Yesterday, I touched on my ennui with things pertaining to life, and one of those things is blogging topics. I have been having a helluva time coming up with good things to blog about that interest me and others. Sure, I could prattle on about my day, but that gets boring. Let's face it, I'm not that terribly interesting. ;-) So I'm trying to come up with some ideas on things to blog about. But since this blog is just as much for you as it is for me, I'd like some feedback on what things you'd find interesting. What
August 2006 Archives
Lately, I've been feeling like I'm burnt out on extraneous projects. For instance, I've not really done much with the Windows Functionality Suite since the last release and the GDI+ project has stalled on the writing documentation aspect of things. But at the same time, I yearn for fun projects to work on. However, once I find one, I find that I have a hard time getting the energy to start on it. I thought that a two-week vacation with Lis would jump-start me again, but it doesn't seem to have done so. I'm excited by the prospect of releasing
Brandon asked this question in my last blog entry, and it's a very sensible question to ask. Is the Ribbon general purpose enough, and a sound enough UI pattern to justify turning it into a standard for Windows? For those of you who don't know, the "ribbon" is a new UI concept that's being introduced in the Office 2007 suite of applications. It looks like this: The ribbon is really just an alternative view for a menu bar. It shows you the same information as the menu bar would, in generally the same fashion. The difference is that the ribbon
So as I promised earlier, I'm going to give you a sneak peek at Word 2007's new UI and what my personal impressions of it are. I must say that when I first opened Word up, I thought, "damn... another horribly skinned user interface. Oh goodie." I really was surprised by the drastic UI changes that Microsoft had made. But, I was also determined to give it a shot and see how it worked for my needs. After having used it a fair amount over the last few days, I must admit that I rather much like the new version
I got up at 9am this morning and started planting trees. I didn't get done until about 2:30 or so. But hey, the price was right: free. George and Nancy had to put in a parking lot in one of their rentals near the campus, so a bunch of the neighbors got together and re-planted the trees which came from there. I got a really huge willow tree, a decent sized shrub, a tiny basswood and a huge ornametal something-or-other. I also helped plant almost 30 lilacs, another willow and a maple tree in various neighbor's yards. It's been a
Ok, fair is fair. I went on a rampage about what things bother me about Apple's user interface (and in the process, I've seen the power of Mac bigots in large numbers. lol). Now it's time for me to bash the Windows user interface for the stupid things that it does. Something tells me that the general reaction from my blog readers won't be to inundate me with 200+ comments telling me I need to get laid... Hiding keyboard mnemonics until the user presses the Alt key has got to be one of the more stupid things you can do.
After a very hectic past two weeks, I think I'm back in the saddle again. Lis went back to Austin this morning, which sucks. I miss her already. :-( But this does mean that my vacation is winding up, and I should be back on a more regular schedule for work, blogging and life in general. That girl is a whirlwind, I tell ya! We went to see Talladega Nights last night and it was a very funny movie. We were both quoting it on the way down to the airport this morning, so it means we must have liked
I've lived in Minnesota for a long time now (over twenty years) and I saw something with Lis tonight that I've never seen in all of my years. A tiger salamander. And not just one, but TWO! Lis and I were out collecting insects for her entyomology entomology class at Kiffmeyer Park in St Augusta. We got a new wasp, and some other interesting insects. On the way back to the truck, I started overturning the railroad ties they use to cordon off the parking lot. After about ten logs, I spotted this strange looking thing half-buried in the rot.
One interesting phenomenon I've been seeing lately is people new to REALbasic jumping right in and starting out with the advanced topics before getting a solid footing. I'm not certain what causes people to want to do this, but when you do it, you're not doing yourself any favors. For instance, I've seen a number of people asking questions about how to do various low-level declares. Ok, that's not strange and good for them! However, I find out a number of posts into the discussion that a major source of confusion for the user is with datatypes. Like how the
I'm back, didja miss me? ;-) On Monday, Lis and I spent a good part of the day packing and planning for our camping trip up to Itasca State Park. We ended up doing pretty well, though we did end up forgetting a few items mostly because I figured there'd be a burn-ban up there, but there wasn't. On Tuesday morning, we got up, finished packing the truck, and headed out. We took Hwy 10 to Hwy 71 as our route to get up there, and it was a very pretty drive. It was also a relatively easy one since
One of the new concepts in Vista is an updated and extended version of the old MsgBox dialog. Vista now comes with someone called Task Dialogs which provide the user with a different, more up-to-date user interface. Basically, the old MsgBox API was there for quick and dirty messages, but people ended up using it for actual user interaction. So Microsoft embraced the idea and you now have a uniform way to interact with the user using a set of new APIs. Now you can use this new set of APIs in REALbasic using declares. A task dialog allows you
She got in safe and sound at about 10am this morning. Most of her luggage made it, but her two insect net poles didn't, unfortunately. So we're hoping Northwest can locate them and get them to the house pretty quick. She's taking a nap right now because she had to be awake around 4am this morning. However, I would like to note that Lis got a really good score on her GRE, and her 50-page capstone thesis is done too! So we're going to go out tonight to celebrate the occasion after she wakes up from her nap. :-) Yay!
Programmers create software that is designed to be used by people. However, people come in all shapes and sizes, and vary drastically from one another. So it's very difficult to create a piece of software that can be used by everyone -- yet that is usually the goal when creating an application. UI designers have to walk a fine line between giving the user a ton of control, and having the software hold the user's hand. For instance, there are times when you are really hungry for a cake. You can certainly go to the store, get cake flour, sugar,
I'm so excited! Lis gets here on Friday! :-) I'm taking off in the morning to go down to the Cities to pick her up. We'll spend the rest of the day recovering from her flight. The weekend is going to be spent catching bugs (and snakes, perhaps) and just chillin. Tue and Wed we're going to be going camping up at Itasca state park, and then head over to Grand Forks and Fargo to check out some grad schools for Lis. It's going to be an awesome trip, and I'm super stoked. :-) She'll be moving up here pretty
RB2006r3 has more to it than just some fancy visual overhauls. MenuItems can now have icons associated with them. You can use non-printable characters for menu item shortcuts. You are no longer required to have Ctrl in the menu item shortcut (so, for instance, you can have F1 instead of being forced to use Ctrl+F1). A Currency data type SpecialFolder got a much-needed new addition to get the CurrentWorkingDirectory And that's just framework stuff. Now, granted, the vast majority of the changes for this release were centered around the user experience within the IDE. So there is tons of new
Ok, so here's a historical trick which some of you may find handy every once in a while. In 5.5 and before, it was impossible on Windows to open up a second instance of the IDE. But this was frustrating since there were times when you'd want multiple projects open at the same time. However, this limitation was installed for a reason -- the IDE wasn't multi-project safe by any stretch of the imagination, and you could horribly corrupt things (including your code) if you had multiple instances of the IDE open. That being said, there may be times when
I'm rather underwhelmed. Granted, some of the stuff is sexy, but not exactly unexpected, such as the upgraded hardware. However, in terms of innovation, I really don't see much happening on that front. There's plenty of "catch-up", some of it interesting to me, other parts of it not so much. But I'm quite surprised at the lack of gusto. I think the thing which I am most excited about personally are the advances in accessibility (though this falls under the "catch-up" category for me). It's good to see Apple is finally getting it. Perhaps this will be the piece that
Special thanks goes out to Bob Rau for teaching me this tidbit of information. Not all serial devices behave properly with the SetBreak and ClearBreak commands. For instance, the FTDI driver (at least for OS X) will only send out a short break for a little less than .1 seconds and ignores the ClearBreak command. Other drivers aren't so assuming, and will continue the break until you call ClearBreak. And I believe that still others won't do a break at all. So how do you overcome this driver-specific behavior? Why, by generating your own break, of course. Set your serial
Boy, time flies! I got up at the ungodly hour of 7am on Saturday because dad wanted to come work on the deck instead of going fishing (which shocked me). I don't deal well with mornings, so I wasn't on my A-game for deck building. ;-) But between the two of us, we got a ton of work done. 3/4 of the spindles were attached, the stair stringers were put up and stairs attached, and by golly, it looked like a deck! We cut off about 4pm, and I went inside to sleep. At about 7, Andrea called me up
So one of the things I like to do on occasion is check my referrer logs to see how people find my site. Every once in a while, I'll find people discussing it on some forum or another, or people arriving from comments I've left on others blogs. It's just a fun little thing. But lately, as in within the last month, I've noticed that the vast majority of the items in my referrer logs are spam links. Who the hell does referrer log spam? I mean, come on, honestly. The only people in the world dumb enough to actually
So a few days ago, I posted my first impressions of the new Vista July CTP, and now that I've been using it as my main desktop for the last while, I'd like to talk about my experience. On the whole, it's still been a good one. However, I've run into a handful of bugs which only daily usage can display. And they are rather annoying. The first bug that I noticed was that accessing my firewire drive was dog slow. It'd take over a full minute to access the drive after it had spun down. After it was warmed
Since Windows 95, Microsoft has included APIs for working with a set of objects called "App Bars." An app bar is a window that is docked to one edge of the screen, and constitutes area which nothing else can reside in. They can be set to automatically show and hide, be always on top, etc. You've used an app bar yourself, probably without ever even thinking about it: the task bar is an app bar. It's very rare that you'd ever want to use one of these constructs since they've a very invasive piece of user interface. When you install
Yesterday, I made some cryptic comments referring to accessibility of window widgets on the Mac compared to on Windows which Adam and Seth promptly asked me to expound on what I was talking about. Instead of leaving a short comment, I decided I'd make a new entry about it. Before we begin, I want to get one thing clear. I picked the Mac as an example because it's a classic mistake and one which I constantly notice when I'm on that platform. But Apple isn't the only one getting this sort of thing wrong. The purpose to using colors in
Wow. While I thought Beta 2 was a large step backwards, I think the July CTP is a gigantic leap forwards. This OS is certainly well on its way to being prime time. I've been using it for about half a day now, and I've only reported two issues (one of which is annoying and I can imagine it being fixed, the other is most likely a bug with Trillian), neither of which are terrible. So I've decided that I'm going to try to make the switch. I've moved most of my dev stuff over to the Vista partition and
