Lazycoder

XSLT debugging in Visual Studio 2005

Debugging XSLT: “Hidden in the numerous debugging features of Visual Studio 2005 is an XSLT debugger.”

(Via K. Scott Allen.)

Wow, I’ll have to try this out. If they would include a RegExp debugger I’d almost take back some of the nasty things I’ve said about them for VS 2003.

Common usage of icons

Microsoft Team RSS Blog : The orange icon…: “Our goal is to make sure that the icon is something that is understandable by all of our users: novice, advanced, developer, business, international, etc.”

If you have to explain what the icon means, your icon isn’t descriptive enough. Also, if people have to think too long about your icon, they aren’t going to use it. I’m confronted by horrible icon choices in the elevator all the time. Especially when I see someone running towards the door and I want to hold it for them. I’m confronted with two icons.

<|>

and

>|<

So I have to stop and figure out which way the little arrows are going, which is usually enough time to allow the doors to shut and me to feel bad about not having held them. While two buttons marked “Close” and “Open” don’t take long for me to process. The shorter amount of time to process means that I press the correct button and get to hold the door for whatever PhD or Noble Prize winner is trying to get on the elevator with me. Other times I end up pressing the alarm button like an idiot.

Think about stuff like that when you are designing icons. It’s nice to have a stylistic representation of whatever concept you are trying to convey (“See the broken circle represents the openness of the system, meaning the user can now ‘open’ a file”). But the main principle of Interface Darwinism still holds. If people can’t figure out your interface, no matter how pretty it is, they aren’t going to use it.

My Red Cross drive is over

Well, September is over and I’m going to donate all of my adsense revenue for the month to the Red Cross. We did pretty good, not quite as much as my personal donation but every little bit helps. I’m going to keep one Red Cross banner up for a while. The rest will be going back to Adsense banners.

Installing apps on Windows is the problem

Installing client applications isn’t the problem, IMO, it’s installing client apps on Windows.

Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger: “Well, just think that if you needed to install a piece of software just to read a new blog. Wouldn’t that be frustrating? Yes. So, having things available in a ‘no install’ way is very important, and very cool.”

I think the biggest problem is with how installing Windows applications works currently. That’s where a lot of the cruft in Windows installs comes from. How many times have you had a dialog box pop up and tell you that the install program is trying to overwrite a newer file? How many times have you said “keep the newer file” or “overwrite the newer file” and crossed your fingers? I haven’t had any problems installing applications on OS X. .NET is a big step in the right direction as far as solving the install problems on Windows.

Lets face it, the reason that people like web apps is because they don’t like to have to reinstall their Windows apps everytime that they have to re-install Windows. It’s an extension of the whole “OS on one partition, data on another partition” solution. If the primary applications you use aren’t even installed on the system, who cares if you have to re-install. I successfully upgraded my OS X install from Panther to Tiger without having to wipe my partition. I upgraded Ubuntu in the same fashion. Back when I was running Mandrake Linux on two machines at home, I was able to upgrade them through two installs without having to wipe out the installs and start from scratch. I’d say 80% of my application installs on OS X consist of mounting the disk image and drag-dropping the application into my “Applications” folder. Although in truth, I could drop it anywhere or even run it directly from the disk image itself. I can’t think of too many Windows applications I can do that with. They all involve a wizard and file copies of DLLs. Who knows if they are system DLLs or just important to other applications?

When they fix installation under Windows, more people will see the value in client side applications.

908 lines

Writeboard: The 4th 37signals’ application on Rails: “The code underneath is currently 908 lines, according to ‘rake stats’”

(Via Riding Rails.)

Keep this in mind the next time you are writing a lot of boilerplate connection code in your non-RoR based application.