Blame the Tools for Thought

Giles Bowkett :

This is, in my opinion, the strongest argument for seeing Unix and basic coding skills as fundamental required literacy today. As prostheses for memory and identity, computers are too useful not to use, but if you don't know how to craft your own code which gives you a UX which matches the way you think, you're doomed to matching the way you think to the available tools, and even the best available tools basically suck. Interaction design is not only incredibly hard to do well, it's also incredibly idiosyncratic.

Analysis of StackOverflow

Yes. Atlas is also pretty damned cool.

I'm not, personally, quite so excited by this as I am by Bespin. But it's nice. Particularly how you program the sizers by clicking on which edges are glued and which not. And the connection of the panels in the screen to controllers on a special bar is good.

DesktopZen :-)

I'm expounding my usual "late-bound" tabs model of IDEs again, over on StackOverflow.

... late binding between the buffer in the editor and actual concrete thing you're working on, gives the editing environment more flexibility and power.

Think this is out of date? One place where the idea is back with a vengeance is in the browser, where you don't have 1-1 correspondence between tabs and web-pages. Instead, inside each tab you can navigate forwards and backwards between multiple pages. No-one would try to make an MDI type interface to the web, where each page had it's own inner window. It would be impossibly fiddly to use. It just wouldn't scale.

Personally, I think IDEs are getting way too complicated these days, and the static binding between documents and buffers is one reason for this. I expect at some point there'll be a breakthrough as they move to the browser-like tabbed-buffer model where :

a) you'll be able to hyperlink between multiple files within the same buffer/tab (and there'll be a back-button etc.)

b) the generic buffers will be able to hold any type of data : source-code, command-line, dynamically generated graphic output, project outline etc.

The biggest problem I've noticed people having with Mind Traffic Control is with delegating. They were sometimes delegating without filling in the task description (thinking that the original task description would get copied across - which it wasnt't) or delegating to names of people which clearly weren't email addresses (or Goggle logins).

Now I've trapped this. When delegating a task, it's description gets copied (although you can still edit it), and the system also traps non-email addresses as targets to delegate to.

Keep watching ...

Today's Mind Traffic Control update.

The "defer" screen was simple, but not simple enough. Why make the user go through two mouse clicks - select a radio button and then the submit button - when this can be reduced to one? Now choosing how long you want to delay is a single button click.

I was also finding, when defering, that I wanted to remind myself of today's date. Now I've just added a display of today's date for convenience.

In general, I'm going to follow a philosophy of trying to identify and implement small improvements like this to MTC.

All suggestions welcome.