Legacy Windows DLL signatures

Useful reference to find method signatures in legacy Windows DLLs: http://www.pinvoke.net/

Shamefully, this is a IE-only. Interestingly it is a wiki.

tech/code/C-Sharp | 15 Oct 2004 | #

Book Review: User Interface Design for Programmers

Last night my copy of User Interface Design for Programmers arrived in the mail from Amazon. I finished it just a little before midnight - I couldn't put it down! Joel of Joel on Software hits the UI mark with this book. There are many original observations about what makes an application usable, concepts that aren't difficult, non-intuitive, nor surprising, but enumerated together like this in just 144 pages (including index) is rare.

I've already emailed my boss asking if the company can buy a copy to give to the development team back home.

One highlight for me was on options dialogs:

"When you are designing and you try and abdicate your responsibility by forcing the user to decide something, you're not doing your job."

"... This doesn't mean eliminating all choice. ... There's another category of choice that that people seem to like: the ability to change the visual look of things without really changing the behavior. Everybody loves WinAmp skins; everybody sets theior desktop background to a picture. Since the choice affects the visual look without affecting the way anything functions, and since users are completely free to ignore the choice and get their work done anyway, this is a good use of options."

This caps off a great chapter explaining why functionality options should be minimised - the default should just work. It's like customising your emacs or vim extensively, works great until you need to use another machine and then you need to tar up your configuration and port it to a new machine. Sometimes it's just better to learn the defaults, and stick to them because your productivity will increase because the defaults are always there and they work all the time. (BTW, that's an argument to use vi[m] - it's always there :-P

Other ideas that are gold are Activity Based Planning, Imaginary Users, hallway usability testing, "Days are Seconds", "Months are Minutes", and "Seconds are Hours". You'll have to read the book to work out what they are. Chapter 16, Tricks of the Trade is also gold. Stuff that I'll use at work today.

Overall, a great book, a must have on your shelf. It's my latest addition to my Essential Books collection.

tech/books | 15 Oct 2004 | #