See that bar that says “There are new updates available for your add-ons”?  Yeah, I knew that already because an entire window popped up just to tell me that.  Thanks.

Clicking the X doesn’t really do anything either, it just hides that oh-so-useful message.

How often do people ever skip updates or uncheck a specific one to not install?  It seems like it would be more useful to have a global “don’t update this extension ever” dialog and just auto-update all of them without asking.  It’s not like a user can make an informed decision on what to do here anyways.

Well that’s easy enough, right? WRONG! FUCK YOU! Why don’t you go fuck yourself? And eat a dick too while you’re at it. No, make that a whole bowl of dicks. This is the feeling that everyone, including you, will inevitably get when looking to buy a new video card.

I fought this battle a couple of years ago. I was tasked with trying to find a good bang-for-my-buck deal across awesomely named products such as: Radeon x800 XT, Radeon x800 XT Platinum Edition, Radeon x850 XT, GeForce 7800 GT, GeForce 6800 Ultra, Radeon x1800 GTO, GeForce 6800 GS, Radeon x800 XL, Radeon x800 GTO2, GeForce 7800 GTX. Huh?

Also, that’s JUST CHIPSETS. That doesn’t even skim the surface of comparing pixel pipelines, texture units, memory, how 3rd party manufacturers implement/tweak the core architectures, major chipset revisions, etc. Yes it’s important information, but these are seriously the best naming schemes they could come up with?

I will now point you to a chart I found on Tom’s Hardware. It’s from their article “The Best Gaming Graphics cards for the Money: December 2007“. This article perfect for complainers like me who are in the market for a new video card. It basically summarizes everything I would of had to spend at least half a week easy researching. Thankfully they are paid to do that for us so we don’t have to, yay them. Anyways, the whole point here is the table I found on page 6 - it’s a list I’ve been wanting to see for years. It has probably been around for a while but I just discovered it so it is amazing and exciting to me.

So I present to you what I like to call, ‘buyer confusion’:

(The rows represent approximate performance levels. Chipset generations shift about every 2 rows.)

Here’s a great example of how even more confusing this can get: Around the time Doom 3 (a huge release) came out for PC, NVidia had launched their GeForce 4 line of cards, one of these being the GeForce 4 MX. This was a low-priced budget card designed for people that would maybe play a game or two occasionally, but that’s it. Doom 3 was one of the first games to use all the fancy-pants programmable pixel / vertex shaders in newer video cards. Older cards could produce similar looking effects but did so in ways that were extremely rigid and limited. Wanting to be able to play Doom 3, people would go to stores and see rows of boxes, GeForce 3s on the bottom and 4s on the top. Well hey, 4 is higher than 3 so those must be better right? Yes…unless they bought the 4 MX. The GeForce 4 MX was basically a GeForce 2 Ti (yeah Ti) with a GeForce 4 Ti-series memory controller. No programmable shaders AKA it was missing features the GeForce THREE had. So that pissed a lot of people off when they realized they literally couldn’t play the game when they got home, it wouldn’t let them, the card didn’t have the hardware necessary to run it.

I haven’t heard of this happening since then, but the naming is still out of control. None of this is a big deal really but I just find it sort of silly stupid that we can’t have reasonably named products.

“Photobucket will undoubtedly be a rich source of photos for people to share on Digg’s dedicated images section, which goes live today,” said Jay Adelson, CEO of Digg. “Photobucket’s integration with Digg is a great example of the kinds of applications that can be created using the Digg API, and that leverages the Digg community as a collaborative filter for surfacing the most interesting content. Twenty-five million people a month visit Digg to discover and share the best content from anywhere on the Web.”

It took them all of those words just to say:

“We [Photobucket] have partnered with Digg. This should make it easier to find cool images.”

I guess it just doesn’t have the same ring without “rich”, “leverages”, “collaborative filter”, “surfacing”, and “content”.

Dear Mr. Householder:

Fidelity’s product and service emails are generated by various systems and departments within our organization. The 10 business day window allows us the time we need to ensure all systems have been given the appropriate notification to stop delivery to your email address. We appreciate your patience while we fulfill your request.

We greatly appreciate your business, Mr. Householder, and we are very pleased to be able to assist you in reaching your financial goals. If you have any other questions or comments, please send us another email at any time. I hope you have a wonderful weekend.

Sincerely,

Greg Walters
Fidelity Brokerage Services LLC, Member NYSE, SIPC

It’s weird, because the second you sign up, they send you a bunch of emails from their “systems and departments” and also earmark an entire tree to turn into various mailings. So turning on is instant, and off takes days…

Thankfully, they didn’t send me any other spam emails after this.

Dear Mr. Householder:
I have placed a stop email request for the email address listed below.
blake8086 @ gmail . com

Please allow 10 business days for the stop to become effective. Your email address will be removed from future marketing and product messages.

So I replied:

10 days? That’s ridiculous. Why could it possibly take you ten days to stop something that travels literally at the speed of light?

10 days would be a long time to send a letter to them and have them send a confirmation. The mind boggles at why anything email could take 10 days.

My coding style:

Alternate coding style:

Writing some code then turning it off:

Not a big deal in that last case, but what happens when you are working inside a huge multi-tiered nested structure? Do you really want to manually indent all of that? Especially while your dual-core supercomputer, the one that can execute billions of instructions per second, just sits there idle?

So the end result seems broken, let’s examine what the process of trying to fix it is like. I call these correction processes crap rituals. Programmers are probably all to familiar with these.

Ok let’s hit enter and type the brace…

What I expected but not what I want, lets backspace the brace…

Ok gone, just gotta backspace to the right spot…

Almost there, just gotta press Shift and–

–what the fuck?

Even worse, this is what we get in the Options screen:

“Caret will position to first non-whitespace of preceding line“. No, caret gave up and went to column 0. And why is the checkbox for Auto Indent grey? Regardless if the box is ticked or not, the background is grey. Usually that means it’s an option for a subset of features, some being on some being off. That doesn’t really seem to mean anything here.

Lastly, when you type a close curly brace, the behavior of future deletion changes depending on where the cursor is. If the cursor is directly to the left of the brace and you press Backspace, it backspaces more than one positions, as if you just removed a tab. But there wasn’t a tab - you can click (or arrow-key) to any individual space between the left margin and the curly brace. So sometimes it removes a little and sometimes it removes a lot? And why does Backspace behave this way but Delete does not? Why did they even bother implementing this?

This is a common issue in many IDEs out there. Auto-Indent features are supposed to save us time, not give us more work trying to figure out when to expect a space or a tab or ok if I press backspace now it’ll go to column 0 so I better click over here and press delete twice then hit enter so it indents the new line properly ok now I can move back up and close my brace. If your Auto-Indent forces people to create, test and tweak crap rituals, then your feature has failed.

I have to say my (limited) experience with Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDE’s have been pretty good in this regard. It does what you expect and allows you focus on your code.

Here’s the initial view:

Here’s what happens when I click the four “links”:

There’s basically two ways to do this correctly:

1. Just show the damn content, it’s not like there’s that much of it anyways
2. If you really have a ton of helpful information in each item, the links should be, well, links to the other pages with the information

Instead you have some sort of hybrid approach that sucks.

Lessons:

1. Things that look like links should act like links
2. Don’t hide data when it’s unnecessary

So earlier I was busy working on a program (”sketch” in Processing lingo) and needed to reference a variable I had created earlier. It’s name was 2 characters, lowercase ‘e’ followed by…hmmm, is that a numeric one or a lowercase ‘L’? Can’t remember what I typed, so I tried both, no good. It turns out the problem was something else entirely, but it made me take a step back and really examine the default Processing font. I moved to a blank line and typed a numeric one followed by a lowercase “L”. Here’s what showed up:

Hmm well that looks pretty hard to tell apart, let’s blow that up:

Wait, what order did I type those in again?

Well that’s interesting, the lowercase ‘L’ has a vertical column that’s one pixel thicker than the numeric one, what the hell?

Why would a font designer in their right mind make 2 characters look virtually identical? I say “virtually” because you can sort of tell when they are blown up ~13.5x and are directly next to each other, but even then there is still no way of knowing which one is which unless you recall the order you typed them. The entire point of character sets are to uniquely identify individual language constructs. Here you can’t even tell if it’s a numeric digit or a letter. That seems like a pretty big failure.

Even worse, why would a team creating a programming language + IDE on top of Java (that’s built around the concept of graphics and visualization) choose a font like this? That doesn’t make any sense to me.

There are a ton more shitty-font examples out there (similar characters, hard to read punctuation, etc) that I won’t get into. So what’s the solution here? Use a font built for programming! A simple Google search for “programming font” will get you this useful site. I’m partial to Profont / Sheldon. They are pretty small and can look cluttered when there is a lot of dense code on the screen, but they are always easily readable. Perhaps one day all IDEs will be developed with the understanding that there is more to a programming font than monospacing.

I noticed their tour makes a common mistake: the hitboxes for the next and back arrows are just too damn small, at 11×19. They’re the size of the images instead of being huge (hitboxes highlighted in red and blue):

Here’s the right way to do it, making the boxes as huge as possible:

If I happen to click right next to an arrow, what did I probably want that click to do? Certainly not “get my mouse click thrown away”. Since a web app usually won’t intercept all clicks and guess where they should go, you have to plan ahead, and that means surrounding these controls in a CSS box that allows for the same linking the arrow images do.

Other fixes:

Why not use text saying NEXT or NEXT PAGE or TELL ME MORE instead of small arrows that blend into the background?

How about adding a mouseover animation so the user knows they’re able to click and get an action instead of just making them guess that the arrows do something?

Generally speaking, throwing away user input is always a bad idea.  It’s up to us to guess what the user intended and act on it as best we can.