Little signs of cool

Often you find them where they are least expected. As in the automated build procedure of a big dull financial corporation. It sends emails using this address: mrbuild@dullcompany.com

Good Marketing

The New Zealand CanTeen foundation, that helps teenagers with cancer, has a bandanna week where they sell those bandannas in a lot of supermarkets. It's a great idea.

But the best part is that this year they had the approval from Disney to use the muppets manha manha (bandanana) clip in the tv ads.

Brilliant!

Office interface

Today one of the most recognized UI's with buttons (after the remote control up/down volume and telephone numbers layout) must be MS Office's.



If you change the money making mammoth you will upset a lot of people for sure.

So why do it?

1 - because it's bad and new users don't get it
2 - because someone could do it better and cheaper (as with gmail, StarOffice)
3 - because people are thinking what they have is good enough and they are stopping the upgrade cycle


Despite always being accused of being only a copier, there are actually some good UI tidbits from this company (the spell-checker underline from word6, the smart after paste drop down from XP). They just don't seem enough to justify so much money and mistakes like the office assistant. But probably nothing will ever be.

But it is nice to follow
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/default.aspx
for some insight on history of the interface and to understand the reasons for the coming changes.

Public property. Keep out!

We've been taught for years to do this:

private string _name;
public string Name
{
get {

return _name;
}
set {

_name = value;
}
}

But now that we know about agile and refactoring doesn't it sound like over-engineering? Shouldn't we simply say?

public string Name;

It's easier to read, uses less screen real estate and we can always change it to the former when we need.