One of the biggest problems with Flash isn’t Flash itself. It’s Flash designers. More particularly, it’s Flash designers’ basic failure to understand why certain UI elements are the way they are. This leads to one of the most common Flash designer diseases: The drive to reinvent basic UI elements. Poorly.
Page Transitions
When a user clicks a [...]
Tag Archives: you fail
Common Flash UI Mistakes
How Failtastic Can One Phone Be? Just Ask Palm About the Prē!
Why I’m Ditching Slackware
I went to find a package to install Git. The page at http://www.slackware.com/packages/ still says that the Slackware Package Browser has been moved to http://packages.slackware.it/ — it’s said this for years, and I keep wondering when they’re going to move the package browser back onto the main Slackware site.
But this time, when I followed that link, [...]
Alert: SpamAssassin’s Year 2010 Bug
A webOS 1.2 Upgrade Experience That Couldn’t Be Much Worse
The following is a copy of what I just posted on the Palm Prē forums:
I woke up this morning to find that the webOS 1.2 upgrade had been pushed to my Prē automatically. I was happy, until the reboot finished and I saw:
Signed Out
You are no longer signed in to your Palm Profile on this [...]
Palm Is Lying, Not Just Spying
Thoughts on the Palm Prē: Category Catastrophe
Note, Added A Few Days Later: This post does not tell the whole story. This is a wail of anguish, and is not intended to be balanced. For a more balanced look at the Palm Prē, read my later, and broader, evaluation of it as well as this post.
There are a lot of good things [...]
Cruel Rollover Trickery
I found an interesting UI problem today, on a site that I will be kind enough not to actually link to. Instead, I’ll just reproduce the general concept and problem here:
alpha
beta
gamma
delta
The links all just link straight to the nav bar itself, so if you scroll your browser view so that the list isn’t right at [...]
McAfee: Failing at Security Since 2005
Back in 2005, I was a “geek for hire” and did a lot of general troubleshooting for end-users. Including malware removal and general PC tune-ups. One client wanted me to install some software, including McAfee’s main end-user product at the time — I don’t recall the name.
I do recall, however, that my head nearly exploded when [...]
Why Downloadable Documentation Is Critical
PHP is a kludged-together, ugly mess of a language. But its documentation is quite superlative: practically every function has documentation written in a more-or-less standardized format, plus whatever comments users have added. In addition, they have something near and dear to my heart:
Downloadable documentation.
This means that if I’m developing on an airplane at 30,000 feet, [...]