blog.shrub

At this year’s SXSW Interactive festival, I’ll be moderating the panel Getting to Consistency: Don’t Make Your Users Think. The blurb:

Predictable and consistent software is much easier to use. This session explores interface consistency, examples of consistency failures and their consequences.

This is going to be a really interesting discussion. I have three fantastic panelists:

• Steve Johnson, Senior Manager, User Experience, Adobe
• Jennifer Fraser, Lead User Experience Designer, Corel
• Alex Graveley, User Interface Engineer, VMware

We’re going to explain what consistency really means to you and your users and show what it can do for you. What happens when you’re not consistent? We’ll demonstrate examples of failures from the silly to the catastrophic and list the obvious (and hidden) costs of inconsistency.

Sometimes, however, you don’t want to be consistent. We’ll explain why.

Come to this session and be the new best friend of your performance, security, accessibility, tech support and product documentation teams. (Then, go to the session on managing social networks and information overload.)

“The best code you have is the code you didn’t write.”

“Legacy code is any code without tests.” (likely paraphrasing Michael Feathers)

Here’s a simple AppleScript that exports all of the email addresses in your Mac OS X address book as a comma-separated list:

tell application “Address Book”

set emailList to {}

set peopleCount to (count every person)

repeat with i from 1 to peopleCount

set emailList to emailList & (get value of every email of person i)

end repeat

set outputFileName to choose file name with prompt “Save address book as text:” default name “addressbook.txt”

set outputFile to open for access outputFileName with write permission

repeat with e in emailList

write e & “, ” to outputFile

end repeat

close access outputFile

end tell

Ellen picks up the phone and calls 88-year-old Gladys Hardy of Austin, Texas, who proceeds to steal the show.

Then, she calls her again:

Eric Carter and Enric Teller posted some photos of last month’s fantastic Anya Marina house concert.

Windows Vista upgrade decision flowchart

Jeff’s yellow potatoes

miniature potatoes
paprika
cumin
oregano
salt & pepper
a little bit of cayenne pepper
turmeric

wash potatoes. cut into chunks. coat with mixture. cook over low heat in frypan until potatoes are tender.