Software As She’s Developed

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, […]

[Read more →]

What manner of 19th century public domain dicitonaries are packaged with 21st century software? For Montogomery Burns, these word lists would be just spifflicastic, but maybe not for the average citizen. I just installed Thunderbird 1.5RC1, keen to check out the spell-check. Neither “blog” and “podcast” were recognised as valid words, despite one of the other […]

[Read more →]

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 […]

[Read more →]

Currently trying to delete about 50 playlists on Rhythmbox. (Rhythmbox doesn’t yet have podcast-friendly features like sorting by date, so I end up creating a daily playlist via a bashpodder hack, leading to numerous playlists). The program’s nice overall, but deleting the playlists is a bit slow. I’m manually navigating to each item, right-clicking to open […]

[Read more →]