Messages to Nowhere

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NSWindow setResizable:

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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.

NSWorkspace Bug in - openFile: ?

EDITED TO ADD: I could reproduce this bug in a large project, but not isolate it in a smaller one. It is much likely for my code to have a bug then NSWorkspace. I’m still not 100% certain that this issue wasn’t my fault in some way I don’t understand. But no [...]

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 [...]

Useful MacOSX Terminal Commands

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Yes

Interesting, and useful tidbit:
Just a curiosity, but it happens that in a yes-no binary response test, the reaction time to select “no” is longer than for “yes.”
Source
This is worth investigating further, but tonight I’m bushed. If anyone has any more information, especially quantitative data, I’d love to hear it.

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 [...]