kebabShopBlues

Well, I finally made a mistake that I really ought to have known better about, using Styles in Word 2003. I spent an hour last night deciding to add numbers to my headings for a particular document; it was quite long and I felt the numbering would help clarify the layout. I loaded the file this morning and Oops, where have my style changes gone? (more…)

Historically, computer hardware development was held-back by lowest-common-denominator hardware and software. Mainframe screens were designed to be character-based displays with a single colour. If a VDU designer came on the scene and looked at the technology of those screens, he might have realised that the technology was relatively old; TV’s can display ‘moving’ images! In colour! But what would the point be to adding colour capabilities to a screen that was used on a system that could not display colour?

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Some time ago, I had my first experience of “Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby” courtesy of “The Best Software Writing” selected and introduced by Joel Spolsky. I was intrigued by the strange writing style, the cartoon foxes, and indeed the language Ruby. But honestly, for whatever reason, it was not an appropriate time for me to follow up. (more…)

Jeff Atwood comments in his blog ‘Unnecessary Dialogs: Stopping the Proceedings with Idiocy‘ that dialog boxes are evil:

Here’s how strongly I feel about this: every time you send your users to an alert dialog, you have failed them. In a perfect world, we should never see a single alert dialog. Ever.

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Anyone who has read more than a few entries on this site will probably realise that I am a little bit obsessed with ‘Styles’ in both Microsoft Word and tools such as CSS. It struck me that it might be beneficial to look at some real-world things that use something similar to styles to help convey my message. The analogy to word processing or document styles will not always be tight, but hopefully it will be informative. Today, I’m going to look at Canon cameras and their ‘picture zone’ settings. (more…)