OH GOD WE ARE SO SORRY

There is a team of guys at Microsoft whose sole job is to be personally sorry for the inconvenience every time an application encounters a problem and needs to close. They just wail for 40 hours a week each.

Enso, why you gotta make me sad?

The guys over at Humanized just released the 2.0 prototype of their quick-launching product Enso. I'm sure they're still ironing out some bugs, (like how I crashed it by typing "1+1" in the google search field). But their help documentation made one UI mistake I really hate.



Guess what area on those previous and next links is clickable? If you guessed "just the links", sadly, you're correct.

always make your buttons as large as is reasonably possible

Aptana Studio disables internet, "known issue"

This may be one of the most ridiculous problems I've ever had with a piece of software. I tried to use Aptana Studio to some Rails development, but when I tried to install the Rails plugin, it would block my network adapter from doing anything. Here's the mail I sent:

If I attempt to install the Radrails plugin from within Aptana Studio, I lose all internet connectivity instantly, including the ability to ping or resolve a DNS entry. Naturally, this interrupts the download also, and prevents me from doing anything until I forcibly close Aptana, at which point, I regain full connectivity.

So Aptana replied:

Hi Blake,

This is a known issue with the Aptana update site for some users. Try the workarounds for manual installation described on this page:

http://update.aptana.com/install/rails/3.2/

Hope this helps,
Michelle Petersen
Aptana, Inc.

So not only is it ridiculous, but it's a known issue. Aptana currently does not have a product, but they shipped something anyways. If you have software that breaks other functional parts of a user's machine, that's unacceptable.

I will never use any of their other products and I can't recommend any of them to anyone.

never break other parts of a user's machine without warning (some exceptions to this would be a BitTorrent client that may peg your network traffic, or a defragger that blocks hard disk access)

When all you have is a pie hammer, the whole world looks like a pie nail

Just look at that! What is a pie menu doing there? ARGH. This is a problem when you spend all your time reading about and creating interfaces. Any sexy technology can catch your eye and overwhelm your reasoning.

Why not just have a play button off to the right of every song? It would be easy enough to either 1) show a ton of play buttons, or 2) show the play buttons on mouseover. You could probably even think of a 3) something better. That's just off the top of my head.

The pie menu gives no affordance as to how to play a song (the point of the site!) until a user explores and clicks something. Then it requires a click and a drag of minimal precision to play a song. I shouldn't have to do more than click to play a song on a music site.

always minimize the cost to perform your most common tasks
don't use interface elements just to use them, make sure they're suited for the task