Daring Fireball: “Once software starts down this path of guessing what it is the user
is trying to do, and then doing something special based on that
guess, it must guess correctly nearly every time, because the times
when it guesses wrong are so annoying that they far outweigh the
extra convenience of the times when it guesses right.”
It’s easy to start to concoct ideas about clever things that your software could automatically do, but this is a useful rule of thumb: If you can’t get it right almost all of the time, don’t. Focus on making it easy for users to know exactly what will happen instead.
Every once in a while you stumble upon something in your RSS reader that really moves you. This is one of those moments. I’d say something insightful if I had the words.
Great news. I’m a big fan. Incidentally, I, too found great inspiration in Jobs’ commencement address, though I only read the transcript, never heard or watched it. I’m downloading the video now - John links to the audio version, but there’s a
Durwood Douche’s “Everybody’s F*ing But Me” and Chicago’s “Saturday In the Park” will forever remind me of the early days of the podcasting. Who else remembers that episode? Or the one where some dude drove up to Adam Curry on the highway while Adam was recording and the dude was listening to the source code. What a moment.
I remember clearly the excitement of standing in my kitchen listening to Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code, or his Trade Secrets with Dave Winer, with a clear feeling that this was something new and fresh, a voice previously unheard. It was a good time. I’m listening to Saturday In the Park now, getting that warm and fuzzy feeling ”;->”
I finally got my MacBook Pro yesterday—oh, the pain of seeing it sitting in a hub in Amsterdam for almost a week. But it’s here now. And it’s everything I was hoping for. I just love how fast the Quicksilver search is, and how fast the Cmd-T and Cmd-Shift-T menus in TextMate are. Not to speak of serving development web pages and running test suites. And the brightness of the screen, the built-in camera, and all the rest of it.
The only glitch I’ve experienced is that it will lock up for a second or two every once in a while, which is really annoying. I searched a little, and it seems I’m not alone—that’s an immense relief to know that it wasn’t something I broke while installing the RAM or what have you.
Now if only one could count on Apple to acknowledge and fix problems, but that’s probably asking too much.
Someone broke into our car tonight. Smashed the window in the passenger seat. Nothing’s missing, not even the radio, but the glove compartment was open and stuff was taken out. My theory is they noticed the holder for the GPS and were hoping that the GPS was in there. But it wasn’t, and now the poor bastard is left still in need of whatever drug he or she is on, and I’m left with a car that needs to go back to the repair shop, from which I picked it up just yesterday. Bah.
Note to self: Leave the car with the glove compartment open so drug addicts can see that there’s nothing there, so they can spare both themselves and me the trouble.
Christina pointed me to the slides from Dan Brown’s presentation at the 2006 IA Summit. There are some good thinking there.
I’ve certainly been there myself, building neat little systems that force people to go through the fixed steps in an idealized model of how things get done, and ending up spending way too much time figuring out how to circumvent the system.
I noticed a nice little twist on the in-place-editor in the new Google Calendar, namely that it adds a small 3D-style border to the hover effect, which makes it look more like an input field. See the image on the right: The first is how the data looks, the second is on mouse-over, and the third is after the field is clicked. Very nice touch.
Then, after you’ve made changes, if you hit Esc, it’ll take you back to the calendar view, but only after having given you the lightbox-style warning popup shown on the right, while dimming the page in the background. I’m not convinced it adds enough value to justify the additional weight over the normal Javascript confirm(), but it does look nicer.
To some people, Easter is a religious Holiday. To me, Easter is what stands between me and my MacBook Pro ”;->”
Ajaxian: “However, does it make sense to click on a category, see a “loading”message, and then re-render in the same page? I don’t really think so. “
This is just the 2006 version of frames, with all the problems that frames get you: Loss of the address bar, and loss of search engine visibility. In one app I’m building, I scaled back my use of Ajax, so distinct objects (products in a shop is a good example) has separate URLs.
Just because you can doesn’t mean that you should. And adding a separate permalink mechanism doesn’t solve the problem, either, because now you have to learn a new way to produce a link for each site you visit, instead of the tried-and-true way. And there’s no keyboard shortcut. With the address bar, Cmd-L, Cmd-A, Cmd-C, Cmd-TAB, Cmd-V copies and pastes the URL into another application, and is already firmly entrenched in my tactile memory.
Yay! Today is warm and sunny. It seems like we survived another winter. Congrats to all who made it with their mental health intact!
