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UI Horror Story of the Day

Adam — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 23:27:58 +0000

I finally got around to upgrading to Dev Studio 2010 Express. It looks nice so far but I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at the number of fundamental UI mistakes they have made with the documentation system. Have Microsoft learned nothing about user interface and user experience in the 18-odd years they have been developing Windows? I’d like to take this blog post to list some of the issues with this software.

Now in previous versions of Dev Studio, if you wanted to look up the manual for a key word or library function, you placed your cursor on the name and pressed F1. So wanting to know how to create a fixed array in C#, I typed the word ‘fixed’ and pressed F1. Did I see the documentation? Nope.

What I did see was a dialog box asking whether I’d like to look up the documentation on my local machine or on the internet. I wish I’d taken a screen-shot of that dialog box because it was an absolute classic of bad design but I can’t make it appear again. Once I’d chosen, there was no way to go back to it and make a different choice.

UI Lesson #1: Let the user go back. People make mistakes, if it is possible to undo, then allow it.

The choices on the dialog were “YES” or “NO”. Um, does that mean yes, look it up on the internet or no, don’t look it up on my local machine? Heads I win, tails you lose. Bad choice of wording for the buttons.

UI Lesson #2: Label your dialog buttons with verbs – SAVE / DON’T SAVE is easier to understand than YES / NO

So I took a punt on NO which it turns out meant loading the documentation from the local machine. Well that’s OK, it should be faster loading locally right? But then again, should I care where it gets the documentation from as long as it gets it. Microsoft is interrupting my work flow. I just want to see the documentation, right now.

UI Lesson #3: Don’t interrupt the user’s work flow unless you have a very good reason.

So next it goes about setting up a small web server on my PC so it can serve up the documentation in my browser. Takes a few seconds but that’s OK, except – get this – it doesn’t work! I get a 404 error! I did take a screenshot this time:

So what this is telling me is that there is no local help! And the software was too brain-dead to realise it.

UI Lessage #4: If you can automatically check something, don’t make the user manually check it!

There is no way I am going to spend time installing the local help on my PC. Remember what I want to do is view the help, not dink around with my computer all afternoon. So of course I now choose to look for the help online. So I click the link and…

UI Lesson #5: Honestly, just think!

I cannot believe how utterly broken this is. I think I’ll go look up my keyword on Google.

Incompatible Objective-C types initializing struct

Adam — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 01:57:28 +0000

This bizarre error message had me tearing my hair out this morning. I’ve finally figured it out.

Here’s the scene: You have two classes, each class has an init method with the same name and taking the same parameters. Here’s an example:

@interface myClass1 : NSObject { }

-(myClass1 *)initWithName:(NSString *)name;

@end

@interface myClass2 : NSObject { }

-(myClass2 *)initWithName:(NSString *)name;

@end

Now try to initialize an instance of the first class:

myClass1 *c = [[myClass1 alloc] initWithName:@"Fred"];

You get Incompatible Objective-C types initializing ‘struct myClass2 *’, expected ‘struct myClass1 *’ which doesn’t make any sense because the initializer never even mentions myClass2.

The thing is that the program will run fine, it just gives this warning at compile-time because the compiler can’t tell the difference between two different methods with the same signature. I like my code to compile with no errors and no warnings because I’m very fussy and thorough with my work. So even though this warning could be safely ignored, it still bugs me and I have to get rid of it!

So to shut the compiler up, I need to cast the object so it explicitly knows which method to call.

myClass1 *c = [(myClass1 *)[myClass1 alloc] initWithName:@"Fred"];

Casting always looks ugly to me but that’s the way around it.

NMEA Checksum Calculator

Adam — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 06:49:08 +0000

I’ve been doing a lot of GPS work lately. Here’s a little utility I wrote which I’d like to share with you all. It’s an NMEA checksum calculator written in PHP.

Try it out here: http://siliconsparrow.com/nmeachecksum.php

Here’s the source code:



NMEA Checksum Calculator


NMEA Checksum Calculator

// Created 12-Jan-2012.
// This code is public domain. Copy & share it all you like for any purpose.

	if(array_key_exists('nmea',$_REQUEST))
	{
		$nmea = $_REQUEST['nmea'];
		print "Calculating checksum for: ".htmlspecialchars($nmea)."\r\n";

		$checksum = 0;
		for($i = 0; $i < strlen($nmea); $i++)
		{
			$c = substr($nmea,$i,1);
			$n = ord($c);
			if($c == '$')
				$checksum = 0;
			else if($c == '*')
				break;
			else
				$checksum ^= $n;
		}
		print "Checksum is ".dechex($checksum)."\r\n";
	}
?>

Enter an NMEA String:

Replicating ASCII Database to UTF-8 in PostgreSQL

Adam — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 23:33:20 +0000

Well here’s a curly issue I blundered into today. I was trying to replicate a Postgres database from an old server to a new one using pg_dump/pg_restore and found some errors like this:

invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0x92

After some investigation it turns out the older version of Postgres defaults to ASCII encoding of the data wheras the new version of Postgres defaults to UTF-8. Of course I would much prefer to use UTF-8 but shouldn’t those two encodings be compatible anyway? UTF-8 is supposed to be backward-compatible with ASCII.

What happened is a few non-ASCII characters got into the database. 0×92 is not a valid ASCII code. It is a code from Latin-1 encoding. This was in the database thanks to my business partner who was entering some crap into the database using a Macintosh which wasn’t following the ASCII standard so much.

So how to solve it?

First I did a plain-text export of the database on the old server

pg_dump -Fp my_database > mydatabase.sql

Then I converted the encoding to UTF-8

iconv -f 8859_1 -t UTF-8 mydatabase.sql> mydatabase.utf8.sql

Finally I imported the converted data into the database on the new server

createdb my_database
psql my_database -f mydatabase.utf8.sql

And then I wrote a blog post so I’d remember all this next time the issue comes up.

Macro Photography with a Phone Camera

Adam — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 07:12:20 +0000

Here’s a real easy way to do close-up when you’ve only got a phone. All you need is a loupe which is a magnifying lens inside a tube, they are used a lot by jewellers, artists and well, people who work in micro-electronics like me. Just plonk it over the lens of your phone’s camera and away you go! Use lots of light to get a good sharp image.

Here’s a frozen pea! well, why not?

And of course, the real reason I want to do this – closeups of circuit boards.

Boxes boxes boxes

Adam — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 13:37:01 +0000

I’m developing a couple of new electronic products and once again I am infuriated by the lack of suitable enclosures. Don’t the enclosure making people understand what I want?!

Take a look at these fairly typical boxes from Hammond Manufacturing:

A lot of the boxes produced by Hammond and such companies tend to have small front panels and a long body. But the reality of modern electronics is the circuitry is very small. It is the connectors, display and controls which take up the most room, so what you really want is a short body and a large panel. When I use these boxes, I end up wasting a lot of space as you can see in this photo of one of my prototypes, more than half the space in the box is unused because I need a front panel large enough for all the connectors.

I have spent days searching through the websites of every box manufacturer I can find but they are all more or less the same. I am currently investigating the economics of getting some custom plastic boxes made. I’ll post more here as I make progress.

Sparrow Cake

Adam — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 09:39:28 +0000

My Mum made me a birthday cake with my logo on it. Thanks Mum!

Happy birthday to me!

HTC Desire HD Freeze Bug

Adam — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 07:06:52 +0000

Business has been doing a little better this last month so I bought myself a treat – a new HTC Desire HD from Vodafone. It is so nice to be back on Android again after being stuck with an old Nokia 6300 non-smart-phone for the last couple of months. I felt like one hand was cut off not being able to access email or any cloud services. This new phone also has a nice big screen so I can read stuff without having to squint.

However I’ve been noticing that often this phone will just freeze up for half a minute or so for no apparent reason. Not what I expected from an expensive phone that was supposed to be super fast and super smooth.

To cut a long story short, after some research I found there is a software bug which causes the freeze ups, no-one is sure exactly what is causing the bug at the time of writing but there is a workaround so for anyone who has one of these phones, here is the solution:

Solution

From the home screen, press Menu, then Settings, Applications, Development and then turn on USB Debugging. This caused an immediate improvement in speed and responsiveness of the phone.

UPDATE: I’ve now upgraded my phone to version 2.3.3 and the freeze bug has gone. Looks like HTC has fixed it.

Unsoldering Equipment with Hot Air

Adam — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 01:26:26 +0000

I just bought myself a new SMD rework station, it’s a fine tool but I want to share with you a few choice excerpts from the extremely poorly translated manual. I think the Chinese manufacturers put no effort at all into the English translation these days:

“Intelligent system that could alarm, Fault detection automatically”

“Green lines and high-quality silicone body heat good for extend life and save power”

“increased gun handpiece would be insertion and unplug”

and my favourite…

“LED manifestation of tiny electricity computer figures”

Comment Spam

Adam — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 06:44:36 +0000

Hmm, this blog seems to be getting a lot of comment spam. I’m going to try the NoSpamNX plugin and see if that helps.