ThoughtFactory.CreateThought()

A random collection of thoughts from an easily bored developer

RSS Feed


Category: User Experience

The Misleading Error Message Strikes Again

11 January, 2009 (23:48) | User Experience, Windows | No comments

We’ve got a stock standard Windows 2008 virtual hard drive image at work that I wanted to make some additions to and generally polish up into a decent developer image. The install media was the “Windows Server 2008 Datacenter, Enterprise and Standard (x86) – DVD (English)” ISO sourced from MSDN. I noticed that the image [...]

Get Back

18 June, 2008 (10:46) | User Experience | 1 comment

I’ve been using the Firefox 3.0 beta since I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04, as it came as a standard package, but until now I had no idea that version 3.0 had a significantly different UI from 2.0. In fact, I only found out when I saw recent Flickr posts showing a Firefox comparison chart with [...]

Your Application is CRUD!

24 April, 2008 (11:18) | Coding, User Experience | 4 comments

How many times have you heard that a tool will save you heaps of time because it automatically generates some sort of CRUD layer for you? Depending on how good you’ve been for Santa you could get a generated data layer, service layer or even an entire application. Great! More time for coffee! Well, yes [...]

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

16 April, 2008 (08:22) | User Experience | No comments

Last year I was working on a fairly large windows forms project that was heavily reliant on displaying large sets of information in grids. Most of the functionality in the system was exposed through buttons that had to sit somewhere near a grid. There were multiple main forms, each built around a central grid that [...]

(Browser) Window Shopping

9 April, 2008 (10:47) | User Experience | No comments

I love buying PC games on Steam, so much so that I haven’t bought a physical copy of a PC game since Battlefield 2 came out. However, I still prefer to purchase DVDs, CDs and books from brick and mortar stores. Why the discrepancy? It’s simple: I can still enjoy shopping for DVDs, CDs and [...]