lex parsimoniae

They finally made my hover-screen

I did a little double-take last week as I was leafing through my RSS feeds.  Engadget had a story about a touchscreen that tracks a hovering finger: So what? About two and a half years ago, I wrote an article about usability where I ran into this exact problem while using a touch-screen phone. I’m [...]

Almost a great idea

Here’s an example of a good idea gone wrong.  I saw a link for a web site that exists solely to advance openness in government.  How cool is that? I clicked around for a bit, eventually reaching a place where I was supposed to be able to submit an idea for government, where it would [...]

How long??

I love these dialog boxes: How hard, exactly, would it be to figure out that a process that had been running at a rate of “x” had suddenly dropped to an entirely unreasonable speed — so slow, for instance, that perhaps it had actually stopped, and thus, would very likely either fail or resume operating [...]

Here’s a clue that your API stinks

I was doing some development recently using Rocky Lhotka’s excellent CSLA framework.  This framework lets you easily connect multiple tiers of an application with HTTP Web Services, WCF, Remoting, or Enterprise Services (you can even change transports just by changing your config files – cool!).  In my case, I was using WFC, and I had occasion to change a value in the config file.

The next thing you know, i was looking at this error box.

On Tooltips and Affordances

I just got a new smartphone – a T-Mobile Wing, in fact, and I like it a lot.  I’ve never used Windows Mobile for any extended length of time, though, so I’m still learning a few things.  This morning, while trying to figure out what a button did, I caught myself doing something astounding, and I gained a whole new appreciation of affordances.

This phone, if you’re not familiar, is a touch-screen smartphone with a slide-out keyboard, so if I’m doing anything remotely complicated, I’m usually using a stylus to point to the screen.  This is sort of interesting all by itself, because in many ways the stylus acts as an interface metaphor for a mouse, which is, in many ways, acting as an interface metaphor for a finger.  It’s no wonder parts of the UI are screwed up!