Messages to Nowhere

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What Quality Means

I was blown away when I read the first part of this talk given by Joel Spolsky at Yale, because it so totally nails problems I’ve seen at Microsoft and problems at my alma mater.
I was also reminded of Will Shipley’s excellent article on the limitations of unit-testing.

Crash Logs

Daniel Jalkut on how to get the most out of crash logs. It’s good advice.
Actually I do have one big issue with the article:
If there’s one behavior of your application that you should focus on eliminating, it’s the behavior of crashing. Above all other “nuisances,” this is the one that is absolutely unacceptable.
But preserving someone’s [...]

How Fast Do People Type?

Less than half the population of the world has the manual dexterity to wiggle their fingers at the speed of 50 words per minute or better.
–Dr. Alan Lloyd, seminal typing instructor.
Computer professionals often seem to have unrealistically high expectations of what the “average” typist can do. For example, according to this Wikipedia article (as of [...]

Hick’s Law

I do not put much faith in Hick’s Law. I’ve seen it misapplied and drastically misinterpreted. Its limits, and edge-cases, are not widely known. I am convinced that it is generally not a dominant factor, even when it is relevant. I don’t agree with many design choices it is used to justify. In [...]

Design Process: Current Location “Headline”

This is a bit of the design process behind one line of one settings panel inside IMLocation.
The “Locations” panel controls everything having to do with to locations. The pane’s “headline”, outlined in red, shows what is assumed to be the current location.

It reads like “Your current location is home”. It does not say [...]

When Computers Kill: Radiation Overdose

I was watching BBC News on EyeTV this morning, and caught the tail end of a horrific story about hundreds of French patients who received crippling, and sometimes fatal, overdoses of radiation.
Earlier this year, a major scandal erupted in France when it was discovered that between 1989 and 2006, two radiotherapy units had accidentally given [...]

MacOSX Redesign: Feedback for “Hold Keys”

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Assert Outlet Connections

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Better AppleScript Through Expressions

When writing a short AppleScript to complete a specific task, do not write a procedure that checks if A exists, then operates on it if it does. Instead, write an expression that operates on A, and ignore any exceptions caused by A not existing. Surrounding the statement in a try-block will ignore any [...]