my lostechies blog - Latest Comments

Re: Huboard – socket.io backend

Rasmus Bækgaard — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 06:04:29 -0000

You could try look at this blog for security: http://www.troyhunt.com/
He has some pretty good guides of what to and what NOT to.

Re: Huboard redesign (gif edition)

Chris B — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 15:41:16 -0000

It looks like the links to posts from the main page are broken. I didn't see a better place to put this, so you are the [un]lucky recipient.

Re: Huboard redesign (gif edition)

rauhryan — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 15:04:12 -0000

Yeah, I saw that. I tried it out and couldn't figure out how to get the kanban to work. Maybe it wasn't enabled for the free trial

Re: Huboard redesign (gif edition)

Nigel Sampson — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 14:40:37 -0000

Looks really great, I ended up creating a similar app as a Windows 8 Metro app, video at http://compiledexperience.com/...

Being able to switch the board between labels, milestones and users as columns I found a very useful feature to manage a project.

Re: Huboard redesign (gif edition)

Dmytro Makhno — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 11:16:05 -0000

It would be nice to have some `undo`
My friends on mac with touchPad, are too easy to broke something.

Re: UX: Color is only meaningful if it’s different

Irné Barnard — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 12:28:43 -0000

There's even an issue with the "word change". E.g. a light switch with the On/Off idea is pretty self explanatory.

However, a button to click would usually contain a word defining the action when clicking on the button. So does a button showing "On" mean it is already turned on, or does it mean it will turn on after you've clicked it?

I'm in agreement that some visual state for the button gives more UI feedback. It need not be a colour though. The Checkbox idea shows pretty clearly an On/Off state. If you want something to work for both the mind-reading-impared (Ha!) as well as the colour blind, then your best bet is not to focus so much on colour or words, but rather contrast:

I.e. give the button a different surround when on, or give it a higher contrasting backgound, or as in some apps: make the On state into a depressed look.

There's obviously nothing stopping you from combining 2 methods to enhance the "feature" though. And IMO that's always a better idea than to simply expect the user to know what you (as the developer) intended for button with a particular state.

Re: UX: Color is only meaningful if it’s different

elzalem — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 09:16:00 -0000

+1 for imgur

Re: UX: Color is only meaningful if it’s different

Dr T — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 08:26:15 -0000

Sensitive <=> Sharable

Re: UX: Color is only meaningful if it’s different

Nzr — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 07:24:42 -0000

Sensitive <=> Safe
Internal <=> External
Public <=> Private

Re: UX: Color is only meaningful if it’s different

brandewinder — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 16:16:47 -0000

As a member of the color blind minority, thank you! Standard color codes often don't work at all for me, having the ability to redefine color mappings is a very valuable feature for me. One typical case is test runners - Red, Orange/Yellow and Green are pretty bad defaults for the color blind...

Re: UX: Color is only meaningful if it’s different

rauhryan — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 11:43:31 -0000

You bring up a very good point.

This feature evolved from a previous feature where the internal status was represented by a simple word with a colored background.

After we added that our customers wanted the ability to change the internal status after the log was created (which previous could on be set when you created it)

None of our usability tests turned out negative, when it came down to it the crux of the issue was that we couldn't settle on the inverse language for the "off" state.

Sensitive <=> [Insensitive] [Not Sensitive] [Unsensitive] [Safe to view] ...
Internal <=> [Not Internal] [Safe] [External] ...
Public <=> [Private] [Not Public] ...

We got a lot of positive feedback after we shipped, but I'd love to revisit this I just haven't come up with a better alternative yet.

Re: UX: Color is only meaningful if it’s different

sodablue — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 11:09:52 -0000

So look at a real light switch on the wall. As long as it's not 3-way, the switch has words on it that indicate ON and OFF. When you flip the switch up, the OFF is hidden by the plate and now you can only see the word ON.

UI controls should not simply change the color, they should change the way it is represented. A checkbox clearly shows something is checked. In the case of a switch control the color helps as a visual cue, but the word should change as well. Just like on the real lightswitch on the wall.

The iPad/iPhone switches do this, change the word from OFF to ON as well as change the color.

I find color changes by themselves confusing and I'm not color blind. It takes a lot of experience working with the UI before you realize the developers choose orange to represent on. When you're neck deep in the app you don't realize this.

I think that's why it's also important to do usability tests by showing screenshots to someone not familiar with the app and ask them what it means, or what they'd click if they wanted to do something.

Re: UX: Color is only meaningful if it’s different

Chad Myers — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 11:07:47 -0000

If another employee is whistleblowing about their manager, for example. In US Federal Law, they are protected and their anonymity must be protected by the employer. That's just one of many examples where an employee is not entitled to see what's being said about them.

In fact, in most cases, they are not entitled to private conversations, so that is usually the default for most of our customers.

Re: UX: Color is only meaningful if it’s different

rauhryan — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 11:02:00 -0000

Haha, that wasn't intentional... The title of the case is "Burt sexually harassed me at the Christmas party"

Where the concerning employee is Burt Reynolds... I have a huge test data suite involving characters from Smokey and the Bandit

Re: UX: Color is only meaningful if it’s different

Chris Bristol — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 10:51:54 -0000

Probably OT, but under what circumstances would an HR rep not want a comment/email seen by an employee? I am assuming that these cases are things like employee complaints, worker's comp, etc... and that such a feature could allow the company to hide information that the employee may have a legal right to know.

Re: UX: Color is only meaningful if it’s different

Chris Bristol — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 10:47:59 -0000

Yeah, I was wondering if that was intentional or not.

Re: UX: Color is only meaningful if it’s different

jbogard — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 10:24:43 -0000

Just make sure you don't forget the significant percentage of the population that are color blind or have other visual impairments!

Re: UX: Color is only meaningful if it’s different

Michael McGuire — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 10:23:51 -0000

An interesting screenshot: Burt Sex?

Re: The *nix Rube Goldberg machine – shift

Vsevolod Parfenov — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 01:04:07 -0000

Also you can use (works in git bash) something like
grep -r "langref" Pages/de/*[^0-9].cs

For your sample
grep -r "fn\.somePlugin" *.js

Re: The *nix Rube Goldberg machine – shift

Roman Kvasov — Sun, 19 Aug 2012 10:08:50 -0000

Ack?
http://betterthangrep.com/

Re: The *nix Rube Goldberg machine – shift

DhilipSiva Bijju — Sat, 18 Aug 2012 00:42:26 -0000

Wow, thank you. I am a newbie, I didnt know that one could define functions on terminal. Nice post. Saves me lot a of time.

Re: The *nix Rube Goldberg Machine – .bat;.cmd done better

rauhryan — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 17:13:53 -0000

Sweet, yeah that works much better! BTW I didn't know you could use the $() syntax like that.

That's why I was using the for loop so that I could pass along the arguments.

This is way mo 'betta

Thanks!

Re: The *nix Rube Goldberg Machine – .bat;.cmd done better

Seth Stone — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 13:17:20 -0000

Sorry... w/o the word echo

Re: The *nix Rube Goldberg Machine – .bat;.cmd done better

Seth Stone — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 13:16:31 -0000

Would you be able to just do this?:

echo $(find . -name 'BottleRunner.exe' | sort -r | head -1) $<at>

(comment field wouldn't let me put an at sign)

</at>

Re: The *nix Rube Goldberg Machine – .bat;.cmd done better

Artem Tikhomirov — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 04:31:51 -0000

Boy, you could use couple of hours learning powershell.