It might have always been this way, but Flickr is making some odd choices when paging their photos. As you can see in the screenshot, it stacks the photos in three columns, but only completely fills the first two, leaving an empty slot in the last column.

I’ve tried this with several different searches, different ordering, etc, and it appears to be random. Sometimes it completely fills up the grid, sometimes it leaves one space, sometimes it leaves two. The first time I saw it, I thought my search only brought up one page of result, but then saw the pager at the bottom, along with the number of results.

I don’t know what they are thinking, but it’s odd. At least to me.

I hate regions in Visual Studio. I don’t like the fact you can hide code from my incremental search and scanning eyes. If it is unimportant to me at the moment, give me a mechanism to jump over it.

#region "collapse me"
    // you’ll never see me if I’m collapsed.
#endregion

I don’t like that I can’t CTRL+I through them nor CTRL+F will skip them unless you tell them otherwise.

While Visual Studio gives your the ability to skip to the method directly via a dropdown.

The dropdown is nice and all, but the members are in alphabetical order, not the order they are in file. Alphabetical may make sense in some cases, but I usually have related members near each other in the source. When I go look for them in the dropdown, why aren’t they the same.

Xcode does things a bit differently. They line up everything with the order of the members in the file. Also, they let you give clues to the IDE to format the dropdown into sections. Brilliant.

Notice the following lines of source and their related markup of the dropdown.

#pragma mark -
#pragma mark Picker DataSource Methods

Pretty awesome huh? The best part is as you move the code around, the markup and members move in the dropdown. A+

Let me preface this with accolades for Hulu. It is an amazing site, with terrific content and amazing usability…except for this one little thing. When I want to subscribe to a new channel, I find a convenient “Subscribe” link on the channel landing page.

What a great show! I want to be sure and get new content in my queue, so I’ll subscribe to it.

Yea, that sounds good. I want full episodes to appear in my queue. Submit!

…uh….yea. I clicked submit. What are you asking me now? Submit again? Do I click cancel to close the dialog? Will that remove the subscription? Maybe I should click the “x”? I don’t know!

Why didn’t it just close the dialog and change the page to something like this?

I’m really surprised that they missed the mark on that one.

The other night, at the most unexpected time, I got a crash course in usability and design. It was about 2 a.m. and I was sound asleep when I heard “BEEP”. I probably didn’t hear that, but I felt the dog shake the bed as she popped her head up from her night’s sleep. I definitely heard the next “BEEP”, followed but another a few moments later. 

There was no fire, thankfully, but the smoke alarm was telling me the battery was low, and if I wasn’t too busy I should think about changing it. I dragged myself out of bed, trying to find the alarm that was complaining. Check the one in our room, and it has a green light. That must be good, right? Next room, green. Next room, green, too. Next room, also green. The hallway, blinking red. This must be it right? Thank goodness, since I can just reach up and grab this one, and the other three are at the top of vaulted ceilings and would mean I would have to drag the ladder up from the garage. In the hallway, however, I can just reach up and take down the detector, and put in a new battery. I did, and the light changed to green and I was back to bed. Not bad. 5 minutes 0f disrupted sleep.

…Beep.

What the hell? I changed it. Now, the alarms all have a green light, so I spend the next 15 minutes standing in each room trying to figure out which room has the low battery, until I finally just shut all the doors and put the pillow over my head.

Where did my logic fail me? The light was red, which surely means something bad, and I made it green, which means something good, right?  What would I have done if I was color blind? What did it mean when that light went from red to green? I never heard a beep while I was fixing it so maybe that alarm was never the problem.

Since reading The Design of Everyday Things, my girlfriend fiance gets annoyed when I point out how poorly designed a door is. This time she just had to listen the poor design described in very colorful language. Luckily, she was half asleep.