Het onvermijdelijke is gebeurd: ik heb ergens een onzichtbare lijn overschreden, en Bob is me beginnen uitschelden.

Ik ben voor de privacy van privé-e-mails, maar het was wel grappig 🙂

Enfin, so much for trying to be helpful.

Ai. Bitchy. De maker van het genealogieprogramma dat ik gebruik, Bob Velke, is boos op mij. Omdat ik gesuggereerd heb dat user interface van zijn programma niet altijd even goed is:

I don’t want to stir up a can of worms, and I understand what I ask may not be easily done, what with TMG being programmed in Foxpro, but…

Am I the only one here who would like it if TMG were a little more Windows-standard in its user interface?

A previous poster mentioned the mouse wheel behaviour, my personal pet peeve is the dynamic sizing of things. I can see the (theoretical appeal) of having buttons and labels change size with screen resolution, but in practice this often means I see *less* data on a higher resolution screen than on a lower resolution.

Compare family.gif with familysmall.gif, or, even worse:  tree.gif with treesmall.gif…

Redelijke vraag, dacht ik. Ik kreeg al direkt off-list een hele resem mails van “ik vind dat ook” en “ik ben daarom overgestapt naa rprogramma X” en “pas op ze gaan kwaad zijn op u”.

John Cardinal, de maker van Second Site en TMG Utility, allebei zeer veel gebruikte uitbreiding op The Master Genealogist, schreef daarop:

Michel,

The resizing behavior is a direct result of Windows User Interface standards. Bob Velke or someone else should represent the WG position, but my understanding was that the Windows UI rules stipulated that buttons and other user interface elements should be resized when the window resizes. They also felt that if they deviated from that standard they would not be able to put the Windows logo on the box–a big problem.

Personally, I wish it worked differently.

John

Nu, met permissie, da’s klinkklare nonsens. Ik weer:

Are you absolutely positive about this?

As far as I see, the Windows UI rules state “Your application should read, use, and preserve system-wide user interface (UI) settings when displaying customized controls or window content.” I read this as saying buttons and other UI elements should be the size I set them to in the Control Panel.

The rule you’re referring to (I couldn’t find it) is probably one that tries to ensure that when a window is resizable, the UI elements don’t end up huddled together at the top left of a big gray rectangle.

Take the Focus Groups window. What *should* happen in my opinion is that the buttons stay the same size, the text in the buttons also stays the same size, and the right and bottom hand edges of the list of people listbox should be the same distance from the edges of the window. Furthermore, there should be a minimum width and height on that window to ensure the buttons never end up invisible or “scrunched up” like they can now.

Just my 2 cents. I’ve been itching to write a genealogy programme myself sometimes, and if *that’s* not an indication of how frustrated I sometimes get with TMG’s UI quirks, I don’t know what is 🙂

Daaropeen paar uur later deze mail van Bob zelf (de eigenaar-programmeur van het ding):

There’s more to it than that. If resizing worked as you suggest, then the spacial relationship between some objects would have to change as the window is resized, some objects would grow in size and others wouldn’t, and (as you say) we’d have to enforce minimum sizes on all windows. All of those design decisions would have to be made by the _developer_ and that’s a sure way of appeasing half of the people while alienating the other half.

And then there is the fact that people use a wide variety of screen resolutions so what is reasonable resizing behavior (or reasonable limits) to one user will not be so to another.

It is easy to point to specific windows that could easily be designed to resize according to the rules that you suggest. The problem is not resizing the easy ones (like the Focus Group) – it is resizing the hard ones (like the Tag Entry screen)…or explaining to users why some windows resize one way and others resize another.

I think that it is misleading to say that TMG’s interface is not standard is this regard. As far as we’ve been able to determine, Microsoft doesn’t have any rules about what should happen to the objects in a window when the window is resized – except that “the effect of resizing should conform to the needs of the user base” (or something like that). According to our research, there’s no consensus among users about what they expect when they resize a window. But many users have made it clear that they want to have full control over the size of windows, for instance. I’ve even heard some good arguments for making some windows so tiny as to be illegible (but still functional).

I suppose there’s no consensus about what resizing should do because MOST applications don’t allow the user to resize windows (especially those with data entry fields, buttons, etc.) and those that do put very strict limits on it. So, like many other areas in TMG, the program is criticized as being “quirky” because, while allowing the user to do things that they can’t do in other programs, it exposes those users to issues that they have never encountered elsewhere. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. After all, many people want those features …and others don’t have to use them.

There’s a easy way for TMG to avoid being labelled as “non-standard” – that is to impose all of the same limits that other programs do. Or maybe we should just be proud of being non-standard .

Ulp. De man zelf. Nu, niet dat ik geïntimideerd ben, zeker niet als hij redelijk duidelijk fout is. Vandaar:

I actually don’t agree with you on this one, but I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree since there’s not much I can do about it on my end (bar actually making my own TMG :).

You’re right that I took the “easiest” window to make a point, but I’m not sure what percentage of people in the user base have *ever* changed the site of the tag entry screen: make it smaller and the text becomes practically too small to read, make it higher for instance and (paradoxically) text in the entry fields becomes larger while the input boxes themselves only scale in height, so you end up seeing less on a bigger input window!

As for explaining things to users: the fact is that most users spend most of their time other programmes than TMG, probably Microsoft Office-type things. And most other programmes do not have the UI “quirks” you describe. Ergo TMG is non-standard.

Now I have no intention to be unconstructive here, so if you’re interested I could create some working Windows mockups of how I think things might be redesigned…

Da’s toch niet onconstructief? Het is zelfs waar dat ik een resem inputschermen van TMG ooit hermaakt heb, in .NET no less, gewoon om te zien of het wel haalbaar is om ze standaard-windows-achtiger te maken (het is haalbaar).

Niet met Bob gerekend, die is nu blijkbaar echt boos geworden:

Can you point me to a Microsoft Office program that allows resizing of a window that has a button on it?

If you like, we make make a check box that disallows all such resizing, thereby making TMG “standard” in your eyes.

Bob Velke
Wholly Genes Software

Brrr… Dat is dus zo’n mail waarmee een flame war begonnen wordt. En ik weet ook niet of mijn antwoord er veel goed aan gaat doen:

I get the feeling you’re taking this very personally. Please understand I meant no disrespect or anything, I was only trying to be constructive.

As for your question: the nearest thing to genealogy in Microsoft Office is Outlook. And the nearest thing to a person data entry screen there is the contact function.

Loads of buttons, loads of different entry boxes and lists and whatnot.

And it *does* resize. In a standard way.

Paraphrasing usability guru Jakob Nielsen: if “everyone” does it differently to the way you do it, then “everyone” is right, and you are wrong. Even if you aren’t wrong in your own view.

Because in usability and user interfaces, the majority is (almost) always right.

Het is gewoon een feit dat ik denk dat ik gelijk heb, en Bob heeft zichzelf schaakmat gezet door te vragen naar een voorbeeld uit Office. Want het contact-schermpje in Outlook is wel degelijk bijna exact hoe het data entry-scherm er in TMG zou moeten uitzien. Het doet begod bijna hetzelfde zelfs!

Ik ben eens benieuwd wat hij nu gaat zeggen.

Right. I’m off to bed.

Or rather: off to El Cheapo IKEA Sofa Standing In The Corner Of My Office.

Een mens weet dat hij te weinig geslapen heeft als hij in mails dingen schrijft als “I find it a bit twee” en “or is that a total canard”.

Zucht.

Mark Williams verdiende winnaar, maar Doherty had het even goed mogen winnen. Schone match.

Gewoon maar om te zeggen dat het snooker on-ge-loof-lijk is.

Doherty speelt ongelooflijk schoon, Williams speelt ook ongelooflijk goed. Als het zo doorgaat, wordt dit één van die matches voor de geschiedenis.

Nog drie frames, en ik kan niet zeggen hoe content ik ben dat de BBC de match rechtstreeks over het internet uitzendt.

Waar ik het voor doe op het werk?

Voor de Aha-Erlebnis. Voor het moment waarop je na een hele tijd gelijk een hond in een kegelspel op allerlei regels en voorbeelden te staren, plots doorhebt hoe html-frames in elkaar zitten.

Voor het moment dat je beseft dat je niet meer naar voorbeelden kijkt als je javascript aan het schrijven bent.

Het moment dat je beseft dat je al een hele dag verkoopspraat aan het schrijven bent en het gewoon zonder veel nadenken uit het toetsenbord blijft komen.

Het moment dat je plots doorhebt en echt begrijpt hoe Data Adapters in ADO.NET werken.

Eigenlijk het moment dat het niet meer zoeken is maar weten, en dat het vanzelfsprekend wordt om iets te doen. Om dan meteen naar iets nieuws te kunnen zoeken natuurlijk!

Ik ga regelmatig naar Ftrain stukjes lezen, en omdat Xhristian het beter zegt dan ik het ooit zou kunnen verwoorden:

You must take the F train. Back when we started Enterzone, a “hyper web text media zine art” project, the goal was not just to produce a kind of ‘zine without paper or distribution costs but also to take advantage of the new internetworked medium to publish writing and art that simply couldn’t be represented fairly or at all on paper. To some extent we succeeded at that, and one of my longterm projects is still to drag out and highlight some of the more memorable works from the archive while reconceiving ezone in a more episodic, less magazinelike vein. At the time I was involved in a correspondence with writer and Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, who was publishing one of the earliest online diaries. He responded to Enterzone as if it were on great coherent hyperlinked work of art. In a sense he got what we were shooting for even when I felt that we hadn’t fully accomplished those goals. In time, the burden of publishing a flat-file magazine out of handcoded

HTML

grew exceedingly tedious, and we petered out of active production somewhere in the middle of episode 16. Since then I’ve kept Enterzone online so that it is still well indexed and pageranked (our contributors sometimes complain or find it amusing that ego-searches on their own names generally find their Enterzone contributions at the top of the results), and occasionally posted new material in branches of the domain, such as photo essays, an arts-news blog, and yet another literary experiment. A revamped home page for Enterzone could point to such new postings and cool offline stuff and voila! we’d be back in business with version 2.0. Sometime last year or maybe a little earlier, though, I stumbled on an incredible one-man (mainly) literary project called Ftrain, written and coded by Paul Ford. Reading through some of the rationales for the site, I realized that he had singlehandedly anticipated and then executed on many of the same ideas I’d been toying with now for almost a decade. Most specifically, he is creating a new literary form, a series of stories and other generally short-form writings that are hyperlinked and structured both chronologically and hierarchically, working toward a kind of neural net of exposed thoughts and storytellings not unlike the way we create our own conscious selves out of constantly retold memories in the forms of stories of our lives. I was stunned, impressed, envious, flattened. It is almost too easy to lose yourself in Ftrain, reading from node to node. This must have been what Hunter experienced at Enterzone but at an entirely higher level of coherence. I was alsways proud that Ezone was a collaborative project, but herding the cats was one of the elements that made it grind to a halt of its own inertia and friction, and with the advent of blogging it appears that self-directed single-responsibility independent-content websites are orders of magnitude easier to maintain and cultivate than collaborative media project (notwithstanding the noteworthy successes of sites such as Slashdot, kuro5hin, and Metafilter, among others). Ford has earned his large audience by steady diligence and by the sparkling, poignant prose he spins out day after day. I believe he is one of the great writers of his generation. We may still live in a time where he will have to write a novel and have it pressed between flattened tree-matter, or gain a gig winking at the talk of town, to garner the full recogniztion he so amply deserves, but maybe not. Maybe this is just the time for a new literature to come into its own and be recognized for what it is: a daring and in many ways more accurate rendering of the fragmented but nonetheless rich experiences of life in a multilevel culture of bombardment and introspection. And while I realize that there is something a bit silly about relatively underpaid and underrecognized writer-geeks pushing small amounts of money around among themselves, an economy of patronage for the arts has to start somewhere, so a month or so ago, I used PayPal to send Ford a token of my esteem for his impressive work. It was a pittance in the larger scheme of things: more than the price of a hardcover book, less than the royalties earned on the short print-run of a typical book of poetry. Somehow I felt that putting a little money where my mouth was might be a stronger way of introducing myself than the usual “longtime reader, first time e-mailer” fan mail I am sometimes wont to dash off, and I stroked my own ego knowing that Ford acknowledges his sponsors with a link back to their own work. In that sense I was like any advertiser, renting the eyeballs of Ford’s cultivated audience (not terribly unlike the way someone might have bid on eBay for a link from Tony Pierce ’s busblog). Last week Ford listed me as a sponsor for one of his pieces and included a very generous plug for my experimental writing space (A Supposedly Staggering Infinite Work of Heartbreaking Illumination I’ll Never Read – or just Infinite Work, or A.S.S. if your prefer, for short), linking directly to one of my entries there and praising my opening line, an above-and-beyond reward from a writer I truly respect. This made me immediately scramble to improve the site’s design over its at-the-time generic out-of-the-box MT look and feel. It’s not much better now, but at least it’s not as boring. Ironically, it looks a tad like Ftrain. Total coincidence, I assure you. I also added a new entry so that readers would find something fresh to read. To do so, I grabbed a note file off my desktop called “new short short story,” read it, remembered the incident it was about and dashed it off. A reader kindly pointed out that I published it chockful of typos. Considering the fact that Ftrain sent over 100 readers to my site that day and nearly as many the next few days, I wonder how many read my semiliterate screed before I polished it up a bit? My bottom line here is that one good link deserved another, and anyone who reads this post (either at its source or when it’s mirrored at RFB) who has never seen Ftrain (or hasn’t been by recently) should head straight over there and take a deep drink from the well. [Radio Free Blogistan]

Mutatis mutandis heb ik dat dus ook regelmatig. Dingen waar ik al een tijd op zit te broeden, blijken door andere mensen al eerder en beter gedaan te zijn.

I blame the internet. Ik bedoel maar: vóór het internet was het niet moeilijk om zomaar wat aan te modderen en te denken dat Men Goed Bezig Was. Nu is het triviaal om meteen naar de Beste Mensen Ter Wereld te surfen. En dan heb ik zo’n gevoel van waarom het wiel nog eens opnieuw uitvinden.

Dat zal zeker andermaal bewijzen dat ik geen poeta ben zeker? Noch vates, en godbetere zeker niet faber.

Hungry man calls police when wife won’t cook dinner

When his wife refused to cook dinner for him, saying she was busy decorating the house, the angry British husband called the police to complain:

“My wife’s left me with two salmon sandwiches which was left over from last night, and I’m sat in the chair here and she’s out there decorating. She won’t put any food on or anything for anybody.”

At this time the operator interrupted him, saying:

“I’m sorry but I really can’t take this. It’s not an emergency because your wife won’t give you anything to eat.”

No sympathy there. Not here either.

[Secular Blasphemy]

Maar!

Aan de positieve kant van de wereld! Mijn vakantie is vastgelegd voor deze zomer! 28 juni tot en met 6 juli, 19 juli tot en met 3 augustus, en 23 tot en met 31 augustus!

Als ik dat uitteken in een grafiekje met allemaal pastelkleurtjes, geeft dat dit:

Alles wat gekleurd is, is een dag dat ik niet moet gaan werken! Joepie! Joechei!

Och, ik heb zaterdag ook goed gegeten.

Um. Als ik het me goed herinner, drie sandwichen zonder suiker uit de GB met Leerdammer.

🙂

Takkoord, ze ziet er soms uit als de centerfold uit Skank Ho Magazine, maar op Stripped is Christina Aguilera, ahem, behoorlijk indrukwekkend.

Stem! Présence! Hola beer!

12-11 voor Mark Williams in de finale, en ik zit hier op het werk. ’t Is schande. Ik kan wel een beetje volgen op internet met de live stream van de BBC, maar ’t is verdorie toch niet hetzelfde.

Ik heb de halve finale ook al gemist, en ik zou Doherty zo graag Paul Hunter zien verslaan hebben… Zucht.

Zo’n tijdverlies die quizen van Quizilla! En zo verslavend!

Ik ben er zeker van dat iemand al die resultaten aan het tabuleren is ergens om tot een profiel van de Mensheid in het Algemeen, en Mij in het Bijzonder te komen.

Paranoia? Wie? Ik? Welbaneen!

Allez ju, om het af te leren:

You are Beast! You are brilliant and extremely clever. You can
handle almost any problem swiftly and
efficiently. You are devoted to philosophy and
are always up for a good discussion.
Sometimes, though, your anger gets the best of
you and you upset those whom you care about.

Which X-Men character are you most like?
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French Guard I’m French! Why do think I have this outrageous
accent, you silly king-a?!

What Monty Python Character are you?
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You are burning

What Self-Mutilation Are You?
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Bon. Dat gezegd zijnde, once more unto the breach.

Zwak. Ze hadden geen “You’re Emerson Lake & Palmer”, of “You’re The Alan Parsons Project” zeker?

You’re nothing, really. But you’re nice.

What type of music are you?
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