The Cafes » User Interface

The Xerces XML parser recently localized its error messages, which seems like a nice thing to do. However sometimes good actions have unintended consequences. It turns out the localized error messages are a lot harder to find with Google than the English ones. Paste an English exception message into Google, and you’ll probably find 10 people who have already had and solved your problem. But the same message in Greek or Croatian? Maybe not.
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Over the last ten years or so, a new metaphor for saving data has slowly developed in some applications such as iTunes, Apple’s Address Book, iCal, and Eudora: the automatically saved document. In this model, the user rarely even sees the document as such. They simply open the program, enter new data, and close the program. There is neither an explicit open nor save step. They do not distinguish between the program and its documents.
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I am so tired of programmers placing their convenience ahead of mine. They work for me, not the other way around! One common problem is input fields. For example, here’s a chunk of a web form I was asked to fill out when purchasing an upgrade to a product:

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Long-running operations that require occasional user input should nonetheless not block while waiting for it. They need to accomplish as much as they can as quickly as they can. If necessary the problem should be divided into the pieces that require user input and pieces that don’t so that progress can be made on some pieces while waiting for input on other pieces. This was recently brought home to me while evaluating the ChronoSync file synchronization tool.
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Tuesday night I gave my RSS, Atom, APP, and All That talk to the Amateur Computer Group of New Jersey JUG in Scotch Plains. This is the seventh time I’ve given this particular talk, and I think last night I finally understood something about blogs that had eluded me up till now.

I’ve noticed for a while that blogging really represents a phase change in the Web. It has turned the Web from a read-only medium to a read-write medium. What I couldn’t figure out was why. There’s nothing technically different about using WordPress or Blogger compared to editing HTML and uploading the files to the server. Sure you don’t have to know HTML to blog; but there’ve been HTML editors that look like word processors for 10+ years now, and they didn’t lead to the explosion of content with blogs. FTP’s a bit of a pain for a non-techie, but there’ve been content management systems and editors that use HTTP PUT and/or hide the FTP client. None of them led to the explosion in content we see with blogging.

Nor is it that there’s one service that’s just particualrly well done that has allowed blogging to explode. If so, you’d see something like MySpace; that is, all the blogs on one site or platform instead of the plethora we have today (WordPress, Movable Type, Blogger, etc.).

But there is one thing that all these blog systems (and most others) have in common that none of the editors like DreamWeaver or Content Management Systems support:

User don’t have to pick their URLs.
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