Archive for October, 2007
Saturday, October 27th, 2007
One of the largest deficiencies in most software interfaces lies in their poor use of semantic categorization. This is most clearly seen in windowed applications' menu bars, where organization is done in several different ways (often inconsistently within the same application):
organization by hierarchy of action, e.g. "Paste" goes under "Edit" ...
Posted in Desktop UI, Interfaces | No Comments »
Saturday, October 27th, 2007
RMS (Richard “Not Milhous” Stallman) has always been insistent that the important virtues of “free software” are ethical, not practical or technical. As best as I can surmise, RMS’s ethical claims boil down to:
Society is better off with a non-proprietary software infrastructure because it protects users against software that does ...
Posted in Free culture, Free software | No Comments »
Friday, October 26th, 2007
WinDirStat is a simple Windows program that displays the files and directories of a partition as rectangles proportional to their size, allowing you to quickly see what's taking up the space. Among the good design decisions the authors made, the files are colored by file type and very helpfully shaded.
Of ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Saturday, October 20th, 2007
Most Java instruction materials fail to make certain basic things as clear as they could be, so here's a FAQ-like rundown.
What are the types of values in Java?
Java divides its types into what it calls 'primitive' and 'reference' types (this terminology is unique to Java):
The primitive value types consist ...
Posted in Learn Programming, Programming | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, October 9th, 2007
I've rethought my ideas for better tabbing in Firefox (first mentioned here) and have revised my mockup in Javascript accordingly. The performance of the tab switching and previewing is much better, previews are now seen as the full size of the page, and the 'all tabs' pulldown now causes ...
Posted in Interfaces | No Comments »
