Drewski   Coming soon in three dimensions

I’ve heard this quote before, but it has been in my mind this last week or so since I’ve been on the phones supporting customers:
“Computer programming today is a race between software engineers, striving to build bigger and better ‘idiot-proof’ programs, and the Universe, trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe seems to be winning.”

I also read another blog about user interfaces in which he talks about the fact that computer interfaces are designed with beginners in mind. However, once the user gets over the learning curve, the interface is a crutch. He asks a rather tough question: “So is it possible to design a system that’s suits both beginners and professionals?” No easy answer for that. We could probably all rant about how certain implementations fail, but do we have anything better to offer? (For all my GNU/Linux snobbery, I must admit the problems with the two major open-source interfaces: GNOME is too simple and KDE too complex.)

As for “idiots”, I don’t really mean it. The same could be said for everyone driving a car: I certainly don’t know very well how to diagnose the internal workings when something goes wrong. Yet I do appreciate a working knowledge of things. And I can certainly empathize that the trend (rather frustrating for developers) in computing seems to be trying to completely diminish the learning curve, and as usual, that makes most of the usefulness of computing null and void. (If you don’t know how to use a mouse or to save a file, you won’t be very productive.) Does that mean the learning curve should be a bit higher and computers demand a bit more knowledge before using them? Or does that mean we should all invest in our local computer education center?

Lesson of the week: A blog is only as good as the posts you put therein. Of course, since a blog is more than the sum of its posts, …I don’t know what that means for me, but it’s good.

So Pygmy’s coming along. I just released the third version last weekend and am pleased with how it’s coming along. I’m rather surprised how much work it takes to get even a little app like this working. I’m beyond the stage where I needed to read a lot of documentation to learn how to code what I wanted to do (though the PyGTK reference is still quite the boon), but I’m still finding that there are a lot of things to account for. And as the program gets bigger (and harder to manage), I see the use for design patterns to effectively use my code. I’ll need to read up on those more, but there’s no time!

So I just started my new job this week. Computer application phone support, to be specific. This month is just training, but by September, I’ll be on the phones making people’s days… or something. It’s funny: I’m not really an Excel wizard, so my training has been illustrative in figuring out what you can really do with it. But it’s surprising, approaching an application like for the first time. I haven’t really had that experience in a while, but at this point, I notice a lot of UI quirks and awkward presentation of features. For example, you can “set print area” in the File menu, define a “range to print” in Page Setup, define a named range “Print_Area”, all of which do the same thing. Why not pick one option and stick to it? Layers automation and multiple options make the UI complicated and confusing. Anyway….