Another great article 2007 July 21
Posted by pethol in Development, Interactions, SharpWired.add a comment
Joel Spolsky linked to this article by Clay Shirky, A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy, which was surprisingly interesting and applicable in many many different contexts, such as Interaction Design and Entrepreneuring, and of course group psychology in general.
Shirky writes
Of the things you have to accept, the first is that you cannot completely separate technical and social issues. There are two attractive patterns. One says, we’ll handle technology over `here, we’ll do social issues there. We’ll have separate mailing lists with separate discussion groups, or we’ll have one track here and one track there. This doesn’t work. It’s never been stated more clearly than in the pair of documents called “LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction.” I can do no better than to point you to those documents.
I would say that this is one of the most central aspects of Interaction Design; one cannot separate the interaction from the technology that realizes the artifact. Much in the same way an architect cannot construct a material free house. It matters (no pun intended :-) what the house is built of and what we see and feel.
The main subject in the article, or talk really, is social software. Anyone who is about to think about such software should read the talk!
“A file error ocurred” 2007 July 3
Posted by pethol in Stuff.2 comments
So, yesterday I had the problem of converting an Office 2003 .doc file to the new Office 2007 .docx file format. It didn’t went to well, and as usual I wasn’t alone. But the traditional solution for handling tested word files; copy all and paste in new document, wasn’t working. What actually did work was this;
- I didn’t remove Word 2003 when I installed Office 2007 (smart as I am , oh yes!) and I had the compatibility pack for 2007 installed.
- I opened the .doc file in 2003 and saved as .docx (in 2003).
- I opened the new .docx file in 2007. Word said the file was opened in compatibility mode (ha!).
- Choose convert.
- Save.
No, all that’s left is
- ???
- $$$
Office 2007 is Pop-up hell 2007 July 2
Posted by pethol in Development, Interactions, SharpWired, WinWired.add a comment
The ribbon Gui is pretty nice for the new Office, but I’m really really surprised over how much pop-ups and small dialogs that are still there. More and more programs seems to find new and improved ways of dealing with info and questions that were previously solved by message boxes, i.e. Firefox and IE7. And when it comes to small dialogs, I think Paint.Net is really cute.
As a stupid example of how not to use message boxes (seriously, the tester/developer/QM that passed this part of the program should be sacked, or at least be forced to read Cooper’s About Face 2.0) here is a mbox that I got when saving a word file.
In my work I really hate to have to use a mbox. Every time I make a mbox, I think of other ways to layout the program and interaction in such a way that the mbox can be avoided. If it has to be there, I make it a rich and informative one (Cooper have a great example of this as well I might add). The above example was followed by a dialog that was a little more informative, but still, why use it in the first place? And more, I think that the common M$ dialogs and boxes are way to wide, which make them hard to read. I guess this is because they open them up programatically, and the standard layout engine just extends the dialog till the text fits.
My Try
I have tried to solve this, and loan some ideas from Cooper. For instance, when importing Virtual Slides into BioPix iQ, I have a dialog that shows only if there was an error. Clicking a filename for a slide that could not be properly imported, the error for that slide is presented. And if the name is double-clicked the image is opened for viewing. For the message boxes that I do have, I have set a maximum width, for readability.
Now, I won’t claim this is a super duper dialog, but it’s a hundred years better than the stupid “ERROR ERROR!” dialog from Word 2007.
And in SharpWired
This discussion about error messaging and feedback to user is something that we will take quite seriously in SharpWired (which recently got a logo. yayhh!). We have some ideas, of which one is to put all errors in a tab, almost like a chat window. Probably also using the drop-down style of Firefox and IE for some notices. The thing is that very many errors don’t have to be intrusive, and since chatting and file loading is completely asynchronic, why should the errors be blocking?!
Pretty colors 2007 May 11
Posted by pethol in SharpWired, Visualization, WinWired.add a comment
Just started a week of no work. Sort of like vacation. Kind of. Gonna be fun to see if I can withstand answering incoming emails about the development or customer support. =^_^=
Hopefully I can manage to at least put one hour of work the coming week on SharpWired (or the SF page).
Igge tried some months ago to plot all the colors in an image in a 3D-plot using MATLAB. This was to slow thought, and today while correcting his report to fit my red and angry notes and comments, he found this plug in to ImageJ called Color Inspector 3D. It shows the colors from an image in a RGB cube or HSV cone or similar. Problem is, it don’t handle images that are a bit larger, to well. Some not at all it seams. Still very nice though.
Written in Java (well, the whole of ImagJ is to). I think a C# clone would be splendid…
SharpWired wiki 2007 April 28
Posted by pethol in SharpWired.add a comment
Ola has been so great to set up a wiki (using MediaWiki) for the SharpWired project. All we need now is a logo and an icon :-)
Papercut 2007 March 30
Posted by pethol in Stuff, Visualization.add a comment
Todays friday, and even though I got lots to do, I need, as well as everybody else, some leasure surfing to cool of. From the neat feed of information aesthetics, I found this wonderfull peace of handcraft; Jens Stark’s sculptures. Some time ago I had the idea of posting all my jottings at jottings.wordpress.com, but I seem to have stopped after two posts ^_^. I have no scanner I must add…
Kinda slow, but smart presentation 2007 March 12
Posted by pethol in Development, Projects.add a comment
I don’t plan to pass on links I get from where-ever, unless I talk about some specific point and can give a small relevant collection, that one can’t find just like that, or alike. But, I did find this, even after less than 10 minutes, to be a quite clear, short, and content full presentation. The things that these people talk about is relevant to very many types of project, not just Open Source projects, and software projects especially. And maybe, some one will listen to it a little bit better, because someone from google says it.
I liked, more than other thins, these two things:
- The obvious: ‘The perfect is an enemy of the good’
- The “Bus-factor” (no, not buzz-factor)
How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (And You Can Too)
(Ola, if you haven’t seen this yet, you don’t like OS ^_^)
Escapable Inkscape 2007 February 23
Posted by pethol in Master Thesis.2 comments
Yesterday I wanted to do draw some figures for my thesis report in a vector manner. Ola tipped me about Inkscape. I have tried this program before, being open source and all and Gimp not so fun to work with all times – and Paint.net only for bitmaps. But my first impression was not very good; quite complex and strange. I gave it a new try then and went off with a rocky start. Importing a normal .png-file crashed the program. But after that it went along quite nicely. The new version really impressed me and I came to like it and work with it quite fast.
Heres of cource a sample of what I did, fast and all. (In the report the image is about 3 x 4cm.
