BAZOMBO: a discursive miscellany of topics

Helpful features that aren’t

Wednesday, March 25 2009

Dear WhitePages,

Your “suggested locations” dropdown and region searching are broken.

Eg, I want to find “City GPs” in Wellington. As I type “Wellington”, the first suggested location is “Wellington Central”. Aha! I think. They are indeed in Central Wellington.

However, this search yields no results. Neither does “Wellington City” or “Wellington CBD”, even though they are at the city end of Willis St and definitely would be in both those regions. Only plain “Wellington” gives me a result.

To add insult to injury, the suggestion when there are no results is to “refine my search”. But “Wellington CBD” IS more refined than “Wellington”.

At this point, your suggested locations feature is actually more useless and more annoying than if it didn’t exist at all. Either get rid of it, or make your subcategories work as expected.

Yours sincerely

Stephen

1 comment

Tags: usability ~ catalyst ~ misfeature

Physician, heal thyself

Sunday, March 22 2009

The other day I was reading Ryan Tomayko’s blog and I got inspired.

Ryan wrote the Kid templating library which drives this blog, and is quite the Python/Ruby hacker. He also has a very minimalist design. Its principles are outlined here.

With hypertext, the information itself is the interface. The content takes center stage while the chrome and tool areas are placed in the back-seat. This inversion of priorities has created as big a leap in interface innovation as the first graphical user interfaces did to the terminal based applications before them.

And yet, these fine attributes of hypertext are regularly subverted. Since the web’s inception and subsequent boom, people have been trying to get around hypertext’s “limitations” as an interface medium: first with Java Applets and Active X controls, later with Flash sites, and today with Rich Internet Application (RIA) platforms. There was a time when sites were authored with the goal of preventing the vertical scroll-bar from ever appearing! The goal is always the same: invert the web’s superior content-oriented interface back to the GUI era and allow for the types of administrative debris so common and accepted in desktop applications.

I have applied them over on my other channel. (I also made a bunch of other improvements, like per-tag RSS feeds, and better 404 handling.)

I often have rude things to say about other people’s usability, so it feels good to get my own house in order. I am interested though in whether there such a thing as best practice design for blogs. For example, are “recent comments” widgets useful? Should you have whole articles rather than excerpts on your home page, and if so, how many? I don’t know, but I’d like to.

Naturally, this blog is still untouched and looks like pus; in fact owing to changes made for the other channel, it’s worse than before. This will not be the case for long.

no comments

Tags: usability ~ burble ~ ryan tomayko ~ catalyst

A skeletal Python script

Tuesday, March 03 2009

Had a burst of hacking over the weekend, and one of the outcomes was the realisation that I have a few practises that could be usefully put into a template for new scripts.

So: here is my current starting point for any new script.

 

#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

from optparse import OptionParser

def _test():
    import doctest
    doctest.testmod()

def _profile_main(filename):
    import cProfile, pstats
    prof = cProfile.Profile()
    ctx = """_main(filename)"""
    prof = prof.runctx(ctx, globals(), locals())
    stats = pstats.Stats(prof)
    stats.sort_stats("time")
    stats.print_stats(10)

def _blurt(s):
    pass

def _main(filename):
    pass

if __name__ == "__main__":
    usage = "usage: %prog [options]"
    parser = OptionParser(usage=usage)
    parser.add_option('--profile', '-P',
                       help    = "Print out profiling stats",
                       action  = 'store_true')
    parser.add_option('--test', '-t',
                       help   ='Run doctests',
                       action = 'store_true')
    parser.add_option('--verbose', '-v',
                       help   ='print debugging output',
                       action = 'store_true')

    (options, args) = parser.parse_args()
    
    # assign non-flag arguments here
    # filename = args[0]

    def really_blurt(s):
        print s

    if options.verbose:
        _blurt = really_blurt

    if options.profile:
        _profile_main(filename)
        exit()

    if options.test:
        _blurt = really_blurt
        _test()
        exit()

    _main()

2 comments

Tags: python

Using Gnome Do’s Docky view with dual monitors

Tuesday, March 03 2009

Gnome Do offers a thing called “Docky” which is somewhat like the Mac OS X Dock. I’ve become quite fond of it.

Docky has an autohide mode, so that it will only appear when your mouse goes below the bottom edge of the screen.

I have dual monitors at home and at work, and I’m afraid that if auto-hide is on, Docky disappears and won’t come back, except for the odd flicker. This is a problem, because the only easy way to toggle auto-hide mode is by right-clicking on Docky.

I realised that this setting was probably in gconf. It is. You can use gconf-editor to find Gnome Do’s settings and tweak Docky autohide there. Problem solved.

Also, bug reported.

no comments

Tags: gnome do ~ docky ~ autohide ~ dual monitors

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