Software As She’s Developed

Poking fun at hollywood depictions of computing is an old favourite on the net - compilations of dumb computing scenes outshadow even mentions of anomalies in the star trek universe. Meet The Hollywood Operating System, you know it well: The Hollywood operating system, or Hollywood OS, refers to any fictional computer operating system clichéd in movies […]

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I’m constantly amazed at the amount of documentation people are inclined to create without including a single example. Man pages that devote pages worth of command-line options, flags, grammar, caveats, historical anecdotes, and NOT A SINGLE EXAMPLE. Textbooks that devote pages to a particular API, then expose it all in one monolithic program. Countless reference documentation on HTML […]

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I didn't ever expect to get excited about how a framework handles keywords, but Rails just impressed me big-time. When I tried to create a model named "Activity", Rails told me it was reserved and then came back with a list of thesaurus terms that might be used instead!. That's not just opinionated software, it's [...]

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Sound Thinking Where's that sound coming from? An app inside my box? Is it ITunes on the desktop Or YouTube in the 'Fox? A Skyper shouting at me? Or Pandora playing faves? Media Player come to life? Hmmm ... Real with recent saves? A podcast I'm preparing? A vidcast made for nerds? Nope, it seems to be this picture, It says a thousand words! Huh? I started writing the [...]

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Setting up a new Windows PC today and not loving the browser warnings. The messages, as I recall them: "You are about to submit the form. It's dangerous.", "You're going to leave the page. It's dangerous.", "This page is encrypted. It's dangerous.", "This page is not encrypted. It's dangerous.", "This is H20. It's dangerous." So my question [...]

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Someone sent Don Norman a critique implying that a machine was more usable because it contained only one button. His response is interesting: Nice story, but wrong. Fewer buttons do not necessarily mean easier use ... When assessing simplicity, don't get all hung up on the number of buttons. Look at the whole picture: more is [...]

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I was wrong, the third character is apparently a nine. There ought to be a Captcha gallery/blog for all these. Apparently I'm not the only one who feels that way. Oh well, blame the spammers. But more to the point, what's up with this Captcha brought to you by the letters "A...F"???? Hex captcha? Hey, why bother [...]

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Matt @ 37Signals discusses new countdowns being used at pedestrian crossings (crosswalks). Did you ever count how many redundant messages are available at a pedestrian crossing? Good, let's be sad together and count them, then. At a workshop one time, various attendees from different countries came up with a list of cues, something like the [...]

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Uh, thanks for the heads-up. Reminds me of the presentation on user attention at Interact 2001, where the laptop suddenly interrupted proceedings with that legendary message, "You're computer is now fully charged". And, by way of contrast, how to write good error messages: tell the user what happened, explain the consequences if it's not obvious, [...]

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Don Norman questions the conventional wisdom on Google: Anybody can make a simple-looking interface if the system only does one thing. If you want to do one of the many other things Google is able to do, oops, first you have to figure out how to find it, then you have to figure out [...]

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