Cubelogic Improv

Yesterday I started a new job, which requires to work on a Windows 2000 workstation. The corporate environment is set up to use Outlook as email application. I confess I never had the “luck”-ahem misfortune to actually use that bloated monster. Anyway, I don’t want to digress on why Outlook is a bloated monster, I just want to point out a design error in a very useful function for an email application: the “Find” function. Finding stuff happens at least on two levels in an email client: at the application level, to search through all your emails (or all the emails inside a folder), and at the message level, to search inside the current message. From a user point of view the concept behind the operation is the same, and the logic is almost the same. Yet the following happens in Microsoft Outlook:

• the application level “find” is located under the “Tools” menu (!?), and has a CTRL-E shortcut; moreover, there’s an “Advanced find” feature with a CTRL-SHFT-F shortcut. (By the way, why using two different letters for the same shortcuts? My head gets easily confused!)
• the message level “find” is located under the “Edit” menu and has a F4 (?!? another one?!?) shortcut. There’s no advanced find.

So, for one single concept (“finding stuff”), there are three different, distinct, non-substitutive approaches. Nicely done.

On the Mac, things are a little better. Finding stuff on the Mac is – at least – a coherent experience throughout all applications: the system provides a default search panel, usually located inside the Edit menu, with a default keyboard shortcut. That is, the find function is recognized as a common applications feature by the system native frameworks. However, even Apple’s design is flawed. The default find panel (the one you find in TextEdit for instance), has a dual function: Finding stuff, and (!) Replacing stuff. Why? To save some coding. Yet this is illogical: although the latter subsumes the former, it is not intuitive to click on “Find” to perform a “Replace” operation. I know that to actually replace something you’ve got to find it first (and so there IS a logic in clicking on “Find”), but wasn’t the Mac supposed to be for everyone? It seems like Apple just wanted to reuse the same software component (and same UI) to do two things at once. This is cool, but it makes me angry because it would have been incredibly easy to achieve the same level of code reuse, and make two separate Find / Replace panels. Or even simpler, add an explicit “Replace” menu option that actually calls the same exact panel of the “Find” option.

Ho scoperto che – a quanto pare – il linguaggio ADA è il linguaggio il cui design è stato il più costoso della storia. Autore: il dipartimento della difesa statunitense. Il progetto mi sembra nacque nel 1975 e continuò fino al maggio del ‘79. Maggiori informazioni sono qui: http://www.cs.kent.edu/~jobowen/stlang/report.html.

“Ada has static typing, static scope, block scope, and scope/lifetime of variables similar to C++, but also supports dynamic scoping for objects and inheritance. Ada has built-in concurrency handling.”

CSS can be pretty amazing. I just found this game entirely realized with CSS. And the entire site contains many “cutting edge CSS experiments”.

Abbastanza sorprendentemente, ho scoperto che esiste un “nuovo” (forse non tanto nuovo) virus killer per M$ Windows: Avast! Antivirus. E’ gratis per utenti casalinghi, l’azienda che lo produce non sembra maligna, e il loro sito ispira fiducia (molto più di Norton). La cosa inusuale è che a farmi scoprire questo “nuovo” software è stato mio babbo, che ringrazio di cuore.

Today, after hearing the news on CNN, I sent them this letter:

Dear CNN,

today, at 12:50 Pacific time, I was watching your news report on the CNN Headlines News channel. One of the titles was about the liberation of the Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena in Iraq, and the death of Nicola Calipari (Sgrena’s bodyguard). They were both shot by US gunfire.

The news just didn’t sound right: more or less it was, “Sgrena was liberated and injured by US gunfire after she failed to stop at a check point”. With a headline like that, everything sounds “ok”, everythang’s cool, simple, normal, in a logical sequence of events: simply put, it sounds acceptable. But the thing is, forgive my language, this event is NOT fucking acceptable! That’s the “key” point here. And as journalists you have to communicate this “no acceptance” thing, this unacceptable tragedy.

Therefore, dear CNN, I feel like I have a few things to ask you to do in the future (and I’m gonna break it down for you guys):

1. when you have to report the death of an innocent Italian man by means of “friendly” US gunfire in Iraq, please don’t fail to highlight that an innocent Italian man was actually killed by his supposed allies.
2. also, please don’t make every tragedy sound like it’s acceptable, when it’s not. I believe American people are incredibly resourceful people, and they can handle the blow and the sadness.
3. generally speaking, when you make headlines please don’t forget to include the “key points”. For instance, the death of Calipari is definitely a key point (although unsettling, see (1) and (2)). If you fail to report it in the titles, you are not doing a good job.

That’s it. I rely on you guys for some decent news. I don’t want to put you in the same league of the ghouls at Fox News.

Ettore Pasquini

This is unfair…. Jef Raskin is dead…. and he was only 61. And appearently the preview release of Archy is almost ready.

Jef viewed good design as a moral duty, holding interface designers to the same ethical standards as surgeons.

Since I am receiving a lot of spam comments, I installed ThreeStrikeSpam and Kitten’s Spam Words plugins, let’s see if they work. This nice page by LaughingLizard/Mark Ghosh page contains a list of other useful WordPress plugins.

I just upgraded this blog to WordPress 1.5. Installation went smooth thanks to the excellent instructions provided by the WordPress team. After the upgrade I noticed some pretty big rendering problems in the admin pages using Safari. For instance, the composition page doesn’t display the Quicktags editing buttons; there are many box alignment errors; also, the upper title does not display correctly. Everything works in Camino.