You're right, a cogntive psychologist is exactly what is need, though it's rare to be able to get that. UI designers should know some of the principles of it, though.
Perhaps I am confusing them. Both graphic designers and artists are typically only concerned with output-only presentation of static material. UI designers have to be concerned with that plus the two-way interaction, input and output, between information that is constantly changing.
Sometimes it's better to have radio box to communicate a two-state switch, when the idea doesn't have an obvious opposite. Your example of "enable" does has an obvious opposite. Sometimes you need the extra word to describe what the heck that other state is.
And graphic designers are not always good UI designers. They can make usually something pretty, but in most cases they don't know how to design interacting with information.
Whenever you see a crappy website squeezed into a unresizable 600x480 Flash window, with hand-made scrollbars that don't repeat when you hold down or do page-up/page-down, you can thank some stupid graphic designer who does not understand usability. You just know they sat there thinking Hey, my cool new scrollbars are have this awesome theme with brushed metal, it's perfect! and never actually try to use the damn thing the read the damn text.
Your graphic designer will not be able to make logical groupings of related settings. They'll just put it where it's prettiest. All the while insisting it must be color X or font Y, white blatantly ignoring the user's settings. Never mind the user set it that way because they hate color X or can't even read font Y.
Graphic designers are good for some UI bits, but heaven's sake, let them draw the icons, not decide what the icons are.
Yes, the format should be open, yes, MS should stop changing it, yes, they should set the defaults for compataiblity instead of profitability, but no, you can read docs without buying Word!
I'm tired of people saying I shouldn't have to pay to read Word docs. A free
viewer for Word files has been available for years.
I discovered this years ago during 95 to 97 upgrade fiasco, where the file formats were incompatible. Everyone else upgraded to 97 and I saw no reason to shell out the change for it.
In tinfoil hat mode: of course, it's probably intentional nobody has heard of it. How much would Word's sales be cut if OEMs (or even MS) installed the viewer on systems delivered without Word? I expect people get sent Word files and then automatically think, "hey, I need Word to see these", and then shell out the change to do so.
Re:Google-centric web design
on
In Google We Trust
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
use of is perfectly correct. what does it have to do with your pagerank score?
Indirectly, it does. According to some articles I've read (this month's Maximum PC, for example), PageRank will consider the presentation (bold, italic, font size, etc) of a word when assigning a weight to it. Think of it, sometimes it's a hint of how important a word is, and rating importance is what Google is all about.
However, if you read your Lakos, you can vastly reduce the coupling with some fairly simple techniques. He calls this insulation, which is a physical encapsulation that the parts can vary indepedently without rebuilds. (Logical encapsulation is great, but it doesn't go all the way: you still have to recompile every user of a class when a private member changes.)
It's pretty straightforward, just time consuming, to refactor software so that it's coupling is far less. Like all real refactoring, you're not changing the meanig of any code, just applying mechanical transformations to so that it's more flexible.
Of course, not everything can be perfectly insulated from everything else. But my experience is when you don't pay attention to insulation, you wind up with a whole lot of unnecessary dependencies. These either 1) do nothing but make recompiles longer or 2) actively hurt when someone unwittingly turns it into a real dependency later, increasing the complexity of the system as a whole.
I think the bottom line of intellectual property is indeed that, or more accurately, the belief that statement is true.
What is in dispute is that a lot of people believe it to be totally true. Most people aren't so far-reaching to think that their own creative work should someday be public property for the good of all. Sure, it's okay for other people's stuff to be public-domain. It's great that we can freely embed quotes of Beethoven's Ninth in all sorts of music scores without paying Beethoven's 900,000 descendents. But the other way around? No, that's mine! You can't touch it.
This is why I really respect guys like John Carmack, who (aside from being a freaking genius) can make an honest buck from their "IP" and still let the public benefit before it's completely obsolete or passed from memory.
Everyone likes Mozilla's tabbed browsing, right? Well, that's just another form of MDI. It's windows-within-windows, but done right.
What is evil is MS's old brain-dead MDI where you have a blank useless desktop with icons on top of it that can be hidden. Tabbed browsing just this trimmed of some extra features.
What Mozilla does also right is that the whole SDI/MDI model not an either-or choice anymore. Want all pages in different windows? Fine. Want all pages in one window? Fine. Wants some pages in some windows? Fine. I showed Mozilla to various family members who usually use computers, and they all immediately love tabbed browsing.
MS doesn't seems to understand which is better. They keep going back and forth between SDI and MDI when the answer is both!
Wasn't there a song about this?
on
SCOoby Snacks
·
· Score: 2, Funny
A few years ago? Running around, robbing banks, all whacked on Scooby Snacks? How appropriate. I think the group was Fun-Loving Criminals, which is appropriate, too, except maybe for the fun-loving part.
Most ads slip by? Using the latest version of Privoxy, it's rare that I see any ads at all, even when going to new sites I haven't visited before. I can't remember the last time I've manually added anything to the blocker file, other than whitelisting a new shopping site for cookies.
Exactly. While you're at it, the next time someone asks you to pass the salt, open the bottom, dump the salt out in your hand, and then pass them a pile of salt.
If I go to a restaurant that says "unlimited salad bar!", and they decide that unlimited really means "we're open 24 hours a day", or "you can stay as long as you like!" then that's blatant false advertising.
I used to work in domain-intense software (air traffic control) and we really need domain experts. People who knew both ATC and computers were highly prized.
I think your goal should be combining your interests. You don't want to be VB code monkey making $20,000/year at this stage in your life. You might be happy desigining software that interfaces with hardware for the medical industry. That is a killer combination that very few people have. Basically, don't "throw away" what you've done so far.
Consider jumping into a master's program in CS at a quality night school. You have a good secure job with respect, one that most people here would envy. You can keep your job while getting your degree. You might need to catch up on few undergrad-level CS or math courses first. Some bad news: since the courses are in a different field, it won't be tax-deductible except for some very small exceptions.
Once you feel you have acquired enough knowledge about computers -- which is not necessarily the degree -- go out and scout places you want to work. Only take the job when you know you would love it, and keep your old one until then. I would bet medical software or hardware companies would be very interested.
Quick, someone tally up all the phone numbers in the US and get an average. I want to know how much to charge next time some idiot in a store wants to know.
This is good! Mine starts with 978. That's pretty pretty high. I bet it's far away from the average and worth a lot!
When you have Finale version X, and your friend has Finale version X+1, and you want to exchange scores so you can both edit them...
...and then you realize Finale has no "save as Finale X-1" feature! So you shell out $150 to upgrade.
You don't write the XML yourself, the program just saves it in that format for you. The only difference you see is that you can now loading scores from program X into program Y.
Ideally, a commercial score-writing software program could store your data in MusicXML and output, if necessary, to a variety of formats, including PDF.
Uh, ideally they already do. My point is not that MusicXML is useless, but this:
I have a score on the web that I want people to see.
Given a choice of posting a score on the web, I can: Post in PDF, which looks perfect and requires a freely-accessible viewer that almost everybody already has.
Or post it in MusicXML, which almost nobody can view. What am I going to choose?
Good PDF scores use font embedding. Since the truetype fonts are embedded, they remain very small. Take a look at the ones on my website for an example. The PDFs are astoundingly small -- about the size of the corresponsing corresponding.ETF file, which is ASCII-encoded, just like an XML data file would be! And that's just with ps2pdf.com -- Acrobat does even better.
Example: on my site, Moanin' in (the program's own) ETF format is 305K. The PDF is 299K. If you look at the innards of the ETF, you'll realize it's awfully close what an XML-style data format would be. The first example is a 15-page score with 16 staves, and it's less than a meg!
So MusicXML would scale better than PDFs exactly how?
But for collaboration across multiple programs, of course you need some common editable format.
Viewing something on the web, which is the point of a browser plugin usually isn't for editing and collaboration. If I want people to be able to see and print my scores with ease, I put up a PDF, and nearly everyone can read it. If I put it up in MusicXML format, then they have to go get some random plugin, if one exists for free.
I'm not saving MusicXML would not be useful for saving as a data format. I'm all for it! I'm saying we already have a good enough technology for viewing and printing documents over the web.
So I put my scores up in PDF; for free with ps2pdf.com. You can print them, they look fine, and it already works. Today.
I can't imagine why you'd need "browser support" for this, as opposed to PDF. PDF already does all the proper font embedding, as music notation programs rely heavily on customized fonts. Rendering music is incredibly complex, way more so than text.
I do my scores in PDF, if I want people to be able to read and print them. Yeah, the PDF is a bit ugly on screen because of Finale's strange linestroke style, but it prints out just fine. I also use ps2pdf.com, the scores do look much better with Acrobat.
(Note all of my more complex scores are not on the web. I usually only print out copies for those I give out or sell to, and rarely send out the electronic masters. People might photocopy my scores, but I'm sure not going to make it any easier for them.)
Now, if someone wants to play back the score, or edit it, then they need the actual.MUS (or.ETF) file from Finale. The only time I've ever needed this when collaborating on a score with a friend over email. It's really difficult because there's no way to merge changes or diff them.
Saving to this format would be handy, because I've been compelled to upgrade a few times when working with someone who has a newer version of Finale than I do. Unlike Word, my friend cannot simply say "Save As..." and select an older file version!
But unless they retrofit it into older versions of Finale, oh well...
Except he's writing an article in an informal style about resumes, not a resume in a formal style. (And no, I can't be bothered to find the accented E key.)
Come on, even your post has sentence fragments. That's informal, conversational writing.
I experimented with PGP for a while, and then decided against signing everything. Why?
Would you record everything you even spoke, sign an affidavit that you actually said it, get it notarized, and then hand it off to somebody else for ownership?
Here's a hint: if someone wants you to sign something, it's because they want to use it against you if they think things go wrong. Why give them all the help they need?
You "legally" sign important things like checks, contracts, loans, etc. I'm not going to, by default, legally sign everything I ever write in email... any more than I'm going to legally sign a note to "pick up groceries on your way home".
FWIW, Office 2000 is "good enough" for just about everyone. I have no need or desire to upgrade, ever. If people send me documents that it will not open, I'll ask them to resend in a down-version copy.
This has happened to me with: Word 6.0, Word 95, Word 97 and now Word 2000. Eventually, everyone is sending you files in version X+1, when all you have is X, and you get sick of asking people to resend in a lower version. The response is usually: "Uh, what's a file format?".
You can usually work around it by downloading and using a Word file viewer, but good luck if you need to make changes...
Has nothing to do with X's implementation of anything. X is not a toolkit. X is more akin to the low-level drawing primitives of Windows (GDI) than the Windows GUI controls. But Windows and the toolkit have always been bundled together. The result is that, on Windows, when you need a text widget, you are likely to use the Windows text control, because it's there. Nothing stops you from writing your own crappy nonstandard text widget on Windows, and there are plenty of examples of this. It's just far less common since, by definition, if you have Windows, you have the common controls.
It has everything to do with that there is no standard UI toolkit for X. Qt does one thing, GTK another, Motif another way, Athena another way. Also consider your favorite app that has no toolkit like xterm or and you'll realize what a mess it is.
The only chance you have for consistency is to only use apps from a single toolkit. Then, hope the toolkit vendor implements what you like.
Congratulations, you just described secondary selection, and it's been in NEdit for years:
1. Highlight destination with left button (if just just want to insert text, skip this step)
2. With shift key down, drag-select source with middle mouse button
3. Let go: source text overwrites the destination text at the cursor, and the source is deleted.
(If you wanted a copy instead of a move, then you'd not use the Shift key.)
Slashdot Mirror
When he sells it for $800K in 10 years, yes, he will be absolutely ecstatic.
Perhaps I am confusing them. Both graphic designers and artists are typically only concerned with output-only presentation of static material. UI designers have to be concerned with that plus the two-way interaction, input and output, between information that is constantly changing.
And graphic designers are not always good UI designers. They can make usually something pretty, but in most cases they don't know how to design interacting with information.
Whenever you see a crappy website squeezed into a unresizable 600x480 Flash window, with hand-made scrollbars that don't repeat when you hold down or do page-up/page-down, you can thank some stupid graphic designer who does not understand usability. You just know they sat there thinking Hey, my cool new scrollbars are have this awesome theme with brushed metal, it's perfect! and never actually try to use the damn thing the read the damn text.
Your graphic designer will not be able to make logical groupings of related settings. They'll just put it where it's prettiest. All the while insisting it must be color X or font Y, white blatantly ignoring the user's settings. Never mind the user set it that way because they hate color X or can't even read font Y.
Graphic designers are good for some UI bits, but heaven's sake, let them draw the icons, not decide what the icons are.
I'm tired of people saying I shouldn't have to pay to read Word docs. A free viewer for Word files has been available for years.
I discovered this years ago during 95 to 97 upgrade fiasco, where the file formats were incompatible. Everyone else upgraded to 97 and I saw no reason to shell out the change for it.
In tinfoil hat mode: of course, it's probably intentional nobody has heard of it. How much would Word's sales be cut if OEMs (or even MS) installed the viewer on systems delivered without Word? I expect people get sent Word files and then automatically think, "hey, I need Word to see these", and then shell out the change to do so.
Indirectly, it does. According to some articles I've read (this month's Maximum PC, for example), PageRank will consider the presentation (bold, italic, font size, etc) of a word when assigning a weight to it. Think of it, sometimes it's a hint of how important a word is, and rating importance is what Google is all about.
(And before you accuse me of being greedy, I do contribute to open-source projects in my spare time.)
However, if you read your Lakos, you can vastly reduce the coupling with some fairly simple techniques. He calls this insulation, which is a physical encapsulation that the parts can vary indepedently without rebuilds. (Logical encapsulation is great, but it doesn't go all the way: you still have to recompile every user of a class when a private member changes.)
It's pretty straightforward, just time consuming, to refactor software so that it's coupling is far less. Like all real refactoring, you're not changing the meanig of any code, just applying mechanical transformations to so that it's more flexible.
Of course, not everything can be perfectly insulated from everything else. But my experience is when you don't pay attention to insulation, you wind up with a whole lot of unnecessary dependencies. These either 1) do nothing but make recompiles longer or 2) actively hurt when someone unwittingly turns it into a real dependency later, increasing the complexity of the system as a whole.
What is in dispute is that a lot of people believe it to be totally true. Most people aren't so far-reaching to think that their own creative work should someday be public property for the good of all. Sure, it's okay for other people's stuff to be public-domain. It's great that we can freely embed quotes of Beethoven's Ninth in all sorts of music scores without paying Beethoven's 900,000 descendents. But the other way around? No, that's mine! You can't touch it.
This is why I really respect guys like John Carmack, who (aside from being a freaking genius) can make an honest buck from their "IP" and still let the public benefit before it's completely obsolete or passed from memory.
Everyone likes Mozilla's tabbed browsing, right? Well, that's just another form of MDI. It's windows-within-windows, but done right.
What is evil is MS's old brain-dead MDI where you have a blank useless desktop with icons on top of it that can be hidden. Tabbed browsing just this trimmed of some extra features.
What Mozilla does also right is that the whole SDI/MDI model not an either-or choice anymore. Want all pages in different windows? Fine. Want all pages in one window? Fine. Wants some pages in some windows? Fine. I showed Mozilla to various family members who usually use computers, and they all immediately love tabbed browsing.
MS doesn't seems to understand which is better. They keep going back and forth between SDI and MDI when the answer is both!
A few years ago? Running around, robbing banks, all whacked on Scooby Snacks? How appropriate. I think the group was Fun-Loving Criminals, which is appropriate, too, except maybe for the fun-loving part.
Most ads slip by? Using the latest version of Privoxy, it's rare that I see any ads at all, even when going to new sites I haven't visited before. I can't remember the last time I've manually added anything to the blocker file, other than whitelisting a new shopping site for cookies.
Oh, you meant the salt shaker?
Someday, this will be illegal.
I think your goal should be combining your interests. You don't want to be VB code monkey making $20,000/year at this stage in your life. You might be happy desigining software that interfaces with hardware for the medical industry. That is a killer combination that very few people have. Basically, don't "throw away" what you've done so far.
Consider jumping into a master's program in CS at a quality night school. You have a good secure job with respect, one that most people here would envy. You can keep your job while getting your degree. You might need to catch up on few undergrad-level CS or math courses first. Some bad news: since the courses are in a different field, it won't be tax-deductible except for some very small exceptions.
Once you feel you have acquired enough knowledge about computers -- which is not necessarily the degree -- go out and scout places you want to work. Only take the job when you know you would love it, and keep your old one until then. I would bet medical software or hardware companies would be very interested.
This is good! Mine starts with 978. That's pretty pretty high. I bet it's far away from the average and worth a lot!
You don't write the XML yourself, the program just saves it in that format for you. The only difference you see is that you can now loading scores from program X into program Y.
Uh, ideally they already do. My point is not that MusicXML is useless, but this:
I have a score on the web that I want people to see.
Given a choice of posting a score on the web, I can: Post in PDF, which looks perfect and requires a freely-accessible viewer that almost everybody already has.
Or post it in MusicXML, which almost nobody can view. What am I going to choose?
Good PDF scores use font embedding. Since the truetype fonts are embedded, they remain very small. Take a look at the ones on my website for an example. The PDFs are astoundingly small -- about the size of the corresponsing corresponding .ETF file, which is ASCII-encoded, just like an XML data file would be! And that's just with ps2pdf.com -- Acrobat does even better.
Example: on my site, Moanin' in (the program's own) ETF format is 305K. The PDF is 299K. If you look at the innards of the ETF, you'll realize it's awfully close what an XML-style data format would be. The first example is a 15-page score with 16 staves, and it's less than a meg!
So MusicXML would scale better than PDFs exactly how?
But for collaboration across multiple programs, of course you need some common editable format.
Viewing something on the web, which is the point of a browser plugin usually isn't for editing and collaboration. If I want people to be able to see and print my scores with ease, I put up a PDF, and nearly everyone can read it. If I put it up in MusicXML format, then they have to go get some random plugin, if one exists for free.
I'm not saving MusicXML would not be useful for saving as a data format. I'm all for it! I'm saying we already have a good enough technology for viewing and printing documents over the web.
So I put my scores up in PDF; for free with ps2pdf.com. You can print them, they look fine, and it already works. Today.
I do my scores in PDF, if I want people to be able to read and print them. Yeah, the PDF is a bit ugly on screen because of Finale's strange linestroke style, but it prints out just fine. I also use ps2pdf.com, the scores do look much better with Acrobat.
(Note all of my more complex scores are not on the web. I usually only print out copies for those I give out or sell to, and rarely send out the electronic masters. People might photocopy my scores, but I'm sure not going to make it any easier for them.)
Now, if someone wants to play back the score, or edit it, then they need the actual .MUS (or .ETF) file from Finale. The only time I've ever needed this when collaborating on a score with a friend over email. It's really difficult because there's no way to merge changes or diff them.
Saving to this format would be handy, because I've been compelled to upgrade a few times when working with someone who has a newer version of Finale than I do. Unlike Word, my friend cannot simply say "Save As..." and select an older file version!
But unless they retrofit it into older versions of Finale, oh well...
And I thought you were going to tell us that he said "I ordered SPICE from my cable company"! Now I think of it, that would be a boner, wouldn't it?
Come on, even your post has sentence fragments. That's informal, conversational writing.
Would you record everything you even spoke, sign an affidavit that you actually said it, get it notarized, and then hand it off to somebody else for ownership?
Here's a hint: if someone wants you to sign something, it's because they want to use it against you if they think things go wrong. Why give them all the help they need?
You "legally" sign important things like checks, contracts, loans, etc. I'm not going to, by default, legally sign everything I ever write in email... any more than I'm going to legally sign a note to "pick up groceries on your way home".
This has happened to me with: Word 6.0, Word 95, Word 97 and now Word 2000. Eventually, everyone is sending you files in version X+1, when all you have is X, and you get sick of asking people to resend in a lower version. The response is usually: "Uh, what's a file format?".
You can usually work around it by downloading and using a Word file viewer, but good luck if you need to make changes...
It has everything to do with that there is no standard UI toolkit for X. Qt does one thing, GTK another, Motif another way, Athena another way. Also consider your favorite app that has no toolkit like xterm or and you'll realize what a mess it is.
The only chance you have for consistency is to only use apps from a single toolkit. Then, hope the toolkit vendor implements what you like.
1. Highlight destination with left button (if just just want to insert text, skip this step)
2. With shift key down, drag-select source with middle mouse button
3. Let go: source text overwrites the destination text at the cursor, and the source is deleted. (If you wanted a copy instead of a move, then you'd not use the Shift key.)