Spreading the love, one twitter at a time…
This is the error message I received when trying to bring my work laptop back from hibernation. This unsolicited advice from one of my co-workers was also very helpful. “Tough choice. I think I’d pick No, I do not want an error.”
This is what happens when error checking goes wrong. The laptop knew something wasn’t right, but it didn’t know exactly what it was.
A while back I remember a co-worker of mine saying that he saw an error message while doing some critical updates to our system. He said, “I clicked ‘yes’ because I wasn’t sure what clicking ‘no’ would do”. Clicking ‘yes’ was actually not what he wanted to do, and it created some problems.
Besides making a good inside joke, this makes a good example of the need for buttons to be descriptive. If an IT worker cannot figure out what the button does by the warning message given and the text on the button then something is wrong. Using buttons that just say ‘yes’, ‘no’, and ‘Ok’ is often not enough. The reader does not want to read three pages of text, but they need to understand what will happen before they click on the button.
I would recommended using buttons like ‘login’, ’save’, and ‘delete’. When one word is not enough, it is acceptable to use short phrases like ‘edit this transaction’ or ‘approve this contract’. They are still very concise descriptions, but in terms of usability they are leaps and bounds ahead of ‘Ok’.
No, I’m not talking about small talk. I’m talking about Smalltalk the programming language.
I am a believer in including all the programming languages I have studied and used on my resume to show versatility. This includes Smalltalk. Even though I have yet to see any implementation of Smalltalk in use, I did use and study it in college.
Within the last year I have probably received no less than six e-mails about openings for Smalltalk programmers. This gave me the idea that maybe Smalltalk programmers are in high demand. According to the TIOBE Programming Community Index, Smalltalk is currently the 36th most popular programming language.
“The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. Observe that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.”
While Smalltalk is far below COBOL (ranked 17th) and Python (ranked 8th), it is above Haskell (ranked 42nd), Modula-2 (honorable mention), and Verilog (honorable mention). So, I will ask you the question. Is Smalltalk dead?
If you have seen many web site these days, you have probably noticed that some sites have a lot of widgets. The use of too many widgets can be a distraction from the content of the site. However, a relevant and useful widget that is nicely placed can complement a web site.
During my recent scouring of the Internet to help improve my own site, I came across Google Gadgets. There are hundreds of widgets (or gadgets) that you can include in your web site. I assume many of them were originally intended for use with Google’s personal home page, iGoogle.
Here are a few widgets that I thought would be fun to include with this post.
So, check out Google Gadgets if you need some widgets. Just remember to not go overboard.
