Comments for I Am Not Charles

Comment on I’m a greasy little monkey by Joe

Joe — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 04:57:13 +0000

Done. I'm too lazy to figure out what they want for metadata, though.

Comment on I’m a greasy little monkey by colin

colin — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 04:08:58 +0000

(my username is cflat)

Comment on I’m a greasy little monkey by colin

colin — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 04:01:42 +0000

Have you thought about contributing this to userscripts.org?

Comment on Joel gives bad advice: details at 11:00 by Joe

Joe — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 05:22:39 +0000

I didn’t mean to imply that the message Joel talks about is a popup. But what else would the menu item do if you click on it and the associated action can’t be performed? Accept your click but do nothing? That’s even worse! With a Firefox-style notification bar, you risk the user not noticing it just opened (I often click on links and find that apparently nothing happened, and it takes me several clicks before I notice that it’s opened the “blocked popup” notification.)

I was picturing a still-active menu item with a short tag next to it (”DISABLED: No selection” or something), which pops open a more complete explanation if you ignore the tag and try to select it.

Comment on Joel gives bad advice: details at 11:00 by Peter McCurdy

Peter McCurdy — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 05:14:21 +0000

I don’t think he’s ever had comments on his blog as such; there’s a Fog Creek discussion board around somewhere though, which probably has threads about his articles.

As for my take, I think it’s an indictment of most of the last 25 years of UI design that when we hear “the menu item can display a message”, we think of modal dialog boxes. If Joel’s plan used a Firefox-style notification bar, then it wouldn’t be so massively irritating. That said, I don’t know whether it’d actually be annoying or not, and I’m not really the best person to judge either – for starters, I hardly ever use menu bars, and when I do, nothing much seems to be disabled anyway.

Comment on Joel gives bad advice: details at 11:00 by Stirling Westrup

Stirling Westrup — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 03:23:15 +0000

I have long advocated this. In the one WIMP interface I ever built from scratch (for a video game), disabled menu items were greyed out and clicking on them did nothing, but hovering the mouse over one would tell you why it was greyed out.

Comment on Wild Zebras by Joe

Joe — Sun, 11 May 2008 00:53:50 +0000

The flicker is caused by the update lagging slightly behind mouse movement, though – if you’re moving the mouse fairly quickly, the rows aren’t quite redrawn fast enough to track it smoothly. How can you make that script update faster? It’s pretty simple – I don’t really see any scope for decreasing the timing. (Increasing it is easy, which is why I suggested putting enough of a pause to completely break the illusion that it’s tracking the mouse.)

EDIT: actually, I can see a way to make it track better: draw just the heavily highlighted row, and then fade out the surrounding rows more slowly only if the mouse is still over the same row.

Comment on Wild Zebras by Christian Piper

Christian Piper — Sat, 10 May 2008 18:41:21 +0000

Hi Joe, Thanks for the comments.

I should point out a couple of things I didn’t make clear for the reason of creating the demo, It was in response to a comment to A List Apart’s original article in which a users mentioned case studies (I believe in the print world) that visual noise impairs responsiveness to tabular data, I wanted to show a simple and effective way of reducing the noise.

As far as the flicker goes this could easily be solved with a bit of timing in the script, I will sometime this week come back to it and build something a bit more robust, for the moment though it was just to show a simple way of reducing noise and get feedback.

Kind Regards,
Christian Piper

Comment on Advogato vs. the world by Wild Zebras « I Am Not Charles

Wild Zebras « I Am Not Charles — Sat, 10 May 2008 15:31:53 +0000

[...] to make dynamic zebra-striped tables. He asked for comments to be mailed to him – in keeping with last month’s rant about open discussion, I’m posting my response here [...]

Comment on Advogato vs. the world by colin

colin — Thu, 01 May 2008 00:42:47 +0000

I think the community context for blogs that you’re looking for is probably best found through technologies such as Google Reader. Not because you can read blogs in Google Reader, but because you can share interesting posts and subscribe to other people’s shared items. In fact, I now find that the best stuff I read these days comes from someone else’s shared items. (for example, Scoble’s shared items is an unending supply of interesting posts that rarely hit digg or slashdot)