Don't Be Afraid to Push Buttons or Click Icons

Saturday evening I returned from visiting my son and his family in Ohio. He recently purchased his home and it was built about 100 years ago. The original seller did an excellent job fixing it up and ensuring my son did not get stuck with problems. The house has a lot of character and a number of interesting features. One that stuck out on this last trip is the sturdy front door. The front doorknob has a nice feature that when you pull it shut behind you, it locks automatically like many hotel rooms. My son made sure to warn me not to close the front door or I would have to walk around to the back door to get back in the house.

Towards the end of our trip, my son was examining his front-door latch and noticed 2 buttons. One was depressed and the other flush with the side of the door. Out of curiosity, he pushed the flush one in and the other popped out so it was now flush with the door. It also caused the outside doorknob to open the door even when it was pulled shut. Simply by playing with the buttons my son figured out how to switch between auto-lock and an unlocked front door.

I had a similar experience with some computer software recently. I saw some icons and buttons but didn't know what they did. Instead of remaining ignorant, I played with them and discovered some functionality I needed. I now use those buttons all the time and they make my work significantly easier.

The moral of the story is to not be afraid to try new things on your computer and in your software. If you don't know what something does, try it out, after you have saved your work. Rarely will it do something that is irreversible. Yes you may have to play around if you find yourself in an unfamiliar place but you will almost always be able to undo any negative effects.

Bad User Interface Design

I just got off a Microsoft Teams meeting with one of my co-workers where we saw a good example of bad user interface design. Fortunately only the two of us attended the meeting and I had seen the flaw before. Otherwise it could have been more embarrassing to my co-worker.

In Microsoft Teams, the button to share or stop sharing your screen is located directly next to the button to leave the meeting. My co-worker was sharing his screen and then went to click the "un-share" button. Instead he clicked the "Leave Meeting" button. When I found myself as the only one in the meeting, I knew what had happened because I have done it as well. I patiently waited for my co-worker to rejoin and then we finished up the meeting.

 Many years ago I worked on creating training for a phone user interface. Basically the service would call you and have you respond to questions using the dial-pad on the phone. When you had a question with "yes" or "no" answers we recommended that you use the number 1 to indicate a "yes" response and the number 9 to indicate "no." The idea is that you didn't want someone to mash the wrong number because the buttons were too close together. Microsoft should have placed the "Leave Meeting" button far away from all other buttons. If both my co-worker and I had the same problem, I wonder how many other users have made the same mistake? Let me know if you have too.

You Work in Computers?

Several years ago I had someone ask me if I worked in computers. When I replied that I did, she told me that I must have any number of job opportunities because there seem to be so many computer job postings. I tried to explain that there are a lot of different areas and that while I may know databases very well, I am not a Java programmer nor would I be hired as a user interface developer. Unfortunately she didn't understand database, Java, user interface, nor the differences between them.

Today I had the chance to attend a series of presentation given by my company's staff of summer interns. My intern gave an excellent presentation on Kubernetes and I decided to stick around listening to others, trying to gauge how well he did. I quickly became aware of how many different disciplines there are in computer science. One person talked about a very in-depth graphics routine he spent the summer researching. Another talked about how she worked with game console software development kits (SDK's). It reminded me of how truly diverse jobs in computers can be.

Should you be interested in a computer job you might want to spend some time thinking about what interests you. My first professional experience with computers involved data and so I built my career around databases. My son has taken a liking to computer networks and so that is where he has found employment. Yes, the field of computers is large and varied. My only advice is that if you decide that a career with computers sounds right for you, continue learning. The field is always evolving and technologies from 20 years ago are different now. When I started out in databases, SQL was the language to learn. It is still applicable but now there are other data tools and to remain marketable, I have had to keep myself constantly educated.

In case you are interested, my intern did a magnificent job on his presentation and made the team proud.

A Laptop is Not a Tablet

My son was able to solve a number of his problems with Windows 8 today. It turns out that the designers at Microsoft want their users to have the same experience on laptops, tablets, and phones. What a stupid idea. Hopefully Apple never stoops to such a moronic idea.

I thought touchscreens were really cool when they first came out. That lasted about 10 minutes. After that, my screen became so covered with fingerprints and body oils that I came to my senses and realized a mouse or touch pad is a much better interface. Sony figured that out with their PlayStation Vita. In addition to having a touchscreen, the back of the Vita works as a touch pad. Why? They realized that if your finger is on the screen, you might be missing something taking place in the game. Not having your fat finger obscuring your vision very important in first-person shooters.

About as near as I can figure, the guys who came up with the idea that we would all want to treat our laptops the same as our tablets, spent a little too much time sniffing model airplane glue as kids. A touch screen is a compromise in a tablet so you don't have to carry around a mouse. I only hope that the public doesn't try to embrace laptops masquerading as tablet computers. Sure there is a place for tablets, just don't try to make my laptop or desktop computer behave as one.