September, 2009

software — No Comments
15
Sep 09

Acknowledging One’s Own Mistakes

I was plowing through the 800+ pages of the Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines (UX-Guide) and found this gem on guide guestions for Group Boxes:

Are all the controls inside the group? If so, indicate the relationship on the larger surface, such as the parent dialog box or page.

Incorrect:
Aa511459.GroupBoxes03(en-us,MSDN.10)

This is the same dialog box that is currently in Vista. It takes guts to bluntly point out ones one mistake (although in this case, since Vista is not a complete re-design, the miss is understandable…almost), so ++ points to Microsoft.

There are tons of other examples using their own existing UI in the UX-Guide.

software — No Comments
9
Sep 09

“more reliable”

I’ve had this post in the drafts since August 6, but only recently catched up with my backlog of tasks enough to finish it. This was supposed to be posted before the new cat released.

Anyway, I was going to comment on how misleading clever Apple’s marketing is. One example: take a look at one improvement they did for Snow Leopard, one I recently had a problem with.

eject-reliability

I never had this problem with PCs as there was a hardware eject. Even when apps went haywire or CDs/DVDs went bad, there was an alternate way of ejecting a disk without having to restart. If you were really honest, you wouldn’t call what you had in Mac OS X ,”reliable”. (Perhaps that’s what people are used to?).

The KB from Apple says to do several things, with the final solution being:

If that doesn’t work, restart the computer, then hold down the mouse button.

Right. Something I’ll never be able to associate with disk eject in a million years (well, maybe a thousand).

I used lsof in the terminal when I encountered this problem. MacOSXHints.com recently posted a script to do this in one go ( which is why this post got out of the drafts folder ):

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13

#!/bin/bash
PATH=${PATH}:/sbin:/usr/sbin
dr=($(drutil status | grep -i 'type:'))
devtype=${dr[1]}
device=($(mount | grep ${dr[3]}))
if [ $devtype = "No" ]
then echo No disk found. Sorry! >&2
  exit 1;
fi
echo A $devtype is mounted on the device named $device
pids=($(sudo -p 'Please enter the administrator password:' lsof -t $device))
echo \nList of programs that may be preventing the disk to eject
ps -o pid,user,comm=COMMAND -www -p $(echo ${pids[*]} | sed 's/ /,/g')
software — 3 Comments
8
Sep 09

Source Code Test

Testing the syntax coloring plugin with the loop that pretty much runs most PCs on the planet:

1
2
3
4
5
6

MSG msg;
while (GetMessage(&msg, NULL, 0, 0))
{
    TranslateMessage(&msg);
    DispatchMessage(&msg);
}
iphone-photos — No Comments
2
Sep 09

late

one of the things sure to irk me, even on very good mornings