue Seven: Disk Drive Nazi.
Not a problem, at least until removeable drives arrived.
The Mac OS has always been intelligent, preventing you as the user from accidentally ejecting or formatting a disk you are using, including network devices. This is a Good Thing. Compare this to the behavior in Windows, which will still allow you to eject media in use, causing All Kinds of Hell.
Workaround: His point seems more specific to USB and FireWire drives. Unless Apple creates a hardware lock that physically locks a device, preventing the thing from being removed, then there's not a lot to do there, except Apple making the OS more robust in screaming at people to tell the OS that the drive is to be disconnected before they physically remove it.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
How dare anyone say anything bad about something made by apple. Jobs is seeking a fatwa over this.
At a quick glance I thought this said "Top Ten PRESIDENT design flaws" which would have been an equally interesting list.
I'm thinking about it, therefore I might be.
Only down to number 3 so far, but #1, "If the computer loses power for more than a few thousanths of a second, it throws everything away", is sooooooooo perfect. 20 years ago I had a clock radio with a 9-volt battery so it would keep time during short power outages. Why don't current computers have something? I know how big UPSs are; I imagine something the size of a couple D-cell batteries hooked to the motherboard could keep it running for momentary power outages, tripping over the cord, accidentally stepping on the power strip's button, etc.
And on that note, why can't the BIOS battery be rechargable? Why should my computer *ever* think it's 1969, or 1980, or 1984?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Mirror dot
It appears that everyone is guilty of having a framework. This guy, you, me, everyone. We think that what we experience in the world, and what we think about it, is all there is. We're all pretty small, even the wisest of us.
In this case, a Mac guy says the user is in charge, and thinks it's a law of nature.
Microsoft treats users as a renewable resource, to be used and reused as needed.
We Unix types, on the other hand, know that users are an unfortunate side effect.
sigs, as if you care.
Yeah, the site is slashdotted. Here's a google cache of it:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:5p4B1xNAGXkJ: www.asktog.com/Bughouse/10MostPersistentBugs.html
:eof
Visual PC suffered from many strange UI problems. But my favorite was putting an unlabled button on the bottom of the screen that was required to be pushed the first time the program was launched in order to get the program to function properly. And you only ever had to push it once.
So rather than a big giant, push me if this is the first time you launched or something button... You didn't know what to do. And if you looked in help as to why your mouse wasn't working it referred to the button by NAME and didn't show the picture of the Icon.
And if you were really persistent, you could eventually discover that this was the button you were supposed to push the first time to make thier product work. Then it permenantly takes up screen space, and user memory for a thing that is only ever used *once*.
And the VPC folks didn't understand why that was bad UI.
Since when is a power failure a bug? I had thought a bug is an unintended behavior in software/hardware.
3.243F6A8885A308D313
Welcome to the Over the Hill Gang, design bugs that have been around so long that we've begun to think of them as folk heros. However, the usual requirement for turning a public enemy into a folk hero is death, not longevity, and so it should be for these worthies: Their executions are long overdue. These bugs aren't necessarily fatal. The are all at minimum highly irritating, and they have all survived for a minimum of five years or five product release cycles, whichever came first.
In some cases, the bugs have outlasted the original developers, persisting so long that their successors may not even realize they are bugs--they seem the result of "natural laws." In other cases, the developers know these bugs full well, but refuse to address them. These all need to be addressed, and that address should be far out of town.
Bug Name: Power Failure Crash
Duration: >30 years
Supplier: Desktop computer manufacturers
Alias: "Oh, Sh--!"
Product: Desktop computers worldwide
Bug: If the computer loses power for more than a few thousanths of a second, it throws everything away.
Class of error: "That's the way Grandpa did it..."
Principle: Protect the User's Work
Discussion: Somehow, the most destructive act a computer can carry out, other than destroying the contents of a hard disk, got "grandfathered in." Somehow it became OK for computers to just die if the power fails.
If cars modelled this behavior, you might drive your car from New York to Miami, run out of gas in Fort Lauderdale, 10 miles from your destination, and suddenly find yourself back in New York.
Immediate Fix: Web Developers
Store (encrypted) information in cookies even before transfer to the server, so information is preserved from all but the most serious "melt-downs."
Proposed Fix: Application Developers
Convert your existing software and write new software to perform Continuous Save, so users cannot lose more than the last few characters typed or gestures entered. Do not fail to provide sufficient Undo and Revert facilities enabling users to get back to where they were before they started doing the wrong thing.
For all the drawbacks of the crude system most applications have had until now, one advantage was that new drafts did not take the place of old until we said so.
Oh, and by the way, a dialog saying, "This action cannot be undone. OK Cancel," is not a suitable substitute for a Revert facility for anything at any time.
Proposed Fix: OS's
Build support for Continous Save and Revert into the toolbox.
Proposed Fix: Computer Hardware
Add very short term batteries or tantalum capacitors to systems with volatile memory with enough power to dump the memory to disk and go into hibernation, perhaps 30 to 45 second worth.
Bug first observed: 1976
Observer: Tog
Bug reported to Apple: 5 Mar 1985. Quote from that memo:
The age of computers that die when the power goes off will fade to an interesting footnote in history, just as radio gave way to TV. The question is not whether Apple will [address the problem], but when. I believe the time is now....We
have the opportunity to add another dimension to computers; let us take it.
Should happen any day now...
Bug on list since:List inception: 1 Dec 2004
Bug Name:The Macintosh Dock
Duration:Four and counting
Supplier:Apple Computer, Inc.
Alias:"The Cool Demo"
Product:Mac OS X
Bug:There are actually nine separate and distinct design bugs in the Dock, probably a record for a single object. You can read about them all in my Article, "The Top 9 Reasons the Dock Still Sucks."
Class of error:Confusing a demo with a product
Principle:Demos and products are two separate entities. The Demo's purpose in life is to help sell the product. The product's purpose is to serve the user.
Proposed Fix:Leave the Dock just as is. It looks great on stage durin
Is it so hard, really, to write a web browser that understands a hyphen is as valid an EOL character as a space? I could do without the page-widening bugs the lack of this feature creates.
I don't know why it didn't become a fairly standard accessory.
Because it would cost money.
Seriously though, I wonder if this guy also bitches about the fact that his car stops when he runs out of gas.
Like, if you're in a web browser, and you click the "Navigation" menu, and the item "Forward" is grayed out, you should be able to click on it and this message will pop up (unless you have a pop up blocker, in which case it will crash your computer) that explains, "This menu item is dimmed out because it's for going forward after going backward, but you haven't gone backward yet. For more information, call 1-900-HELP-ME!, and it will only cost $19.95 for the first minute and $1.95 for each minute thereafter, and you'll be on hold for at least two hours before a rude customer support asshole comes on the line and reads the wrong information off the screen, and you'll still have to pay. Bwaaaahaahahhaahahahahha!"
Actually, disregard this post... I'm going to patent this and charge anyone who later implements this.
I agree that it would be nice if computers could sort the same way a human would, but I'm not convinced we have the technology to fix this right, and partially fixing it could be make it worse.
The author is essentially asking for the computer to be able to do reliable lexical analysis to determine what parts of a string are supposed to be a date, for example. If it sees "1/7", it has to guess if you mean "January 7", "July 1", "0.14", or something else. If it guesses wrong, how would I be able to correct it?
At least with the ASCII sort, the results are entirely predictable and it is obvious how I can tweak my strings to sort correctly.
Generally, I'd rather that my computer be stupid then that it try to be smart and fail.
Bug name: PDF
Duration: 10+?
Supplier: Adobe et al
Alias: Why-is-it-so-hard-to-write-decent-software?
Product: Various PDF viewers, primarily for Windows
Bugs: One: Acrobat kills Mozilla. Two: Hidden "check for updates?" box locks up IE.
Class of error: Poorly written software
Principle: Simple software shouldn't hog resources or kill other apps.
Discussion:
Why is it so hard to write a decent PDF reader? Preview for Mac is fast and doesn't crash anything. And yet Acrobat for Windows (and maybe for Mac--I haven't tried it) is slow, a resource hog, locks up Mozilla/Firefox until the file is done loading, hides its "check for updates" window (without a tab on the XP app bar), and locks up the PDF-viewing window in IE until the "check for updates" box is dealt with.
Yea it's back online! This site rocks.
Uh, they're grey because they're disabled ?
I'm sorry, I don't understand how this is a design flaw. You'd rather the menu in question _always_ do something? What do you want copied when nothing is selected? Would you rather the menu was enabled always, but just beeped or did something else ( i.e. not the desired action ) when clicked ?
The menu is grey to let you know it can't do anything until some other action is taken. It doesn't just disappear because location/muscle memory is how we remember where that menu is. What would be the better design? How is a disabled menu a flaw, again? You'd rather get a dialog box telling you that you need to do something before clicking here... how could you have known ? Why is clicking "copy" bringing up a dialog box ?
TSFA says :
The software "knows" why it has dimmed the item. Some decision or decisions led to the flag being set. At the same time as the flag is set, the reason why should be made available. If the user clicks on a grayed-out option, the reason or reasons should be made known. And none of those, "Gosh, Oh, Gee, it could be any one of these 14 reasons or maybe something else" messages. The message needs to be intelligent, responsive, and accurate. This one is important. This one needs to be done right.
Ok, so the issue is that you want to know why the menu is disabled. So, which of 20 different on-screen objects do you want a message to indicate could be selected to enable "copy" ? Even if you manage to get the message "right", how useful is the message "You must select something to copy." going to be after the second time you see it? At that point the greyed menu tells me everything I needed to know.
Gee, I wonder why that one hasn't been fixed. Yea, that's a real design bug, right there. Just like the dock, which even my mother-in-law can use, with it's 9 bugs and all...
Now, ASCII sort and reasonably flexible data entry ( aka Bug Name: Let's you save me some work ) now, those are real design bugs. Design bugs which are usually there ( as the article notes ) doe to lazyness of the software designers/creators.
A few of these design problems I can agree with, but IMHO, if you're troubled by a disabled menu, that's a clear sign you don't understand the function of that menu, and you might want to try a menu item that isn't greyed out, like that one labeled "Help".
Dimmed menus don't bother me: I always assumed they were part of the consistency of the UI (all other controls dim when disabled).
IMHO, notification of a disabled state is helpful in guiding the user, even if he/she needs to "figure out" why a state is disabled. Why? Because once you learn, you (almost) never forget.
Tog suggests leaving menu items undimmed and "popping up" a message explaining why the menu item is dimmed. Why? Because of his "Interfaces should be explorable" principle. Then, why not apply the same logic to dimmed scroll bars, buttons, checkboxes, radio buttons, etc.?
Answer: because it would be ridiculous. A user would be forced to click here and there and then have to commit to memory that what menu or UI elements aren't active in the current state (not to mention going through countless "helpful" dialogs explaining why you can't do what you want to do).
Isn't this "whack-a-mole" UI worse than the learning curve in "dim" state UIs? What happened to the prinicple of "Interfaces should not piss off the user?"
After all, there are other ways of providing state feedback (e.g. status bars).
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
Power Failure Crash
This is due to the save file paradigm. Changes only get saved if you tell the computer to. People have long realized this is bad; this is why some programs have autosave. I am all for saving changes continuously - and forking a file if you want to have distinct versions.
The Macintosh Dock
I guess this is more of a personal thing. Personally, I think the Dock is great, although I prefer separate launch icons and open window icons (aligned at separate edges of the screen), a la NEXTSTEP. The Mac doc certainly kicks the Windows taskbar (and imitations') ass.
Mysteriously dimmed menu items
I don't necessarily agree these are bad. The alternatives are removing them (bad because menu structure changes), not disabling them (makes no sense - they are disabled because they aren't meaningful right now), or not dimming them (bad because you don't signal the action is unavailable).
The proposed fix is a good idea, though.
ASCII Sort
This issue has never affected me much. The alternative is is having lots of black magic exceptions to get items sorted the way humans might sort them. To me, it seems these exceptions are hard to deal with for machines, but for humans as well. I don't think it's worth the trouble.
What is good, though, is having proper metadata support, so that we can sort not just by filename, but also by author, project, modification time, etc. Add in a search function, and you don't even notice the asciibetical sorting anymore.
URL Naming Bug
Some browsers already convert spaces in URLs to '%20' or '+'. I think this is the way to go. I'm not sure if stripping spaces (as the author suggests) is a good idea. Does he mean to make "my birthday pictures" internally translate to "mybirthdaypictures"? Why? My filesystem can deal with spaces just fine. Perhaps stripping all spaces after the first (i.e. removing errorneous spaces) is a better option.
Let's you save me some work
So, not accepting multiple formats for the same data is bad. I have to ask why the multiple formats exist in the first place. If we're talking about SSN, library card number, etc. there's always an authority issuing these numbers. Why not use the same format they use, everywhere? If users want to be inconsistent, they must be prepared to deal with the consequences.
The Disk Drive Nazi
I, too, hate that machines don't let me have my device back. Linux and BSD (and probably other unices) can be particularly annoying in this respect. Someone once tripped over the USB cable of my webcam, unplugging it. Nothing but a reboot would let me kill the program (which was in uniterruptible sleep), reload the (confused) driver, plug the cam back in, and start streaming video again. Grrr. Isn't this what exceptions are for?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
The disabled menu items are grey and dim because they still exist, they're just not available in your current state. How else do you represent that? Changing the menu to include only the active items means 1> the menu changes, which is inconsistent and therefore confusing, and 2> you don't know what other options can be available in a different state, which is extremely useful when trying to find a function you need, but don't recognize. How would you do it instead?
--
make install -not war
Probably two reasons. 1) It costs money, as the other poster pointed out. I am a little surprised Apple didn't do something like this, since they don't typically try to cut costs to the bone like most manufacturers, but none of the PC makers would ever add something which costs money and which isn't being demanded by the customers.
2) UPSes aren't like other peripherals that you just plug in and forget about them. They rely on batteries, which have to be replaced every so often. That'll increase the costs even more, and make customers hate it because they have to spend $50 on a new battery every year, and don't see why they need one in the first place (they won't think of all the times the power actually did fail when they were using their computer and the UPS saved their butts).
start an app (like, say Photoshop), wait 10 seconds, get bored staring at the developers' names, and start doing something else. in another ten seconds, PS will come to life and jump to the top of the z-order - no matter what you're doing.
and related...
you're playing around in some menus and some other app throws up a popup, your menu disappears. nothing should ever kill your menu.
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.
While we're administering the beatings for bad UI decisions, there's the pig-froker who dreamed up scroll bars that snap back to their original position if your mouse cursor gets too far away from them during a drag. What was the twisted thought process behind that decision? Oh, the user's forgotten they're using the slider, even though they're ACTIVELY HOLDING DOWN THE MOUSE BUTTON? We need to launch reprisals at them for not keeping the mouse cursor inside an invisible rectangle?
Its all part of MS's policy of torturing their users until they buy "intellimouses" with scroll wheels.
Mod parent post up, please. Sure computers aren't intuitive, but you're arguing semantics. As the parent post said, the fear is that you wipe out what's on the disk -- it's a justified fear, and no, it's not a little gripe. Any sane computer user coming from any other computer environment will be skeptical to even drag and hover a disk over the trash bin (in Mac OS X that will lead to a change in icon from trash to eject, but how would you ever really know that!). It's like saying, "oh just dangle the baby over the balcony. Don't worry, trust me, the instant you do that, the hands of God will come down and protect him. Then you can let him go so he can ."
Linux at home
Some of my "favorites":
Too much design
This applies mostly to coding projects. You get a huge pile of UML diagrams, neatly prescribing what all the classes are called and which piece goes where, how they interact, etc. You end up with a project that has 20% code and 80% overhead to make it fit the design.
Lack of flexibility
AKA The One True Way. Java is an example of this. For everything you write, you have to write a class. Classes must be in files with the same name (including capitalization). Certain exceptions must be caught (or "declared to be thrown", which is not always possible), even if you don't care what happens when the exception occurs. The list goes on...
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Having 61 validation errors isn't very flawless...
Is this the same people who wrote the usability guide? The quality of the article is not something I expect from Nielsen. This is more comparable to Gentoo ricer article.
For example:
Bug Name: The Macintosh Dock
Duration: Four and counting
Supplier: Apple Computer, Inc.
Alias: The Cool Demo
Product: Mac OS X
Bug: There are actually nine separate and distinct design bugs in the Dock, probably a record for a single object. You can read about them all in my Article, The Top 9 Reasons the Dock Still Sucks.
The dock may not works for some people, but the idea behind is good. Giving an easy access to tools you frequently use. An analogy here is the surgeon's table, why they put those surgical tools on the table, but not in a drawer? He ranted The Dock is big and clumsy and Dock objects have no labels; while these arguments are valid in a way, the Dock can be configured to suit your taste. It is really hard if not impossible to satisfy the needs of every users out there, I remind you.
I agree that trashing disks to eject them is unobvious, and would be pretty bad as the primary way to do so. No sane novice would ever figure that out, or be willing to experiment with it.
But that's pretty irrelevant. Dragging the disk to the trash is a quick shortcut for skilled users, but has never been the primary method. The primary, normal method of ejecting a disk has always been the same way you perform actions on other icons: select it, then choose "Eject" from the "File" menu. No voodoo, no risk, no inconsistency.
Bug on list since: List inception: 1 Dec 2004
are from the future!
What is slashdot?
(they won't think of all the times the power actually did fail when they were using their computer and the UPS saved their butts).
How often do you lose power each year? How often is it unexpected (as in not during a thunder storm, ice storm, hurricane...)?
Oh, and by the way, a dialog saying, "This action cannot be undone. OK Cancel," is not a suitable substitute for a Revert facility for anything at any time.
No problem. You can undo anything. At any time. We (the programmers of the world) can give that to you.
As long as YOU (the idiots of the world that need an undo history stretching back to 4004BCE) don't complain that your 27k text-only document now takes three DVDs to back up.
Deal?
allowing human moderators...
You can't handle the truth.
The OS you're talking about is EROS, an orthogonally persistent operating system. EROS doesn't seem to be under active development, but other OSes are. The one I know about is Unununium.
And yes, I agree it is a design issue, not a limitation of our hardware and software.
There's bad enough with non-HTML based apps. On the web, if you have 13 choices there's little reason not to use radio or checkboxes for it. Eyes are always faster than scrollbars. Nonetheless, we see lots of unnecessary menus, etc. in web pages.
Example: A post of "Often it is difficult to figure out why certain options are dimmed and under what context they will become active. I don't see a better alternative though other than better documentation..." attached to a story containing the solution of "Make grayed-out objects clickable, revealing what has caused the object to be dimmed and what the user can do about it."
First Noticed: 1996
Proposed Solution: Require the user to read the article. This could be implemented in a number of ways: either the referring home page to the message board should BE the article, or a page between the story and the article should contain some sort of code permitting posting. Or a mod of "-9999999, RTFA" should be added.
But if my car runs out of gas it doesn't corrupt my stereo. Heck - my stereo will even still run since my car at least has a battery.
Why look for WMD's in Iraq when one of the most powerful resides in /.? Any mirrors for us caught napping, Oh Great and Mighty Masters of Destruction? LOL! (again)
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Bug on list since: List inception: 1 Dec 2004
I could have swore it was Nov. 29th today.
Tog violates about every one of his cohort Nielsen's guidelines on good html. He's wiring about design bugs, but... What about the bug where you make the title of your document a graphic and don't provide any alt or title text? Or the one where you use graphics instead of actual text to number the items in your top ten list? Or the one where you use tables for a layout that obviously does not require them? Or the one where you use tags instead of header tags or css to indicate the headers in your document?
http://mirrordot.org/stories/fbe18de303c13c7a1f140 f43465eca04/index.html
- This and all my posts are public domain. I am a Physicist. I am not your Physicist. This is not Physically advice
Don't know about the original poster but I know I lose power at least 10-12 times a year and that is 10-12 times too many. The last one was caused by heavy winds and was really fun since it went in and out like four or five times in an hour. That is great on computers.
I also seem to remember a power outtage where I work in Manhattan a couple of years back. That one wasn't expected either.
everyone can and should use one! Anyone who has programmed knows there is always more to do. An unlimited ammount of time can not be spent on each application (and most likely should not). I would suggest if a user needs every tiny aspect of their computing experience to work the way they'd like, perhaps they should take the responsibility upon themself.
I find laziness to be an excellent motivator.
Actually, I think this is very region-specific.
In my current location (Phoenix), I can't recall ever losing power. Hence, when my UPS battery died, I didn't put much effort into fixing it.
But when I lived in Knoxville, TN, years ago, the power failed at least once a week, for no natural reason at all. This wasn't a temporary thing, either; it was commonplace for the many years I lived there. The power only stayed out for a second or two, but it was enough to reset all the clocks, shut down the computer, etc.
So, while you may be living in an area where the power company has competent employees, not everyone does.
I've thought about this in the past too. It should be cheaper than an external UPS (as far as parts go, anyway) since you save two power conversions (1 from UPS to AC, and 1 from AC to DC inside the PSU). So you get away with a smaller battery. Plus, if you're smart about it, you could probably throttle down CPU and GPU speed to make a smaller battery last a little bit longer for a proper shutdown (or hibernate).
OTOH, without UPS for the monitor, you're relying on the shutdown code to do the right thing with your unsaved files and open network sessions!
If anyone's interested in the opinion of a native German speaker (with recidences in two cities located at the danube [= Donau] :-): You can construct very long words in the German language, but it's not required and mostly considered poor style. Oberammergaueralpenkrauterdelikatessenfruehstuecks kaese is not a German word, it's a fantasy product name. Vierwaldstaetterseedampfschiffahrtsgesellschaft is a fantasy company name, also not a German word. Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftsoberka pitaen is a proper German word, but it is only used when someone wants to construct a very long world. It's a job title that refers to a position that only existed in an earlier time, when Austria's bureaucracy was infamous for using overly pompous technical terms that were very difficult to decipher for a layman. Fussballweltmeisterschaftsqualifikationsspiel is a proper German word, and it's even used in practice sometimes. It's the proper translation for "soccer world championship qualifying game". But seriously, would you consider this monster term over "qualifying game for the soccer world championship"? Nah. So it's the term that's silly, not the language. And usually the context would have already been established when you want to use the term, so just saying 'qualifier' would do just as well.
... I should change my sig to "You should see what happens when I don't even intend to post on topic to begin with."
Oh well
but what do i know, i'm just a model.
What's your point? At least the eject button fuckign ejects!
I hate when a button I am pushing tries to second-guess my intentions. The whole "hold it down for 5 seconds to turn it off" trend SUCKS SUCKS SUCKS SUCKS. i HATE being dragged down to that level.
So... Windows:1, Mac:0.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Proposed Fix: Make grayed-out objects clickable, revealing what has caused the object to be dimmed and what the user can do about it
Edit -> Undo
"You don't have anything to undo"
Edit -> Redo
"You don't have anything to redo"
Edit -> Cut
"You haven't selected any text to cut"
Edit -> Copy
"You haven't selected any text to copy"
Edit -> Paste
"You haven't copied any text to paste"
Great, one more way for my computer to treat me like a complete imbecile.
If an option is greyed out, it's usually because -- shocking -- you can't use it right now. This is Common Sense. If it's not Common Sense, it's because that application's UI designer made their menus too complicated to begin with, and in my experience software programmers who do that sort of thing would also make their pop-up help even more useless, something like: "This option is disabled because you can't use it right now."
Rule #1 in UI design: if you have to explain something to your user, you're doing it wrong. Or at least you're doing it inconsistently, which is the same thing in this business. I shouldn't need to wonder WHY an option is disabled, at if for some reason I should, it shouldn't be disabled at all.
What a whiner.
I'm not impressed with the presentation of the 'dimmed menu bug' argument. It appears to grasp the wrong end of the stick. ie. If Today, it can take users upwards of an hour to even a few days to figure out why an option is dimmed, often involving calls to the vendor. the problem is with the functionality of the user interface, because the user is expecting to be able to do something which the program isn't. The dimmed menu isn't the underlying cause of the problem and it doesn't advance matters significantly to blame it across the board. Anyone using a well designed program don't care why a menu item is dimmed at a particular point because they aren't expecting to use it. The difference is therefore not the dimming in itself.
Kinda ironic the article brakes almost as many usability rules as it points out:
1) No alt tags - you've used images to number your list, yet no alternative text for blind users (or those with images off), this is a very well established as bad usability
2) Confusing title - you say top 10, but don't actually have 10 items on your list, an important aspect of usability is clarity, which your title lacks.
3) Consistency - you've divided each item into sub-sections, yet the sub-sections are inconsistent with from one item on the list to the next. If a sub-section is not applicable, I suggest you add, for instance: "History: N/A," this will save readers scrolling back and forth for a section they might believe to have missed
4) No submission form - You provide an option for people to submit suggestions for your list, yet fail to provide a basic HTML form for them to do this, instead you opt to let them do the work.
There are more, but I'll stop here, since I expect this to be modded down anyway. I hope you see the irony.
It looks like you have little experience with applications other than very simple ones, where the conditions causing a menu item to be grayed are clear.
I've seen lots of applications graying out menu items for _very_ obscure reasons.
I believe the demo in question was done with BeOS, as the parent had specifically mentioned the OS's "journal." BeOS used a journaling filesystem that would allow you to pick up if the power went away. That, and I remember reading about the demo a while ago when BeOS was all the rage. Not to say that EROS couldn't do the same, of course.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Its a matter of security.
Depending on how paranoid your organization is, they either want you to:
-permissive-
see what you could command (see the menu item,)
if the object state is incorrect (greyed menu item,) and
if you don't have the priviledge (switch to unauthorized page,)
or
-restrictive-
they don't want you to know dick-all and stop where you are
There are arguments to be made for both modes.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Everything should be possible without a mouse, without having to emulate one.
If you are not playing quake or starcraft, a mouse is just a luxury. Design to avoid its use.
--
Wiki de Ciencia Ficcion y Fantasia
The first point I understand of course, but I was thinking more along the lines of finding such items readily available for sale, rather than getting 'em pre-installed with the machine.
That second point though, does make a lot of sense. I seem to recall that there were plenty of PCs at the time on which the 'real time clock' wouldn't work and CMOS settings were lost, all for the want of a button-cell.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
Dynamic electronics tend to like power. That's in their nature. If that upsets you, use static RAM (which doesn't need refreshing, so has a retention level that can handle power spikes and stuff) or FLASH RAM (which retains data indefinitely without power). You get a performance hit, but you can't always get it all ways. If you absolutely must have the performance, then use full log journalling for all transactions. If you can't afford to be down, then use hot-standby High Availability. So what's your excuse for ignoring what is already out there?
Dimmed menus work a hell of a lot better than not having the options at all, which is a popular alternative. (It's popular, because you don't end up with a gazillion greyed options cluttering your menus.) The problem is not the dimming, the problem is that menus are too big. The dimming has nothing to do with it. Keep It Simple, Stupid is the only bug you can legitimately claim here.
DOS and Windows' DOS shell don't sort at all. Windows' GUI doesn't auto-place unless you tell it to (and even then it can require a crowbar and the suitable application of threats). Unix and all derivatives allow you to pipe ls through any text processing code you like, and GNU's ls has so many sorting options built in that you almost don't need to do that. If this is an Apple bug, don't blame everyone else.
I know of no browser on Earth that doesn't allow you to escape a space. What, that's extra typing? That's not the bug described. The bug described is that spaces "aren't allowed". You know what? Yes they are. Even if your browser won't let you enter spaces directly (and I know of none like that), there are ways round it. All you need is something that swaps spaces for a %20. What, you can't do macros? Don't blame software engineers. Maybe blame your browser, but most likely you need to take a good look in the mirror and blame that person instead.
This is one of the few genuine bugs I've seen on the list. And it's not exactly unique to computers. It's also nearly unsolvable. Let's take the date 01/02/03. Is that European format? (February 1st, 2003), American format? (January 2nd, 2003), or International format? (February 3rd, 2001). You can't tell from that information, as it's ambiguous. That's a good word to learn, in computing. Computers don't like ambiguity. You'd need an additional drop-down menu, from which you would pick the format. For EVERY data entry panel. The format list would be between 4-2,000 entries long, depending on the type of data. You don't think that would confuse the users a hell of a lot more?
Many problems fall in this list.
As for problems with docking bars, the Windows GUI, etc, that's what FTP sites are for. Prefer a UNIX-like environment to MS Windows' desktop? Just download Afterstep for Windows, or use the X11 package from Cygwin.
If solutions exist, but you persist in living in the problem, why the hell should anyone feel sorry for you? This list is about as valuable as a Windows user complaining about all the security holes and speed issues, KNOWING there's plenty of free alternatives, but CHOOSING to ignore them, because only by staying with Windows can they continue to feel sorry for themselves.
When living in misery is a choice, the misery ceases to be a defect of other people and their work.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It's calles "Nielsen Norman Group" not "Neilsen Norman Group".
How about modal dialog boxes with error messages you cannot copy and paste (like to search deja with)? Its always some cryptic crap that is hard to type.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Ignoring his confusion between Design Flaws and Bugs...
1) Power Failure Crash
-- A "Continuous Save" is unpractical. Committing every action to permanent storage, aka a hard drive, would both kill performance and shorten the drive life. It would also increase the risk of hard drive failure during the crash by increasing the likelihood that the drive would be in use.
2) The Macintosh Dock
-- "It's not that the Dock sucks so much as a productivity tool as it is that Apple threw away so many more powerful, useful objects in its favor." So it works, but there were better options in his opinion? You'd be hard pressed to find anything that couldn't be described in this way.
3) Mysteriously dimmed menu items
-- I can see the point of wanting them to say why, but it is very short sighted to say the message must be exact. A much better solution is that in Help, every menu option should be searchable and explain exactly when it can be used and how. (Though I miss the Apple Help Balloons. Heck, now that I think about it I think they worked and could explain disabled Menu Options but no one bothered to fill them out.)
4) ASCII Sort
-- This is a consistent extension of alphabetic sorts, and will likely never change in standard file system listings. The example of iTunes is a specific application with a specific data set, and any application should organize data as appropriate for the use. Part of the point of iTunes IS to organize files in a way that makes sense for what they are, whereas the operating system must treat all file names equally and not make assumptions about what they represent.
5) URL Naming Bug
-- Correct history: filenames didn't have spaces because the early command line parsers separated tokens by spaces. Even today, command line parsers need help either by quoting the entire name or escaping the spaces. (The Apple II worked because the parser was even simpler; every command was only one word and everything afterwards named the object to be acted upon.) The problem with the proposed fix is that the only place spaces are not allowed is in the machine address part; spaces are allowed willy nilly in the directory portion as per the server's setup. There is no consistent way to know whether spaces in that portion should be dropped. While the browser could be written to automatically remove spaces in the first portion doing so in the directory portion would be disastrous for many web sights. Having it do both would seem to be a blatant inconsistency.
6) Let's you save me some work
-- This is actually reasonable, and as a programmer it's a pet peeve of mine that the computer should do the work. It's not always possible though, and sometimes compromises must be made. I prefer if the field only wants numbers it would say so and prevent numbers from being typed without beeping or anything. I think it's a good compromise between getting a clean entry and not interfering with the user, since any spaces/dashes would just be ignored.
7) The Disk Drive Nazi
-- This was a feature. It prevented floppy or system corruption. (The System was on a floppy and could otherwise be ejected.) OS X is much more dynamic in recovering from these incidents, having to deal with USB, Firewire, and Network drives. The incident with the Powerbook described is most likely the result of using a non-Apple drive with a bad driver. Booting from an emergency CD would eliminate. Given the author's history it's even possible he was using OS 9, increasing the likelihood of a driver problem.
8) 9) 10)
Apparently, he's counting in base 7.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
If cars modelled this behavior, you might drive your car from New York to Miami, run out of gas in Fort Lauderdale, 10 miles from your destination, and suddenly find yourself back in New York.
Sounds like a great way to speed up deliveries!
I actually LIKE those windows. My start menu cascades to about 60 submenus, at least 20 of which cascade to about 30 submenus each. There's way too much info to look at.
I don't want to have to visually grep against every program I've ever installed (for example "that mass audio decoder I use once every six months" or "that winzip I only call from the commandline").
I'd much rather have to pick from the choices I regularly make. Computers that can detect patterns in what you do and respond to it appropriately are exactly what is needed to make machines work for us more, and to make us work for machines less.
To the people who have a problem with this -- I have a problem with you.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Bug: Browsers disallow entry of spaces into web addresses
Proposed Fix: Allow advertisers to advertise and users to enter as many spaces in a web address as they want, then remove all spaces internally before matching.
This seems like it would cause more problems than it's supposed to solve. Besides the obvious issue of resolving non-hierarchical namespaces, what about sites where the position of the space character is important? (i.e. "Reds Hots" vs. "Red Shots")
A sentence fragment that is.
A biotch you are.
And trolled you have been!
Fuck the shut up.
> People separated written words with spaces from the time writing was invented up until around 30 years ago whenaspacebecameavaluableobjectnottobewasted
Tog, that whistling sound is the point going over your head.
30 years ago, we took spaces out of filenames not because we needed to save characters, but because we were all using a CLI, and we did it because we were using spaces to separate words.
then: vi ~fredfoo/stupidapp/stupid.cfg
now: vi C:\Documents and Settings\Fred Foobar\Application Data\Stupid Company Name Here For No Reason At All\Stupid Company's Application\Configuration Data.cfg
("/c:/documents: new file")
now, once more, with feeling:vi "C:\Documents and Settings\Fred Foobar\Application Data\Stupid Company Name Here For No Reason At All\Stupid Company's Application\Configuration Data.cfg"
For the love of fuck, I'm not asking to go back to 8.3, but would it have killed you, Mr. Gates, to have named the two most commonly-used directories on a Windows box "/Programs" and "/Users"?
Of the ten items on the list - most have perfectly proper reasons for existing. Most aren't bugs.
Actually IMHO none of them are bugs.
Just some of them poor design issues....
eg: computers losing when power down:
You've got a choice. Fast data access... versus slow but reliable. People take the former. Therefore lots of caches throughout the system - and unless the entire system can handle a power failure well, keeping the data can cause more damage than otherwise.
IS solveable. That's what UPS's and secondary batteries on laptops are for. Software fix is unreliable and prone to corruption thanks to things like hard drive cache aborts.
The entire list reads like a joke - or like someone's pet peaves being rewritten into an "important" story. Study the issues before claiming it a bug.
NOT happy. Complete waste of my time.
The first point I understand of course, but I was thinking more along the lines of finding such items readily available for sale, rather than getting 'em pre-installed with the machine.
Back in the early 90's, PC Power and Cooling did offer a PC power supply with a built-in UPS. This was back in the days of the huge horizontal IBM PC/AT cases, where the power supplies were much larger than now. It was very expensive, and I guess didn't sell too well since they don't seem to have anything like that now.
That second point though, does make a lot of sense. I seem to recall that there were plenty of PCs at the time on which the 'real time clock' wouldn't work and CMOS settings were lost, all for the want of a button-cell.
I remember this being a big problem back then too. I haven't seen a CMOS battery die for a long time now, and I'm not sure if it's because the batteries are better, or because people change their hardware more frequently. I've used some really ancient P2-class stuff with the original button-cells, however, so I think it might be the former.
You present a straw man argument: few would fail to understand why a Copy command is greyed out. But what about a greyed-out command for a transformation of an image in an image-editing application? Unless you are very familiar with the application already, you wouldn't necessarily know that the reason for it being greyed out is because the image needs to be in a different format to be transformed. Many problems I've encountered with greyed items are similar to this hypothetical one. One important purpose of a GUI is to allow people who are not familiar with the ins and outs of an application to use it effectively. Otherwise, why not just use command-line apps for everything? Keyboard commands are almost always faster and more efficient that GUIs. It's just that they require folks to know (and remember) more. ktj
Regarding removing media during a write...
hanging or BSODing seems pretty dumb. It would be nice if the hardware would prevent such a situation, but even without this surely it isnt that difficult to just handle that scenario.
Why cant the OS display a message saying that the device was ejected prematurely. The user could then reconnect the device after having his wrist slapped and the program could finish what it was doing.
J
"Some babies actually have to be taught to suckle, the nipple isn't that intuitive."
There are plenty of geeks willing to learn.
Then it would be criminal not to. Granted, most of these bugs will never result in loss of life (though you never know). Also, I know that nothing will ever be idiot-proof - they will just build a better idiot. Nevertheless, if something is obviously flawed, and the benefit of fixing it outweighs the costs of repair, then it should be fixed. I know that neither the benefits nor the risks are always obvious, but most (if not all) of the points made here seem (to me) to meet the criteria of benefit > cost, even when pared down to benefit-to-company > cost-to-company, which is obviously the equation most companies care about.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Okay, there's not intuitive and there's really not intuitive.
It's one thing to have an icon that has no prior cultural associations with it, and say "that's the eject button." It's another thing to have an icon artistically rendered to look like the thing where you throw rotting food and soiled diapers and say "that's what you do to save your company's precious data."
So yes, nothing but the nipple is an intuitive interface, but it's still a design error to go against the habits of learned object recognition.
The fact that now the icon automagically changes is just a kludge for backwards compatibility. Is it small? Yes. Is it still wrong? Also yes.
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
Windows thinking: "Hey dude, it's a good thing you lost your thread of thought, because you just emailed your card numbers to everyone in your address book! so now we've snapped you out of your daydreaming and you can worry about important things, such as calling your bank and cancelling all your cards!"
.. and then you try to use the scroll wheel in a ms product such as the VBA editor that comes with excel (don't laugh - modeling systems in excel macros is NOT funny) and the stupid thing DOESN'T WORK. Scrolling through hundreds of lines of text with the mouse button held down.. nnngh.. tendons... tightening... argh..
Ok, so the issue is that you want to know why the menu is disabled. So, which of 20 different on-screen objects do you want a message to indicate could be selected to enable "copy" ? Even if you manage to get the message "right", how useful is the message "You must select something to copy." going to be after the second time you see it? At that point the greyed menu tells me everything I needed to know.
This argument doesn't seem very consistent. You're suggesting that the first time you see something and it's not obvious to you, it should tell you so you'll know, but at that point, it's not useful to you. What if someone else is using your computer and has not seen that message? Would it be useful then?
Do you realize that there are more menu items than just ``copy''? I use a lot of applications with a lot of menu items (i.e. Final Cut HD) that will occasionally have something that sounds like what I want, but it's greyed out. Why would I not want immediately contextual information describing what I need to do? Is it really practical to suggest that I pull out the manuals and try to figure out what all is required to use something when I could just hit the brief contextual help?
A more concrete example: I'm in gimp which is giving me the option to scale my image, but not crop it. Why is that? Why can I move this layer down once, but not twice? I happen to know these answers, but it wasn't very long ago that I did not, and it was frustrating to want to bring a layer to the bottom and having gimp just refuse to do so with no explanation as to why (which was added in 2.something...but not on the menu).
-- The world is watching America, and America is watching TV.
Seems like the simple best case solution would be have it standard so that when you mouse over a disabled menu item, it does a mouse-over popup explaining why it is disabled. Seems like an API supporting this concept would be simple enough, just have to make sure that it supports multiple reasons in case multiple execution paths have decided the item should be grayed. Unfortunately, thats an API only microsoft could provide for the most common case.
This sort of thing is probably my biggest frustration with writing end-user interactive desktop apps. You start down the path of using a nice functional framework provided by a microsoft, you are really happy, cruising along, but suddenly you really want to implement a feature like that. It can turn into a -serious- sidetrack if you want to do it in a semi-integrated way, and you'll end up down even more maddening and asinine paths if you've been relying heavily on GUI building tools and want integration there, next thing you know the complexity of your handy little disabled menu pop-ups is one of the most complex aspects of your project just because you tried to improve on a basic paradigm that has totally opaque guts.
This is part of why I am so much happier in my life as a back/mid-tier systems developer then I was as a front-end application guy. Dealing mostly with open source tools is one great factor, but I think even more profound is the fact that when I am using a proprietary tool, the support people I deal with tend to either be the engineers of said tools or can easily escalate directly to them anytime they don't know a solution. Also my customers are way more likely to be other geeks, so they tend to have concise and thought out requirements.
A good example of this is the "export" function in OS X's KeyChain Access tool. It is ALWAYS (as in 100% of the time) greyed out. To date nobody (including apple) has been able to explain why. This basically means you can never export certs or keys that you have in keychain.
Finkployd
You can klick a scrollbar with your on-buttoned mouse and then drag in every direction eternally, without snapping anywhere. Very convinient. Especially if you scan a big document for pictures. Just klick, hold and forget where the cursor was and move your mouse around frantically.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
- The app pops up a dialog box in a certain situation, and you can't tell it, "Never show me this dialog box again, please just do the default!" (Firefox actually does have this option sometimes.)
- The app has built-in help, but there's nothing in the help file. Solution: Don't display a help menu item if there's no help file.
- You can customize the app's behavior, but when you sit down at a different computer, you have to go back to the default way of doing it. Solution: let people save their preferences persistently on the web.
- The UI has too many widgets in it, and you can't make them go away without black magic. For example, how do I get the personal toolbar in Firefox to go away? Yeah, I know the answer: Google for it, find out how to edit an obscure config file, and then experience bug #3 above.
- The app pops up a window that is too big for your screen, and you can't move or resize the window. (This happens the first time you run KDE on a small monitor: it asks you to set your preferences, but it shows you a window where the OK button is below the bottom of the screen.)
BTW, the solutions to most of these problems have more to do with the GUI toolkits than with the developers who write the apps. For instance, #5 is something that Qt just shouldn't allow to happen. Likewise, something like network-available preferences (#3) would only really be useful if it was implemented the same way by lots of different apps.Find free books.
motorcycles come with a reserve to their tank that you can cut to as a backup, when you run out of fuel... good cars will tell you your out of gas when you still have a gallon left.
these are good things... a built in device that saves your machine in the case of a power failure would be pretty cool too... even if it only gave the OS the time to save all contents of memory to a file so it can re-boot to exactly the same state you left it in... with all your apps and docs open.
but your right... unlike the gas tank reserve (which is extremely cheep to implement) this might actually cost something.
still, its a shame nobody does this... it couldnt add more that 10-20 bucs to the cost of the computer.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Tog reported the "missing backup battery" problem to Apple on 5 Mar 1985, but the original macs already had this battery. It's purpose was just to power the RAM until external power was restored -- at which it would dump memory to disk and power off (from what I remember being told). Upon powerup (with stable power), it would reload memory and return to the point power was lost. Here's a page on replacing that battery with 3 AAA batteries
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
I don't know if it is listed in the article (it is currently slashed), but multi-item pull-down lists need a rethink. Rather than pressing the Ctrl key (or Mac equiv), perhaps have square check-boxes to the left of each item in the list.
Table-ized A.I.
If I wanted to see your fucking sig, I'd have sigs on, asshole.
If an alert is so important that a pop up is needed, there should not be a default button that causes the dialog to go away without the user making an active choice.
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, MOD PARENT UP NOW!!!
This was an anonymous mod-up message.
Thank you for your consideration.
I've seen lots of applications graying out menu items for _very_ obscure reasons.
First, dude, get an account, nobody reads AC posts anymore. Second, no, I work with extremely complicated UIs all of the time. Even the UI I use most often - XCode - has a pretty complex set of menu items, though it's no MS Word or Adobe Photoshop. ( or Illustrator, etc ). Still, I don't readily know what needs to be done to access some of those less-frequently-used menu items, but usually I can figure it out pretty quickly, and if I can't, I'll look at the documentation; as a user of complex software, I expect to do that from time to time.
Third, the fact that some menu items disable for very obscure reasons actually helps my argument that a dialog describing that obscure reason won't solve the 'problem' here - it'll probably be wrong more often than right, and will likely confuse the user even when it's right. The more obscure and difficult to describe the reason for the disabled menu, the more difficult that description becomes to put in a dialog box. Again, what you really need to do is understand what that menu item does.
That does leave a documentation and training problem, though, and raises the important question of why the design is so complex. What a menu item or button does ( and what is needed to enable it's action ) should be obvious from the context of the UI. If it's not, there is maybe a better UI design which could make the needed context clear.
.. who invented dragging the floppy disk to the trashcan to eject it from the drive. How much brainpower went into that one?
(probably as much as MS put into the fact that you have to click 'Start' to quit with WinXP)
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
I think part of the problem/conundrum is that you're wondering what action "greyed out" the option rather than which one activates it.
...
With more esoteric or complex options the rule set is usually this options is off unless
That means that it would be difficult to provide a good answer as to why something is greyed out in most cases short of listing the times it is active which might have no relation whatsoever to what you're doing.
As for the "well why don't they just hide it then" question that's a tough one. A consistent menu list is a nice thing for comfort but possibly confusing. The same is true for options that come and go.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
And as soon as your car is a general computation device, the comparison will be applicable.
Admittedly, this was more of a Win9X problem, but I've seen it once or twice in XP. You have a disk inserted, then later remove it and suddenly you're up at a blue screen (not the Blue Screen, but blue) stating that volume such-and-such was removed. Please re-insert it, or cancel. I've seen this with floppies, CDs, and USB drives.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Having the app do stuff automagically can be a real pain. I don't know how many times i did something in Word only to have the program second-guess what I wanted.
This sort method would put any files it considers "date" in date-order--crazy. Proposal to make it worse: auto-rename them. Great fun.
# ... ehhh... 8? Desktop computers don't prevent publishing a top ten list with only seven items.
# 9 (?) Desktop computers don't prevent making postings dated 2004-12-01 available already on 2004-11-29.
Perhaps this guy is a celebrity in some circuits, but this page seems just silly.
Bug Name: Rebus icons
Duration: 15+ years
Supplier: Eudora, Rational (now part of IBM)
Alias: "Let's play a game - can you guess what this means?"
Product: Eudora mail reader, Atria/Rational/IBM ClearCase revision
control system.
Bug: Eudora: The 'check mail' icon has a picture of an envelope and a
"check" mark. ClearCase: The 'check in' icon has a picture of a
document, an arrow (in a direction arbitrarily ordained to be 'in') and
a "check" mark.
Notice the use of the "check" mark to imply the English word "check".
Not only is this going to be completely opaque to every non-English
speaker, it is very murky to about half of the world's English speaking
population also. "Check" is the American name for this mark, in British
(and Australian, New Zealand...) English it is a "tick" mark. It took me
two years before I realized why it was on Eudora's "check mail" button.
Discussion:
Icons are supposed to transcend language barriers - not to limit
themselves to one dialect. A related bug are the highly stylized icons
found on Swedish home appliances: circles, crosses, dotted arcs etc.
These are quite incomprehensible without a manual, which likely has been
lost. If they just wrote Swedish words, at least I can find a
Swedish/English dictionary in my local library.
Bug first observed: c1987, "Eudora" mail reader, c2000, Rational (now
IBM) ClearCase.
Bug reported to supplier: Reported to Rational c2000. They told me where
I could find the bitmap file for the icon so I could edit it myself.
---------------------
As an aside: I expect this one has long since been fixed. Macintosh,
c1990, in a shared computer room environment: You'd start using a
computer, and at some point the computer would demand that you insert
some floppy disk. Said disk belonged to the previous user of the
computer, who has left. The computer would refuse to do anything at all
until you supplied the (unavailable) missing disk. The only solution I
knew of to this was a reboot.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
For Bug Three, that is, the dimming of menu items, I found Mac OS 9's balloon help to be, well, helpful. If (in a well-written application) you hovered your mouse over a disabled menu item with balloon help on, the help balloon would say not only what the menu item normally does, but why it is currently grayed out.
I would nominate balloon help for one of the most annoying omissions from OS X. Sure there are tooltips, but they don't work in menus.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
1. MS Word suddenly and mysteriously corrupting documents so they are unrecoverable. This has happened to me several times.
2. Unhelpful help that programs force on you instead of doing what you tell them to, such as moving embedded files to another page because the program doesn't like the way you arranged them, or mysteriously and randomly changing the font when you cut and paste text.
Drive not ready: (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail.
Ever tried unmounting a mounted CD when an application is using it? Ever tried removing a Jazz Drive or zip disk when it is in use?
Even in XP I get a 'please insert disc with volume label ______' and when I click cancel, It pops up again. Do this about 60 times and it eventually gives up and usually crashes the program so that Dr Watson can come up (will that thing ever go away).
So no- Microsoft doesn't let you do anything. Microsoft in fact lets you do pretty much nothing without bugging the crap out of you.
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
Most BIOS are littered with design bugs (not to mention the heap of implementation bugs).
The oldest is the "Keyboard not found, press F1 to continue" bug. Fortunatly, that one seems to FINALLY be going away.
Next, why is serial console (where supported) turned off by default? If the CMOS gets corrupt, that's exactly when I need serial console access, but I won't have it because of a silly default. The whole point of serial console is that it gives you some hope of dealing with this sort of problem remotely.
Next in line is the way PXE boots will demand "press any key to continue" if the DHCP server doesn't respond for some reason (perhaps it was reloading it's config at the time). It's not as if the machine has anything better to do than try the boot again. They could at least make that configurable.
It's stupid to bother adding wake on LAN,modem,keyboard,moon phase, etc into the chipset and then have the BIOS do the least useful thing possible on any given error.
Actually, I do see his point with the greyed-out items. It would be (relatively) easy for the system to support tooltips on menu items. And the comment would only have to be something short like "Copies selected item. Unavailable because nothing that can be copied is selected." Balloon Help in System 7 was capable of this, but only Apple ever bothered to implement it properly (and only masochists and easter-egg hunters ever turned on Balloon Help at all...)
I recently wanted to change the thumbnail I present in ichat. I found a picture of a swearing fuchikoma on the web, grabbed the image from my browser window and dragged it directly onto my thumbnail where it appears in ichat; ichat did what I expected and changed my icon to what I'd given it.
Did I know with certainty that ichat would accept input that way? Had I read the docs on it? Do I even know where exactly it saved the image on disk? Nope. But even without this concrete knowledge, I intuited that it would probably work that way.
Like overlaping windows?
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Especially the part where Tog starts bitching about greyed-out menu items.
Looking through Camino's menus right now...
Apple menu: nothing greyed out.
Camino menu: nothing greyed out.
File menu: nothing greyed out.
Edit menu: Redo, Cut, Copy, Paste Plain Text, Delete, and Get Info all greyed out. Let's look at why.
Redo: I haven't undone anything. Duh.
Cut: Nothing selected. Duh.
Copy: See above. Duh.
Paste Plain Text: Wild-ass guess -- the text on the clipboard is ALREADY plain text, or is a format (like an image) that can't be converted logically to plain text.
Delete: What the hell does this command do, anyway? Has anyone EVER used it?
Get Info: Nothing to get info on, obviously. Duh.
Moving on...
View menu: Stop Loading Page is greyed out. Gee, might that possibly be due to the fact that I'm not currently loading a page in this tab?
Go menu: Forward is greyed out. Yeah. Because I've never hit "Back," so I don't have anything to go Forward to. Duh.
Bookmarks, Window, and Help menus: nothing greyed out.
OK, maybe Camino is just a stellar example, but remind me WHY this is a problem again...?
Man, I really wish Tog would just realise he's irrelevant and shut up about it.
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
Hideous overuse of drop shadow. Default blue links used both inline and in the nav... I find it very hard to take these sites seriously. Learn just a little about what it takes to give a site some kind of look and feel. No matter how well thought out the UI is if no thought or skill is put into color and formating than it equates to a poor user experience. I get lost when I look at pages with nothing but heavy drop shadow and standard blue links everywhere. What a joke...
My karma is getting better everyday.
Hmm.. Maybe you can select a greyed-out menu option and it would pop up a dialog explaining why it's not currently active? I know that would have been helpful to me in many cases and it would still provide the visual indication that the option won't do anything useful at the moment.
That just happens to be my all-time least-favorite OS X application. Sounds like a bug in the Keychain to me. Not terribly shocking. KeyChain Access is definitely something Apple has yet to get right. If a dialog was to be shown to describe why "Export" is disabled, it'd probably say "This feature is not yet implemented".
Not that I'm really clear on what you'd export to... the cert had to exist outside the keychain to begin with, so you shouldn't need to export those... 'keys' don't really make sense outside of another Keychain, which is an "add" or admin function. Did I mention I dislike Keychain Access? It's like Apple forgot about it or something...
..the GUI has something magical to do with storage hardware plugged into the computer. Fact: it doesn't. I mean, if you really want the Mac to release the disk, use a paperclip. But it's not a design flaw that the OS wants to keep the system in a consistent state. (Of course, that shouldn't keep the computer from booting.) Also, some of the features he's asking for are not even meaningful. How do you sort a list when the comparison operator doesn't even have a partial ordering because it's multiple, matched operators. Is it really that hard to insert extra 0s into a number to get it to sort? As for his "spaces in URLs" idea, the problem is that you can then have multiple files that fill the same request. Shouldn't users be clicking on long URLs, anyway, and typing short ones? Trust, me I don't fill out online orders in the URL: I use the website provided.
I don't live there any more, but I was born there, and the dates aren't the only thing that drive me batty. How about that oh-so-intuitive measurement system which is just slightly different from that other oh-so-intuitive Imperial measurement system?
U.S. and Imperial measurements - OLD and BUSTED.
Metric measurements - NEW and COOL.
My biggest PITA design flaw in software (just so I'm not completely offtopic) is the inability to remember previous user input, such as the directory you picked the last time you hit "File -> Open". I don't care when the last time was, just remember the directory I was in, dammit! This falls under the general principle of "Make the user's life easier and simpler", and yes, I did send it in to TOG.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
My vote for #8 is the increasingly common practice of clearing login name and password fields when a page has finished loading. Almost as bad is the practice of simply setting the focus to the login name field. I don't know how many times part of my password starts showing up in the name field because I've started typing before the page has finished loading.
:wq
My biggest peeve is non-resizable windows of any kind. ANY window should be resizable, including popups, file/folder selection, webpages, etc, etc.
This includes columns! Especially when there are multiple files with long similar names in a file selection window... do you want file:
My_parents_made me_ea...
or
My_parents_made_me_ea...
I didn't choose to buy a large monitor so I can scroll all over the place because some (developer) doesn't want me to resize their carefully laid-out windows!
bah
How would you like to be in a shop, and one in every two items there has the word 'no' on it, and you can't take it. You can't see why, there's no explanation... just no. What would you do (other than go to another shop)? Ask someone why you can't take it.
An alternative is to offer a tooltip with an explanation. How hard is that? it would be so useful, too. You even state that you don't understand the option. That's not necessarily true. You can understand the menu command, but not why it has been disabled.
For example, open up notepad on Windows XP. Note the view menu. There's one item, called 'status bar'. It's disabled (well it is on my machine). Why? I know what a status bar is, thank you very much. I know that the menu item should show me it. But it's disabled, WHY? No amount of help is going to get you there, because the help is always going to be context independent, you would have to list all the cases. Here though it can tell you exactly why for this instance.
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
Here's a real simple example. So "Copy" is greyed out because I haven't selected anything. So if I hold the cursor over Copy, a bubble pops up saying "Select some text before using Copy". There, now we've explained the problem to the (probably confused) user without cluttering up the interface.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
OK I understand that some of you guys don't like tog. That's fine. He may have a poorly laid out site, thats fine too. But, those two facts don't make what he has to say any less relevant. I think he has many reasonable things to say.
"brxref
as with most good ideas i threw in my two cents over year ago in my blog
Shouldn't that be Nielsen?
Hooray for porn!
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Bug Name: "Are you sure?"
Duration: [in years] Almost Forever
Supplier: Nearly all
Alias: "You're probably an idiot, therefore you must reiterate your request before permission is granted to proceed."
Product: Nearly all OS's and Applications
Bug: Idiot check switch always on
Class of error: Programmers' syndrome->'All Users are Idiots'
Principle: C.Y.A. - Make sure the customer acknowledges that it's their screw-up if they lose data by performing the action.
Proposed Fix: User-accessable "Newbie" switch in the advanced options menu
Discussion: How often have you tripped over this annoying waste of click? Valid only when truly dire consequences might result, such as a drive reformat or system file operation. Otherwise, default it to 'always on' for newbies, until they discover the advanced options menu.
(Note: Kissing cousin to the "XYZ file has changed. Do you want to save the changes?" bug, which occurs upon closing a file you've changed but don't want to save.)
Bug first observed: [Date] Day 1
Observer: [Your name] JabberJaw
Bug reported to supplier: [Date]
Bug on list since:
It's because in X-Windows an application has absolutely no concept of what the window manager is, what functionality it offers, or that the window manager even provides desktops.
This is so that every single application doesn't have to hold onto code to make it act correctly in this window manager.
What actually happens is that all of that behaviour is deferred to the Window manager, unlike in Windows where the OS == Explorer == The Window Manager all there is.
Basically the app gets told to launch, you switch to a new context, the window is ready and says to the window manager "draw me please", and the window manager does so, where you happen to be.
Trust me, the X-windows model specifically precludes the application from being supposed to keep track of your environment/windowing issues.
That's why it's so easy to change window managers in UNIX and almost impossible in Windows. That's also why we don't want it pushed into the application, because whatever you want as default behaviour, I expect my window manager to decide based on my settings. (And by 'we', I mean long time X-users)
Starting an application in X-windows is much more like a command-line to put something in the background. The mechanism which draws the resulting application does not by design consult the application, nor does it have anything to do with wether or not your application will even draw a window or not.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Which really wasn't worth looking up.
My father works in construction, and the standard procedure is:
1) Receive plans in metric (per state law, apparently)
2) Convert plans to Imperial
3) Convert Imperial to decimal feet (yup, that's tenths of feet, or 1.2"), which most of the tools are marked in and makes the math easier.
Heh.
The truth is (as much fun as the world has mocking us), the US _is_ converting to metric, but there's a lot of damned infrastructure, and it'll take a century to do..
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
Simple solution to the cost issue:
1. Big OS maker with clout defines standard for how this can be implemented in a power supply and motherboard that supports a DC voltage for x seconds after loss of AC. The OS will sense the warning from the power supply and do a fast hibernate.
2. Allow users to buy the supply/board for $20 extra at their option.
Without OS support no vendor would add such a feature to their hardware. The OS support is fairly trivial to add, however, and doesn't raise cost for people who don't use the feature.
The cost of doing this has to be a LOT lower than an external UPS. You can supply the power as DC (far more efficient), and only need about 30 seconds worth.
My favorite: the mysteriously dimmed menu options. Why are those darned things grey anyway?"
They're grey so that you know you can't click them, but they're still there so the layout of the menu doesn't change every time you go to use it: things stay in a consistent place, but you know some options can't be used.
I can't think of a better way to do it.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
Not that I'm really clear on what you'd export to...
PEM or DER encoded pkcs12 files, or just seperate files for key and certs, like every other application in the world understands.
the cert had to exist outside the keychain to begin with, so you shouldn't need to export those...
If I delete the only copy outside of keychain, is it unreasonable to expect me to be able to export it?
'keys' don't really make sense outside of another Keychain
A key could certainly only exist inside of keychain (generate a thawte email signing keypair with safari and watch this happen)
And of course it makes sense outside of keychain, not every application uses keychain, some (such as mozilla/thunderbird/firefox) use their own certificate/key repository.
Not to mention non osx platforms, is it unreasonable to expect to be able to move an identity cert and key to a non os x machine?
The inability to export has been fixed in Tiger, HOWEVER it still will not let you export your own private keys. Quite annoying.
Bug Name: Case sensitivity bug
Duration: longish
Supplier: old geeks
Alias: Capital errors get capital punishment
Product: C++, Java, etc.
Bug: Like - everyone clutters their code with distinct variables thisOneThinkMentioned vs ThisoneThingmentioned vs thisONEthingmentioned vs thisOnEthingMentioned vs... which all naturally have totally unrelated meanings. Putting away this feature will make serious programming nigh-impossible
Class of error: Keep programming to those in the know
Principle: Why simple if could be done hard
Proposed Fix: always revert to first parsed spelling
Discussion:
Bug first observed: [Date]
Observer: [Your name]
Bug reported to supplier: [Date]
Bug on list since: 1.1.2006
I googled high and low, but no one has published a solution. Our Mac expert got laid off a year ago, so he's no help. Finally, I was helping another poor developer forced to use a Mac, lamenting the fact that there is no "Option" key when VNCing to the Mac. I pointed out the lack of a way to eject the CD. She said maybe something on the keyboard? Sure enough, right next to PLASTIC REMOVABLE LABEL that says "hold the eject key to open disc drive" is an eject button! I had seen the label at least 10000 times, but obviously never read it. I just dismissed it as one of those pieces of clear plastic that covers something when it's new.
Apple is just way too concerned with what looks cool, and not enough with what works. Even the stupid label is white and grey, and rounded on the ends to look cool. THAT'S WHY I NEVER READ THE DAMN THING! The fact that there is a designed, removable label explaining the function of a key indicates that this is a design flaw. If they had put the label on the CD drive, it would make slightly more sense, but would still be an atrocious design.
Other stupid things about the Mac:
the power button that doesn't work/pulses with light
the magnifier on the dock
Code Warrior has unexpectedly quit (hah! not so unexpectedly!)
the "Rescued Items" folder(s) in Code Warrior. Come on.
niload
line endings
lack of keyboard shortcuts/support
the one-button mouse
Here are some solutions to common Windows complaint-items (warning to the paranoid: links to REG and VBS files).
Disable programs stealing focus
Disable Windows keys on keyboard
Disable personalized menus (the dumb "CLICK HERE FOR MORE!" arrow in the start menu)
Disable personalized menus for IE favorites
More Windows tweaks (tons more) can be found here.
motorcycles come with a reserve to their tank that you can cut to as a backup, when you run out of fuel..
Yes, and the reason *why* they have a reserve is because they don't have gas gauges.
good cars will tell you your out of gas when you still have a gallon left
So you're saying that a computer should warn you that your power is out?
zone alarm sometimes pops up alerts while I am typing, and takes the next character as its input, and disappears, faster than I can see it.
What just happened? who knows.
Which is a problem in its own right. Applications that have a lot of menu items are either (a) trying to be too many things to too many people; (b) have poor menu organization; (c) have designers with fairly poor notions of actual workflows so that they can offer nothing but disembodied atomic actions; or (d) have designers that are too lazy to do the work to embed workflow into the application in meaningful ways, forcing the user to deal with workflow organization himself. The greying out of menu items is a fairly half-assed way of dealing with workflow (i.e., the implicit "you can't do that now" message). If the workflow system was properly designed, it would probably be obvious *why* you couldn't do something.
That is all.
It's not that computers can't sort dates, it's that it's more code (and thus more potential for eerors). The ISO method provides a simple standard that was clear, unambiguous (Is 12/11/04 December 11, or November 12? I've people in my office who go either way.), and not-so-incidentally algorithmically easy to sort.
yes, I consider "m/d/y" to be as moronic as everyone else.
Since the current convention is obviously Broken As Designed, why not fix it with something that is not only not broken, but allows for algorithmic simplicity?
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Tognazzini is the one to complain: he was at Apple and probably had more opportunity than just about anybody else to fix these problems. Yet, Apple stuck with its ROM-based, disk-based architecture. Why? It's not because it was technically the best design; that was clear even then. It's because it allowed Apple to deliver a sufficiently good product at a sufficiently low price. And that's how all those decisions are made: engineering tradeoffs between cost, backwards compatibility, programmer acceptance, complexity, time-to-market, and usability. No company that wants to stay in business can optimize just usability alone.
The first thing that strikes me is there is a demand for `Build support for Continous Save and Revert into the toolbox.'
Of course, there is an attempted save by saying: "Add very short term batteries or tantalum capacitors to systems with volatile memory with enough power to dump the memory to disk and go into hibernation, perhaps 30 to 45 second worth."
Riiiight, I'm real sure a Pentium 4 can use any reasonably sized battery in like 10 seconds. Why not just spend some decent money and buy a UPS? A UPS SOLVES this problem.
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
Did anyone else notice that nowhere in the world is it December 1st?
No, it's not unreasonable, until you realize that Keychain Access is the crappiest app Apple has seen fit to include in OS X...
The inability to export has been fixed in Tiger, HOWEVER it still will not let you export your own private keys. Quite annoying.
And it continues to be the ugly stepchild of OS X. What gives? I'm tempted to chalk it up to "security is hard" and "they're leaving out features to keep it secure", but I doubt it. There's probably just one coder assigned to Keychain Access, and they have other, more important responsibilities, so it's left to 'later'...
Back in the day of floppies, about once a month someone would come to me in a panic because they had opened a file on a floppy, started editing it, then put in another floppy to pull something off of that, then hit save, completely scrambling th file system on that disk. (I should say, 'they came to me with a screwed up system', they had no idea what they had done wrong.) The idea that you can pull a floppy out without unmounting is just... stupid. Perhaps you could design an operating system that notified everything interested when the floppy reject button has been pressed so you could post huge warning signs over the screen and scare the bejesus out of the user. Or you could just do what Apple did: remove the reject button and have the operator use the GUI to eject the disk. Then, when you go to save your Word file, it simply asks you to reinsert the correct floppy.
The only reason he thinks you should be able (caution, I am basing this on the above comments because TFA is slashdotted) eject a floppy with a push of a button is because you can on Windows machines, the self-same machines that make a mess of it.
Built in UPS and you can pick it up and take it with you to boot!
It's not anything stupid like that. Of course computers turn off when there's no power, and of course RAM is volatile. All he's saying is that you shouldn't be sitting there working on something for an hour, lose power for a second, and lose all your work. And he's right. What he's talking about is what EMACS has been doing for many many years - writing temporary recovery files regularly, and checking for them on startup. This way if you do lose power, after a reboot and fsck, you restart your app, open the file you were working on, and get the option to go to your autosave file and pick up very close to the moment that the machine died.
Like I said, EMACS has been doing this for years, it's a very nice feature, and there's absolutely no excuse for all the other apps that still don't do this.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
it does happen in XP. at least it happens on the two copies of XP that i use.
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.
So what if you don't like the Dock? I do. I can't imagine why anyone would want to keep their applications in the Apple menu, all mixed up with Recent Documents and About This Mac and that sort of thing. The Dock does what I want it to, the way I want it to. So quit thinking you've got all the answers.
Well, one thing I've learned over the years is this:
If a device needs a manual, it has been poorly designed.
For example, every person in the world knows how to set a clock to the correct time - so long as it is a mechanical one. However, I'd like to know how many video machines and Microwaves are busy flashing 12:00, 12:00, 12:00 around the world right now. It must be in the tens of millions I suspect.
It's not really rocket science is it? 3 buttons are all that's required: a SET TIME button, and two arrows, up and down. You could get really tricky and add a fast scroll after 5 seconds of holding the arrow down.
Part of the problem is that you also have to save application state in between fs writes. I doubt that BeOS could do this (it wasn't that unconventional), but maybe EROS could.
Ewige Blumenkraft.
...when is someone going to take the Linux desktop (or at least A linux desktop) to task for all these failures and more? Yeah, it's easy to poke shit at an OS you didn't even install on your computer- most end users never change the defaults, and linuxland, "YOU DON'T LIKE IT?! CHANGE IT! RECONFIGURE! USE A DIFFERENT ONE!" is the answer. Which is work. Geeks are fine with that, users aren't. That's why they whine at us to fix it. :P
:|
Besides, this guy reads like he has his head six feet up his ass.
Case I: +5 Funny
- user gets 0 karma
Case II: +5 Insightful
- user gets 5 karma
Case III: +5 Funny, -5 Overrated, +5 Funny
- user loses 5 karma
Case IV: +5 Insightful, -5 Overrated, +5 Insightful
- user gets 5 karma
Case V: +5 Funny, -5 Overrated, +5 Insightful
- user gets 0 karma
If you lose too much karma in quick succession, you get instabanned for a day or more. Also, with low karma, your future comments will start out at a lower level and will be less likely to be rewarded.
The moral of the story is that you should always mod Insightful rather than Funny these days. CmdrTaco is working on a redesign of the system from scratch which sounds promising, but the current setup is b0rked.:)
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
Sorry, but balloons were part of the original system 7. Also Apple Guides (which would walk you through a task by drawing large, red friendly circles around the buttons and menus you were to click) came in 7.5 I believe. I miss it a lot, but I suppose it was too hard to do for developers, as many applications had terrible balloon help. Perhaps that's why it was abandoned. Macintosh has been degrading ever since. Mac OS X is almost as bad as Windows XP!
(Does anyone out there know how to get the old *true* Finder to run in OS X?)
-Lasse
Windows has all the message plumbing in place to deal with power failures. It was originally put there to handle notebooks and their batteries going dead, but the plumbing is used by some UPS software hooked up via USB or serial port. There's even a UPS service and a Control Panel applet where you can configure settings. Apps even have a way to receive notifications about power changes via WM_POWERBROADCAST.
I would really like to see PC makers take advantage of this plumbing by including some sort of emergency battery (a big-ass capacitor might even do) in the power supply that would provide enough power for an orderly shutdown, no more than a minute or so.
Example: There's not nine distinct design flaws in the Dock. There's one guy who doesn't like it, though. It's not shareware, it's not a demo. It's a far more elegant solution than what was originally available, however.
I *enjoy* the fact that Apple won't let me remove my iPod if I have a photoshop document opened from it.
Sorry man, you, like Vanilla Ice, passed your point of relevance, and you just can't handle it.
ShortFormBlog: Writing a little. Saying a lot.
Using cygwin or LInux serving up you can simply create links like you describe. One for the legacy systems and one for the usable CLI compliant system.
The problem here is that this is NOT a design flaw at all, rather it is more of a feature request.
The objective of a grayed out menu entry is to act as a placeholder for a command that cannot currently be executed. Period. That in and of itself is merely for user usability...anything additional even more so.
A bunch of these posts suggest "tool tip" style help. As far as I'm concerned, while not a "flaw" exactly, it would distract from the usability of the program (of course adding an option to disable would fix this).
Personally, I would rather see the GUI have a "help" mode. I once used a image viewer/editor (don't recall the name, but it was in Linux I believe) which allowed you to enter into a help mode when you clicked on an icon in the title bar (a "?" icon)...then, when ever you clicked on a button or menu item, it displayed a quick dialog description of that item. This was nice...making it intelligent enough to explain why something is grayed out would be even nicer.
But Still...Not a Flaw.
personally, I tend not to store important things in my rubbish bin, 'cause that's where rubbish goes. Any file that I put in the trash is no longer of use to me and will only stay there for a day in the not-so unlikely event that someone else needs it. Other users at my company have the bad habit of selecting Empty Trash immediately after dragging a file into it.
Not making sure your website is able to handle a slashdotting.
Just use google's text-only cache http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:5p4B1xNAGXkJ: www.asktog.com/Bughouse/10MostPersistentBugs.html+ &hl=en&lr=&strip=1
Surviving America
All I want to know is how to "maximise" a window in OSX. Pressing that damn green button just streches the screen vertically, but not on the horizontal.
:-?
Would really help on a 800x600 screen.
Wiwi
"I trust in my abilities,
but I want more then they offer"
I don't know what he is complaining about. Try tying in such things as "Excelsior Springs High School" or "Nintendo DS" in the Firfox browsing bar.
my bike has both a gague and a reserve... but that was their original intent.
Im not expecting the computer to be anticipating the outage. Im simply saying it should have a touch of juice saved up (in a small battery) to handle the emergency and save the data.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
yep... Id say that Apple would be the prime suspect for implementing something like this... they have all the tech they need and they control both the hardware and the software.
While I have begun to realize over the last few years that Tog doesnt always find the right things to gripe about, his complaints are occasionally valid. while surviving a power outage might not be the highest on a users list of priorities, it would be a cool feature that every computer could have.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
My computer system runs a journalled file system (ext3) so that it recovers gracefully when the power is kicked out.
My core software writes working files that I can recover when I start the application again.
If I am playing a game I do not want this sort of overhead, I want the computer focussing on playing the game and it is not important if I loose a bit of play time.
Computers are 'general purpose', they need to cater for a range of different applications. The software application vendors have to build in this sort of journalling because it makes sense to thier particular application.
Frankly I do not worry about power outages. It is so infrequent that it is just not a concern to me. If you live somewhere that this is a problem then a hardware solution might just be the best alternative.
There's a much bigger problem with the MM/DD/YY format. Namely, people who aren't American will misunderstand you.
In my office this is constantly a problem when people send out emails involving the dates various things will happen and write the date in the format MM/DD. For days after the twelfth of the month, that's fine. However, a significant minority of our office (who grew up Russian or British) will interpret "11/12" as December 11th.
The standard around here has been to switch to "DD MMM", e.g. "12 Nov.", or to do the full year-included ISO format. (Or occasionally 12Nov04, but that's silly) No one misinterprets either of those formats.
Also, it's not just computers that are more able to sort the ISO format. Sorting stacks of paper labeled with dates in the ISO format is visibly faster than sorting papers labeled with other date formats.
Windows XP sorts numeric tokens numerically.
t xt
So files are sorted:
1.txt
5.txt
9.txt
11.txt
65.txt
80.
rather than
1.txt
11.txt
5.txt
65.txt
80.txt
9.txt
What about blind users that would like to scroll exactly 6 elements and select option X.
What about the ability to see that there is another option if you do something else. Sometimes it is good to hide these for security reasons otherwise you have to indicate that 'yes we can do this but you have to do something first' be nice to figure out what though, which brins us back to the comment in the article.
If cars modelled this behavior, you might drive your car from New York to Miami, run out of gas in Fort Lauderdale, 10 miles from your destination, and suddenly find yourself back in New York.
For a trip from New York to Miami, that would be considered a bug.
For a trip from Earth to Mars, that would be considered a feature.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Totally agree with you here - this problem seems especially epidemic in image editing software. For instance, in some (older) versions of photoshop, you might want to use layers, given that apparently using the Undo option more than once is a foreign concept to the image editing gurus who created it. (Though I still have to admit that layers are cool, and very, very useful.)
If you open a "flat" image, such as you might find on the internet or from your digital camera or from a scan or pretty much anywhere else, the program will not you use any layer functionality, greying out the menu items. It would have been nice to know that I had to save the image into a format which supported layers, then change the color depth via 14 nested menus, then hold my nose while standing on my head for 64.7 seconds, rather than having to look it up on the internet, or worse, attempting to find the magic combination via the not-so-helpful Help menu.
So at least for the more esoteric menu disabling combinations, I completely agree that some information about why the option is disabled would be an extremely good idea. One whose time should have come long ago.
// harborpirate
// Slashbots off the starboard bow!
I hate it when Windows Media player skin hides its menu bars and appears maximized, while it is not. Clicking on the "X" button on the top right hand corner closes the maximized window behind the player . Trying it again, closes the next maximized window... and so on and so forth!
"What if a user has an open file, and yanks the drive? How does Windows "gracefully" deal with that? Answer: it can't."
Last time I checked it asks me where I want to save the file. At that point I can save it on the local drive, a network share or any other form of writable media including plugging back in the drive that was pulled.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
1. Engineering a solution that is more complex and problematic than the original problem it was intended to solve.
2. Expecting that users will (or should have to) read anything.
3. Expecting that users will (or should have to) possess technical expertise or jargon.
4. Expecting that users will (or should have to) configure it before using it.
5. Guessing or questioning the user's intent.
6. Neglecting to handle all possible failure cases gracefully.
7. Neglecting to save state frequently enough or at all.
8. Pointless rearchitectures (if it ain't broke, don't fix it).
9. Avoiding necessary rearchitectures (you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette).
10. Designing based on your own motives (in-product advertising, etc) rather than on the user's needs.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
TSFA says : The software "knows" why it has dimmed the item. Some decision or decisions led to the flag being set. At the same time as the flag is set, the reason why should be made available. If the user clicks on a grayed-out option, the reason or reasons should be made known. And none of those, "Gosh, Oh, Gee, it could be any one of these 14 reasons or maybe something else" messages. The message needs to be intelligent, responsive, and accurate. This one is important. This one needs to be done right. Ok, so the issue is that you want to know why the menu is disabled. So, which of 20 different on-screen objects do you want a message to indicate could be selected to enable "copy" ? Even if you manage to get the message "right", how useful is the message "You must select something to copy." going to be after the second time you see it? At that point the greyed menu tells me everything I needed to know.
I have to agree with you, In fact a menu being greyed out is usually not the result of a flag being set, but the result of a flag NOT being set (to enable it). In most OOP based applications, what happens is that a "chain of command" is given an opportunity to enable the menu item if it has anything for the item to do - if not, it passes it on to the next object in the chain and so on. If the chain terminates with nothing set then BY DEFAULT the menu remains greyed out. So all that could be supplied as a reason at that point is "nothing in the command chain has anything for this command to do right now". Well duh, that's what a greyed menu item MEANS! It may or may not be intuitive (a moot point I don't wish to argue), but it's the work of three seconds to explain it to someone and learn it. Users don't necessarily need to know about chains of command and so on, though in practice this concept is fairly pervasive in a GUI app, so personally I find explaining it to novice users does actually help give them a clue about just how the computer works and why things are the way they are. Even my Mum(TM) gets it.
FFS, this gets me mad all the time!
You don't have to drag any disk to the trash to eject it on a Mac. And you never had to.
You were supposed to use the "Put away"-command from the file menu. Only if you had ejected the disc from the "Special"-menu the icon would remain on the desktop. To get rid of that "empty" icon you had to drag it to the trash. Now if you put the icon to trash without using any of the menu commands the icon would go away AND the disc would be ejected. A lot of users thought: "Hey that's easier than clicking in a menu, I'll do it this way from now on.
But it was never meant that way.
Grrr. Argh.
Parent is correct. KDE has fixed this and windows do open on the desktop they were launched.
At least on my machine.
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
The problem is, somewhat simply, that the "workspaces" to which you refer are not a feature of the X windows service. They are a feature of the window manager you have chosen to use. The "workspaceness" is acheived by realizing and unrealizing (showing and hiding) and moving windows about on the screen.
The DISPLAY value only has "server" and "screen" sections. So there is no way to communicate this "workspace" to the application.
You start an application on the _SCREEN_, that being the only screen you likely have. When the window is finally realized your window manager assigns it to the "active workspace" because that is the one that is active when the window "finally arrives."
So you have a bad case of operator impatience, and the workspace feature is so nicely and seamlessly presented by your window manager that you have been led to beleive it is a facility as opposed to a visual convention. Good for your programmer.
An exceptional window manager (note, not "application" as in Mozilla or Word or Open Office, but window manager as in KDE-WM of Gnome-WM or Motif or whatever) might be able to be configured to "know" that you want a given application to show up in a given "workspace". [e.g. like Hydravision(tm) for ATI addapters in Windows(tm).]
The problem is one of disconnect.
You click on an icon to start an application and the fork-and-exec take place and things are off and running. You switch "workspaces" but the application may not even have gotten around to calling the init routine for the X library yet, let alone contacting the display server and allocating a top-level (if invisible) window. There is no way for the window manager (or X) to associate the application that is "just connecting to the server" with the button-press of a few moments ago as the contexts are completely disjunct.
As an added example case, an application that will realize/show/"un-hide" itself in some circumstance may apear to skip around from "workspace" to workspace. Some window managers may be smart enough to take the realize-notification, see that it is for a window "on another workspace" and immediately un-realize the window before you see it or it really gets drawn.
But the virtual display surfaces you know as workspaces are just an illusion, so you really cannot blame arbitrary apps for "failing to work" with a particular (if useful and wholesome) smoke-and-mirror effect.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Though every once in a while they don't mirror in time and we still have to deal with server choke.
Power crash Under a power crash situation, it prolly surfices to disengage the disks, with or without a graceful shutdown. This might involve flushing the core, etc. How should the computer know it's about to crash? The macintosh dock We had the same problem with OS/2, but IBM still supplied the older tool, and the means of restarting it (including an icon) Grey Doubt The menu could be hooked up to a pop-up dialog message, saying "you need x". It is still useful to gray it out. Ascii sort Ascii was around a century before computers, and adopted by computers via teletypes. Ascii sort is much faster (if counter intuitive). None the same, it is of course silly to have Z before a, but what happens when you hit welsh (which has ff as a separate letter? Spaces in URLS The whole point of punctuation is to separate words. Computers use extra punctuation to separate containers, etc. So if you start complaining about spaces, next you will be looking at "Financial Year 2004/05" as a name. Data Entry fields Valid enough point. One has to parse the field to store it. What do you allow? Disk Drive Nazi I suppose the author comes from the DOS world, where you can pop disks in and out willy nilly. It's a case of asking for the disk, really. Would be nice, if there was a list of open files given, or some option to forcably disconnect it. I suppose it's share and share alike, or manners, really.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
Leave the original as is, but update a redo log as the user performs operations.
Only when the user saves do you commit the changes from the log to the file.
This has the added benefit of being an undo/redo history backing for your "project" file (assuming the app is based on projects or workspaces).
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I decided to repeat the author's experiment, i.e., put the powerbook to sleep, unplug the firewire drive that is previously mounted, then wake the computer up. When my powerbook wakes up, it still sees a ghost image of the firewire volume (I suppose due to cache) and I could navigate as much as what the cache has retained. Once I go beyond, the system tries to read from the drive and realizes it's gone, then unmounts the drive and pops up a dialog box telling me I should gracefully unmount the drive before I unplug it.
Brutely unplugging a drive while it's mounted really isn't a big deal nowadays, that we have journalled filesystem. Filesystems like reiser4 feature atomic operation, so it would be provably robust against brute removal. You only ought to worry if you're still using FAT (for example, digital cameras). Maybe the author should have acknowledge this "bug" being dependent on the filesystem, but then, this is beyond an end-user's (possibly also the author's) knowledge.
I once had a signature.
Power Failure Crash; Store (encrypted) information in cookies even before transfer to the server, so information is preserved from all but the most serious "melt-downs."...Convert your existing software and write new software to perform Continuous Save
SOOooo... I missed the part where this is the PC manufacturers responsibility. It's not their job to back up your data. Period. That's all YOU. Nobody else. You're in control of that PC's hardware and software, as well as providing safeguards for catastrophic failures. And let's say it was their job for a moment. Do you really think they would provide such a service for free? Not a freaking chance they're going to provide webservers to maintain the integrity of your data without charge. If anything, it's going to be an option for which you pay for, like an extended warrenty and people are still going to turn it down, just like people don't (but should) back up their system on a regular basis. Did we mention you can already pay for these services anyway???
The same damn thing goes for the capacitors crap, which, while not a bad idea, is a solution anybody can take personal resposibility for as well quite easily. From an engineering standpoint, you just increased the wieght and cost of your box anyway. And we all know the hibernate time from computer to computer can vary at any given moment depending on what you're doing to begin with. I'd contend that this is less neglect on PC manufacturers part and more a market demand issue.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
on the power button; preventing accidental power-off.
I can't tell you how often it is that accidentally press the power button with my leg, foot, or arm, especially if I want to get behind it for some reason. (This was back in the day when my APM was never set up right).
The fact that now a mere brush against it will only bring up a dialog box and not shut the system down immediately is a great comfort.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
(On URLs)
Principle: Support people's ability to communicate in the manner to which they are accustom.
Yeah. Because URLs should automatically translate AOL-speak, l33t and the kind of spelling you find in Harry Potter fanfic written by dyslexic pre-teens.
They should also support "Tognazzini-grammar" natively.
The computer is a virtual world. The real world has rules that cannot be changed and can be deadly (like gravity and inertia). Within a computer, programmers make the rules (within the limits of computing speed and storage space).
.
So, you should really be swapping user with driver of a video-game car
Why on earth would you be against the user having total power? It seems like only sadists could be against that. Responsibility may be required in some parts of life... why do you insist on inserting it where it's not really required?
OK... Windows tells you that you should have used the disconnect thingy or whatever when you yank a USB key or a digital camera out of the machine... every time you do it... until you decide
"You know what, I am capable of knowing when I can pull these things out and when not to, and I'd rather not have to go and select 'safely remove device' or whatever EVERY time I do it"
I want to be able to just press the eject button on my CD, I want to be able to just disconnect my USB key or Digital camera... it's a thing that really gives me the irrates with Macs
"Woh there bucko... you ejected a disc but didn't tell me about it... now I'm kinda all messed up... could you put it back so I can know you're about to remove it?" (Usually you can't do that because you can only eject via software (or buttons controlling software)... but there is a way, I've managed it somehow... can't remember, but it was very annoying.
We have one really kickass interface that everybody grooves with:
Things in space.
A space full of things that get more detailed when you get closer to them and less detailed when you get further from them (this could equate to the 'significance' of a thing). These details can also be 'things' (thus things can contain things). These things, you can 'look' at them and have 'conversations' with them (pet a kitty, turn a doorknob, click a button, design a document...).
We have have the thingspace interface partially implemented in the 'windows' interface. I think it could be lightyears better of course. I think that a lack of vision is all that stands between what we've got and what we could have.
Mac OS X also lets you do what you describe (i.e., simply save the open file to a different destination). But it ALSO complains that the device has been removed before properly unmounting it, the overall benefit of which (for ALL users) likely outweighs any complaints some people have about this behavior. A reasonable compromise might be an option to turn this behavior OFF somewhere in the OS, but intrinsically, Mac OS X really, really likes to know when filesystems go away. Frankly, Windows does too: it just gives the user less feedback.
I've solved this problem in the past by having tooltips show up when you hover over the disabled menu item with information on why it's disabled.
stay frosty and alert
There are tons of tower-replacement type computers out there. HTPCs, those mini Shuttle PCs, those tiny Dell Dimensions, DTR laptops, etc. etc.
You're just not _looking_ for them, or maybe the price is turning you off?
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Worse than dimmed menu items are menu items that aren't dimmed, but don't currently do anything.
Furthermore, he is completely wrong anyway.
The page says: "Product: All Existing Browsers"
Yet in Firefox, I can enter spaces in the URL and they get correctly translated into their correct escape. Clearly he has never used Firefox, and as such is hardly worthy of using such expressions as "All Existing Browsers."
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Seriously... what a maroon.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
The ELEVENTH October in 2004? Wow! October has been busy this year.
1 - www.apc.com
....let me help Bruce. I think I can guess where you are going with this..
2 - Prototype is an acronym for "Short Leadtime".
3 - Google is not "Gray Doubt"
4 - sort -n
5 - It's a (say it with me) s-t-a-n-d-a-r-d
6 - We tried that, and named it CSV.
7 - Turn off your drive cache.
8 - Clean the shit from the mouse wheels regularly.
9 - That's a cdrom not a coffee holder.
10 - Umm...Where did you save it?
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Now that Hibernate is nice and mature, has anyone considered using it on the client-side? This provides a journalled environment where data is continually saved. In addition, it could be extended to provide an undo facility.
I can't remember the source, but a luminary suggested that a language of the future would provide automatic undo facility, as well as automatic saving.
... I can't find Flaws #0 through #9
Tag lost or not installed.
Hiring programmers who work in countries where people are still occasionally eaten by tigers.
There are a few ways around this problem. Here's one, as an example:
Menu items are still greyed out, but hovering the mouse pointer over them produces a help bubble with some text that the application set when it turned on the disabled flag. The bubble also appears if the user attempts to select the greyed-out menu item.
The bubble goes away as soon as the mouse moves away, the user gives focus to a different option, or the user clicks on the bubble.
Once you've seen the message and know why a given item is disabled, you never have to see the message again, and if you do inadvertantly trigger it, it's easy enough to get rid of it without any extra effort.
You're all wrong. DD-MMM-YYYY (e.g. 29-Nov-2004) works best for human-to-human communications because it is unambiguous across cultural lines. It doesn't alpha sort properly, and in those computer cases I do use the ISO format, but otherwise you really MUST use the three-letter format. I think it's a happy medium. And cross your handwritten sevens :)
One simple rule for its versus it's
...then relatively speaking, Windows' Taskbar sucks-ass-big-time.
Neither are perfect, but I use both every day and, despite it's flaws, the Dock is better than the Taskbar -- IMHO.
The Dock is an excellent application switcher for me as well as a good visual aid for seeing what's running. I keep about twenty application icons and my Application folder there. I like it pinned to the right side. All the icons are still plenty big enough to quickly see what's running.
The Windows Taskbar becomes useless for me if I have more than about five windows open. Any more and I have to click see what each one is for. Plus, installers just love to crowd it with crap. And, honestly I hate having a Taskbar button for every friggin' window I have open. I much prefer the Mac's application-centric approach.
Anyway, this guy's list of design flaws is lame. I could think of a bunch of much better ones. Many of them in OS X. But, to call the system's application switcher a design flaw is just stupid.
"The only intuitive thing in the world is the nipple. After that, everything is learned"
/. users. Maybe I wrote one or two words wrong =P
Ivan Tkatchev
One of the earliest and better
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
As others have mentioned already, most everything a user does is learned behavior. Everything from turning the computer on, what a mouse is, what happens on the screen when the mouse is moved on the desk, etc, etc. It all has to start somewhere.
Remember action/reaction? For every action a potential risk or consequence (of something going wrong, expected or not)? I think there is some truth to that, even in this context.
As you mentioned
Computers are not a virtual world. They may represent a virtual world to the user, but they must obey the same laws of physics that I do. You raise a good point though, that programmers make the rules within the computer. To the users, we (programmers) do seem to make the rules. And we have a responsibility to the users to "give them what they paid for", within reason and constraints (some of which you raised)
I believe that everyone has some sort of responsibility (be it large or small) within the context of the issues raised by Tog. For example (just to list a few & definitely not an exhaustive list):
Hardware manufacturers should continue to improve hardware to meet the needs of users, plus continue to be innovative at the same time (because users don't always know what they want, or what is possible with new technologies etc). They need to provide manuals, instructions + specs, and make sure that their hardware works consistently & as described under said conditions. goals: to create robust and ground-breaking hardware that performs as desired risks: prohibitive cost & failure to go to market
Developers, like myself, need to do the same. We need to listen to, study, try to understand and help our users by making software more intuitive, robust and still try to maintain an innovative edge. goals: to develop intuitive, robust & flawless software risks: prohibitive development cost, increased likelihood of bugs in complex systems (potential damage costs increase as well)
Users need to read instructions, manuals and help when they need it. They must continue to relay their wants, desires and support questions to those that need to hear them. However, as I pointed out before, they are not totally free from all responsibility. When a beginning user buys their first computer, their responsibility is to learn how to use it (plug it in, turn it on, move the mouse, learn how & when & where to click etc). When experienced professionals buy an expensive/complex system, you better be sure that most companies will send their employees to training or something, to help ensure that they know how to use it properly (thus reduce risk and potential damage & costs). goals: obtain & use completely user-friendly software & hardware risks: prohibitive cost. Potential damage to self/property/lives if instructions and/or proper training was not followed. (for casual users, mostly just data loss)
You will notice that "prohibitive costs" kept on creeping up in all categories. Unfortunately this is very real and must be dealt with as we go. Nobody will develop/engineer for free or just throw money away, there must be an analysis and a decision somewhere.
So while Tog made some very valid points, I don't think they are all easily obtainable or even realistic to fix (at this stage at least). Keep in mind that the perfect world solution to all his problems span a
to have a window (or door) icon on the opposite side of the screen from the trash.
You drag the volume over the window and the window opens. Release it, and the volume turns into a flying saucer (or a bird) and disappears out the window while the disk ejects (assuming an ejection mechanism).
Of course, if you have this (redundant, really) special icon for the eject function, the question comes up of what happens when your five year-old daughter drops your volume on the trash icon?
And, while everyone's stomache does the flip-flop, I'll point out that some Mac users in the good-old days would use resedit to make a duplicate of their trash and change the duplicate to an open window. Some just changed the trash icon to the open window and left it at that.
All Microsoft file systems (FAT16/32 & NTFS) have a bug that prevents files from being reliably deleted or renamed.
Any process can open a file and hold it "hostage", preventing all deleting or renaming, until the process is killed. If it's a "zombie" (or other unkillable) process, then the file can be held hostage forever.
Therefore, the only reliable way to delete or rename a file on Windows is to reboot the machine. This is frequently why you need to reboot after installing software on Windows. The reboot ensures that the delete of the old version of the file(s) will be successful.
This is a severe "show-stopper" bug under any reasonable definition. Of course, Microsoft has refused to acknowledge or fix this bug for over 20 years. Instead, Microsoft has taught an entire generation of users that frequent rebooting is a normal part of the computing experience.
Same here. I write my dates YYYY-MM-DD. It just makes much more sense.
I also hate when countries use DD-MM-YYYY. This makes absolutely no sense. It's like sorting people by first names.
He states that the file name can have spaces and then comes back to the advertisers that promote the web site. This is a confustion between the file name part of the url (in which you can put spaces in any browser) and the host part of the url which is the part that is advertised by the marketers. Well this part has to do with the DNS and not the file name. The DNS does not allow right now to put spaces in a host name. The browsers follow the standards and do not take anything else other than valid host names.
This works quite well in languages that have specific patterns (such as endings) based on the grammatical roles of the words used. Japanese, ancient Greek, and Latin are all examples of this. Spaces might help, but they aren't necessary to separate the verbs from the nouns. English, on the other hand, makes very few distinctions between kinds of words, so text without spaces appears tangled and obscures meaning.
Similarly, this is made easier to deal with when the sounds represented by the text are greater in number, so syllabaries and ideogrammatic systems work much better than alphabets without spaces. Alphabetic systems (Latin- and Greek- based, for instance) are much more legible with spaces as a result.
anybody wiilling to go on record on how long it will take to get any of these fixed and which company will be the first to take the initiative...
Get your torrents...
Yes, I wish The GIMP's file dialogue boxes were a bit less dumb, instead of always opening up at the same tiny size, and had a better implementation of Most Recently Used directories, like CoolEdit95 apparently did (scroll a third down the linked page), although I never used it myself, but other programs have this useful feature. Since GIMP is based on GTK, I suppose I should ask them, and continue to praise GIMP for being just cool everywhere else.
Co-operation beats competition
How about reducing the user's default font size for the article body? "Hey you, your browser isn't causing enough eye strain with those big fonts. Let me take care of that for you." Does he get a cut of every Lasik surgery or something?
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch.
It's a freeware Windows utility called Push That Freakin' Button (PTFB). Drag the PTFB finger over a button on any annoying dialog, and it will automatically close it for you from now on. Actually it is meant to work with standard Windows widgets, which Firefox does not use. But the PTFB author has cleverly supplied a way to push non-standard widgets: when you drag the PTFB finger over the button, hold down *both* mouse buttons - this will tell PTFB to click by *coordinate*. Using this technique, you can make PTFB work with Firefox (or any other web browser) !!!!! Goodbye annoying login screens !!!!!
Swap user with driver and you prove the author's point very clearly. Perhaps "without fear of reprisals" is too strong a phrase, but compare to car design. If you look at a car, it would theoretically make sense for a gov't (or a responsible car company) to make cars that can't go faster than the highest speed limit in the country. Do they do this? No. Why not? Because a) users don't like it, and b) sometimes being able to go fast is a safety issue, or the technical methods used to implement the speed governing cause extra safety issues (what was the story about a saturn that lost power steering going down a hill?). Also witness that you can drive the car when the oil's low, even though this may irreparably damage your engine, or do many other things.
Since you brought in aircraft, I may as well chime in there since I'm a pilot. There are a multitude of systems in airplanes that, if used improperly by the crew, can lead at best to a serious incident or at worst a fatal accident. Why do we not engineer aircraft such that these systems can't be used improperly? Because for every possible accident there are real examples where by using the system in an unintended way a pilot saves the day. Take for example the experience of a friend of mine, who was flying along and went to reduce power. Pulls out the throttle and it comes out in his hand, with the engine being left in a full power situation. While not as bad as no-throttle, its seriously impossible to land at full throttle. So she goes back to the airport, establishes an emergency situation, and when all is ready she pulls out the mixture control and cuts off fuel to the engine and executes a forced landing. No fatalities, No injuries, No damage to the aircraft, all in all a good day. But suppose some engineer had thought that he would cut down on accidents by eliminating the chance that a pilot could accidentally turn off his engine in flight (which does occaisionally happen with dire consequences)? The situation could have been a lot worse.
This post has grown a lot longer than I intended it to be, but I hope my point has been made. As you said yourself, use comes with some responsibility. At certain point IMO it is more important that someone who knows what they're doing be able to do what they want.
On the Apple Macintosh platform, it appears to be possible to detect if a disabled menu item is chosen. Apple mentions that the need for this is rare and that it would happen in situations such as providing context-sensitive help. Virtually no software does this.
first project I ever worked on in my professional career - it was an early unit that had 32K of battery backed RAM to preserve the state of the system it was testing. For some strange reason the RAM contents were getting munged on powerdown - took me about an hour to figure out the machine was going flaky when it was shut off, so we put a comparator to drive the RST line - bingo, problem solved.
For the last ten years at least companies like MAXIM have been shipping zillions of WDT chips for use in embedded systems. They have all sorts of functionality and cost a dime. There's at least one in about every laptop. But because we have grown to expect our computers to be flaky and unreliable, there's no demand for robustness in desktop systems.
E=1/2CV^2
Most every PC power supply uses a switching convertor jsut like the one in a TV set (some even use the same control chips). They don't use bigass iron core transformers and they don't directly regulate to 12V or 5V or whatever - they use a DC bulk supply that is directly rectified from the AC line (yes, that's right, no transformer) and switch it down at high frequency (thus smaller transformers). A cheapass PC power supply might have (if you're lucky) 2x330uF of storage on this bulk supply - at 170VDC that's less than 10 joules, at 70% efficiency that's enough to drive 140W load maybe 50 mS.
All it would take to increase that to seconds is to add capacity to the bulk DC supply that's already part of every system. This would require getting larger caps to replace the cheap low value caps and a twenty cent varistor to limit inrush current so you don't blow the internal fuse simply by plugging it in.
They could even go to fullwave rectification on the input, use a 350VDC bulk supply instead of 170, and use 1/4th the capacity - a 2000uF/340VDC supply would have enough reserve to keep the entire system running a couple of seconds under "panic load." Stick a single 4700uF/450VDC cap in the "premium" power supply and you'd have a system that would be rock stable through just about anything.
The caps would cost $2-$5 instead of the twenty cent crap that's in there now; the sleep signal is already there, but no one uses it. Figure ten bucks to the end user and you have a system that will perform flawlessly through those little glitches and would have time enough to perform a proper shutdown on those rare glitches when the power didn't come back a second later.
Ten bucks. Maybe. But there's no demand for it because no one knows they could expect better at an equally reasonable price. Reviews don't even test for such basic functionality - no one has a clue, and the industry doesn't want you to know better because they would rather keep those pennies of profit themselves.
And BTW if you are feeling particularly sporty all it takes is a parts order and courage with a soldering iron. I've installed photoflash caps in TV sets to bolster the power supply and it works wonders - the cheapass Philips in my living room had this treatment and it's outlived two others and has a rock solid picture. My ancient HP Vectra firewall PC with the 233mhz cpu and the mighty 100W internal power supply coasts right through brownouts that caused my "better" desktop system to restart... that is, before I fixed it, too.
...is making the help interface an animated paperclip.
What's even more ridiculous is that you can actually choose from among several "Office Assistants", including the infamous paperclip, a bouncy ball, a robot, Shakespeare, and quite a few others. If Microsoft wouldn't spend so much time on useless things like that, they could design better products and fix more bugs. ("Why haven't you fixed the bugs?" "Well, we we updating the bouncy ball animations.")
This is a joke, right? Most of these 'bugs' either haven't been a problem with mainstream software for decades or the proposed 'solutions' would have been worse than the 'bugs' themselves.
First, dude, get an account, nobody reads AC posts anymore.
Slashdot policy denies accounts to blind users.
Most OS offer a way to show via the help system why an item is dimmed. The only thing dimmed is the mind of the writer, like only suppling 7 items but saying there are 10 in the title.
Wo Ho, I can remove a floppy halfway though a copy operation, oh yer, more power to me! Idiot! Software driven disk ejects stops idiots, the key strokes were there to eject a disk if you wanted to, but you were to lame to reseach the 'problem'.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
I completely agree. Stupid. I never have understood why the Mozilla developers wanted to mimic this insanity. At least you can change it:
Type about:config. Type slider.snapMultiplier in the filter and then double click the line to change the value. The multiplier is far from the scrollbar you can be before it snaps back. I use 20. I think you can use 0 to disable the snap.
That pulling the power plug from the wall trick was one of the things the BeOS developers would do at conferences and demos to demonstrate the robustness of the BFS journaled filesystem created by Dominic Giampaolo, who now works at Apple. It was one of the first true journaled filesystems, certainly the first available in a desktop operating system. They would unplug the machine in the middle of heavy read-write activity and show how it came right back up just as fast as when it booted clean. This was around 8 years ago, I believe, so it was a pretty big deal. A few years later Linux finally got ReiserFS, Ext3, XFS and a couple other journaling filesystems. MacOS X got journaling in version 10.2.3, if I remember right. Supposedly NTFS has been journaled for a while now, but I don't know the details on that.
The rest of the computing world has finally almost caught up to long-dead BeOS in terms of robustness and speed. I still haven't seen anything boot nearly as fast as BeOS though. If your needs are simple it's still a bitchin' OS. The original BeOS is dead but you can still find the Free BeOS 5 Personal Edition download if you look around, or you can buy an updated commercial version from these guys who bought the IP from Be, Inc. before they folded up shop. The free version was kind of cool, it was a 45MB download that expanded into a 500MB drive "image" and let you boot up BeOS from Windows. Pretty neat way to test drive a new operating system. Too bad it never stood a chance in the market against uno-hoo.
Here's a link to that free version.
Scroll down a bit for the "Windows" version. Be aware that it probably won't run on newer computers with anything more advanced than a P-III. The patches for newer processors have been integrated into the commercial version, I'm sure.
Ah, BeOS, we hardly knew ye.
But what would the open window do with any other file/folder? That is the question here.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Some techs and/or IT people might think that giving users the options to pick what applications can insinuate themselves into their systems might keep virus/spyware/malware infections down.
I can say with great certainty that if you give the user the power to allow or deny changes that software makes to their operating system, they will deny their printer drivers from installing, but let malware like Sasser, Look2Me, or WebRebates right on in.
-
"Sometimes you have fun, and sometimes the fun has you"
This guy is a complete moron. Is he having trouble filling space on his website or something? The only valid problem I see is #6 (something which personally annoys me). The rest are just human-learned usage issues. Do you want a user friendly OS that tries to prevent stupid user error (and thus the confusion of stupid users)? Don't let them pop out a floppy with the unthought-out push of a mechanical button which will inevitably lead to the user trying to save the file to an inaccessible disk and the confusion of the user by another error message. This guy is just bitching to bitch.
Not sure when it happened to Word but Office2000 on my old Win98 machine does a pretty decent job recovering from the occasional O/S crash. I remeber using Word on Win3.1 it was impractical to work on a formatted 100 page doc without near continuous reboots and manual saves. However I very much doubt continuous saves would do much to the performance of modern apps, provided they are coded half decently (ie: journal files). Most places where I have worked (at least after I left) have had a "debug log file" mechanisim that can write huge ASCII files onto disk to debug intermittent customer problems. They mechanisim is simpler and slower than journal files. They basically just append text to the end of the log file(s) and flush to disk after every write. The last time I wrote one was about 2 years ago, they wanted it as a multithreaded dll that would maintain a seperate log for each *thread* of the dozen or so apps in the overall system. The performance hit was required to be less than 15% with it switched on. It was not a difficult requirement to meet and I think the actual figure was about 9%. The software itself is a suite of commercial performance measuring and reporting tools (*nix, Win32 and even a bit of Mainframe). So as you can imagine our customers (Banks, Telco's, Governments and the like) would not be happy if thier server farm turned into molasses to debug something that is measuring the speed of said molasses. A "computer" in the 70's was a Mainframe, anything else was a toy. The Mainframe was (and still is) a completly different beast to a PC but hard disks on a "real" computer were common in the 70's (some with exposed heads that you could watch hovering over the spining platter!!!). They had a reasonable stab at what this guy is advocating because the information was worth $$$$ and people demanded it. What he does not say is that adding functionality also costs $$ and are people willing to pay the extra to get it implemented in something like "notepad".
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Well... most languages dont. Try editing recorded speech. It's not that easy to separate words.
Depending on who is talking, skipping pauses between sentences is also common. Especially when reading aloud.
Conceptually, the original Mac designers were on the right track with the Resource Manager. It was always available and handled structured data well. But the update safety of the Resource Manager was awful. (128K and one floppy, remember.) There's no problem doing it right today.
The Windows world has Jet, which is a mediocre database but is at least standard.
The mainframe people have had this for decades, NT and later sort of have this, but the UNIX/Linux world lags here.
The real problem is the standard C library, which supports a very dumb file system model. Two or three generations of programmers know only that.
Unless you every file name you will ever encounter has a uniquely determinable encoding (hint: they don't), you simply cannot do case insensitive comparisons correctly. For latin alphabets this is usually not a problem, but for any alphabets with non-latin characters it's a problem.
reasons you don't write phonetically.
One thing that I do like, though, is that I can click on the icon in the system tray and do the, "mother may I" so that I can give the OS the benefit of the doubt in case it would prefer that I clean up somewhere else before yanking the USB thumb drive.
I've only been impatient once when it wouldn't give permission, and the only thing I was doing was a file copy to the drive, but enough time had passed, in my opinion, for it to be done.
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
The scroll bar snapping back if you move the pointer too far away is probably THE most annoying Windows bug.
Then I agree with others about pop-up windows stealing focus, and applications opening windows which then block the rest of the application until it's closed.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
The guy is saying that the intricacies of the computer should not be exposed to the user.
The whole act of saving your files, so you don't lose your work is stupid in essence, and in practive, because we do have the resources and the technology to avoid it. Many computer systems have existed that respected the work of the user. There çshould be no such thing as a "save" button. If I type it, I want it, if I didn't want to save, I can always undo (unlimited undo), or work on a copy of the original document.
The same thing happens with RAM, you can always save the state to some other device. There are many non volatile RAM-like technologies.
They are expensive, so people have to put up with losing their work on power failure.
You could always have a small device that recorded state, and let software do the rest, and you could have a device with a persistent state, resilient to power failure.
It's just that regular users are accustomed to the way things are. That doesn't make it sensible.
Consumer computers shouldn't have those stupid limitations. It's ok for an engineer, or a programmer, but not for a regular guy. It's not a failure of the user, it's a failure of the product.
You could have continuous saving, plus a filesystem with write-ahead-logging , that doesn't get corrupted, like ReiserFS.
Things have changed.
Writing to disk all the time shouldn't slow the application down, that would be just bad design.
Funny, on my SE-30 I do. I looked for that stuff you mentioned but it's not there.
Some of us use computers as tools (and not a fetish) and therefore we don't upgrade when the tool is still perfectly capable of performing the function it was originally bought for.
Of course, Mac fetishists will never understand this. But my SE-30 serves my needs perfectly well, despite the counter-intuitive interface, and will not be replaced until it burns up.
Look, doofus, my Macs don't run OSX, and never will. I have a limited budget to solve specific problems and the existing macs solve a problem despite their suckular GUI.
Saying "you need to pay for an upgrade" is not a valid answer to "the paradigm sucks in the version I have".
But you macaholics will never understand. It's religion for you that nothing can be wrong with the Mac GUI. You're like old-skool BSD fanatics (which is basically why linux is crushing BSD).
....simply type some stuff in a text box somewhere, select it and select delete, deletes it. No, I don't know why they bothered to put it there either *sigh*.
I am NaN
2) some karmawhore will always post fulltext.
3) redundancy can often be prevented by at least reading the other
4) google cache is your friend
5) if you can't be bothered to read other posts and/or the article, then you have nothing to add, so don't post.
No excuses for not R'ing TFA in some manner.
1. Bug Name: Power Failure Crash
Solution: Buy a 5 minute Battery Backup.
2. Bug Name: The Macintosh Dock
Change the Window Manager, and/or Box.
3. Bug Name: Mysteriously dimmed menu items
Software Engineers: Don't use this "Pattern".
Users: 1. Ignore this opinion, currently you can't get to it.
2. Change software.
4. Bug Name: ASCII Sort
Software Engineers: Allow other types of sorts, and table(s) for different sort criteria.
Users: 1. Learn to work with the Sort.
2. Change software.
5. Bug Name: URL Naming Bug
The [Space] bar is common to ALL computers, [Return] is not; Get use to it.
6. Bug Name: Let's you save me some work
Software Engineers: Use "Patterns"
Users: 1. Change software.
7. Bug Name: The Disk Drive Nazi
1. Change to an OS that lets you remove floopies while a floopy-write process is occuring.
2. Warm Boot.
8. Proof Read Your Material
9. Proof Read Your Material
10. Proof Read Your Material
They don't have to think of it. If they want to eject the disk, they click on it once to highlight it, and then they either look in the menus for a menu option to eject the disk (which they will find) or they'll use control-click for the contextual menu. Think of the drag-the-disk-to-the-trash-can as an Easter egg if you want: possibly useful for people who know it's there, but a user can get along fine without it. (And if they took it out now, there's sure to be old-timers who would be upset with them.)
> Oh, and by the way, a dialog saying, "This action
> cannot be undone. OK Cancel," is not a suitable
> substitute for a Revert facility for anything at > any time.
You're right; we're sorry.
We've removed the extraneous "Cancel" option.
*** CASE CLOSED 11/30/2004 11:01a bpfh@support.yoyodyne.com
*** Customer was satisfied with answer. Case is closed.
Close, but still not quite there.
The prblem is, of course, what happens when the power fails while writing the journal?
In practice, writing to the journal is a short, quick operation, so the probability of it happening at the same time is smaller, bit it's still there.
The correct solution is to have some sort of uninterruptable power supply which keeps the machine up long enough that either an orderly shutdown can be completed, or power is restored before the battery or whatever runs out.
This is all well and good until the UPS breaks at the same time as a power outage, or a mouse or pet hamster chews through the cable between the UPS unit and the computer.
You can engineer this problem out too, but a water pipe might burst near your computer and short it out.
So you can isolate the computer by encasing in it a water-proof housing with multiple redundant and divers power-supplies and maybe even a few Diesel generators.
Of course, none of this is any good when a suicide bomber explodes on top of it all.
So you install a couple of machinegun nests to prevent suicide bombers getting close enough. Problem solved!
Not quite, Einstein :-(
What happens when a rock falls from space ...
Stick Men
For any reasonably complex bit of software, it's really, really hard. How many different reasons for the disabled menu could there be? Many. In some cases, very many. Once there are two reasons, that's too many for a tooltip.
Software isn't written like that because it takes enough time and effort to write software as it is. It could be written like that. Someone probably has written such a piece of software. But it you never saw it, because it probably never made it to market.
Which guy? The one who wrote the article? From TFA: "If cars modelled this behavior, you might drive your car from New York to Miami, run out of gas in Fort Lauderdale, 10 miles from your destination, and suddenly find yourself back in New York."
He thinks cars running out of gas display the _correct_ behavior, and he wishes computers were more like cars in that regard; you run out of energy and you stop where you are, not go back to where you started.
Obviously implementing such a system with a computer is hard, but it's a nice idea.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
For user interface elements which are not currently available (eg buttons, menus), you could combine the two approaches already outlined.
Have a visual cue that the operation is not currently available (eg. make the text on a menu or button grey) but still allow the user to click the item and get a message indicating why the operation is not available.
It is the window manager that must kept
the starting program in the correct virtual screen.
Sure the app doesn't know about virtual bla bla.
But the window manager know (for sure!)
and could unmap/remap the window as it wish.
When you hit a control to minimize a window,
or change virtual desktop, the window manager
is actually doing the work like map/unmap window.
Do the same with starting application.
The window manager know that mozilla is started
in desktop 1, the if the app request to be mapped
ti your screen and your are actually in desktop 2,
don't map it! or unmap it whatever so that it
is not in desktop 2.
(and don't switch me to desktop 1 like they
do recently. as bad as puting it in desktop 1
or popup/popunder banner)
my 2 cent
Exactly.
Which is why a trashcan that changes to an eject button is about the only GUI element you want to put on the desktop (or, in this case, the dock) for ejecting a disk.
Although, I suppose a file/folder that gets dropped on the unmount proxy object could turn into a boomerang and fly back where it was. A visual no-op.
Quoth the article:
... then it cites iTunes as an app that has this fixed.
People have been forced to learn bizarre and unusual ways of naming objects to force them to appear in the correct order. Such tricks as adding leading zeros and reversing the order of dates have become pandemic.
For dates: I habitually use ISO 8601 dates (e.g. 2004-12-01) in context other than sortable lists, since it's the most logical representation, and saves all sorts of international confusion.
As for iTunes, this raised a hollow laugh from me, since although I value the special treatment of "The" (Slimserver also does this, via a plugin, incidentally), I've had to prepend all my various artist compilation album titles with a "!", so that I can get them grouped in one place on the iPod.
Unless Apple creates a hardware lock that physically locks a device, preventing the thing from being removed, then there's not a lot to do there, except Apple making the OS more robust in screaming at people to tell the OS that the drive is to be disconnected before they physically remove it.
As an imminent problem this is around the corner as ultra-wideband Firewireless is approved and headed to market.
Lord knows I just want to pick up my iBook and go, not turn it on, find all the drives that are mounted, quit all the apps that are using them, then sleep the iBook and go.
This isn't impossible to handle - you'd need a virutal filesystem on top of the regular one, a filesystem that can handle synchronization, and some way for an app to know that its data access to a file is disallowed for the time being. If there was a framework for the app to serialize its unusable files to an OS-managed store, so much the better.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
For example, open up notepad on Windows XP. Note the view menu. There's one item, called 'status bar'. It's disabled (well it is on my machine). Why? I know what a status bar is, thank you very much. I know that the menu item should show me it. But it's disabled, WHY? No amount of help is going to get you there, because the help is always going to be context independent, you would have to list all the cases.
1. There's no reason help *must* be context independent. Help documents could easily contain commands that check the internal state of the application that started them to display suggestions based on how it is configured.
2. In any well designed application, there should only ever be one or maybe two reasons why a command item is disabled. This could easily be documented in the help for the command item. (It doesn't help that XP doesn't actually have any help at all for notepad's status bar, presumably because the facility was added after the help was written, and it did take me a while to discover that the reason it is disabled is because the status bar is for some reason incompatible with word wrap)