kometbomb

Programming and stuff.

Monthly Archives: May 2007

29 May

Webdesign stuff that annoys me

Here are some annoyances I still encounter in the Web even though I’m sure they have been featured in rants since the WWW was introduced to the masses (an event somewhat similar to when Titanic was introduced to frozen water).

  1. Checkboxes that aren’t linked to the actual text so you can’t click on the text to check the box. I can only imagine how much this annoys people who actually have a physical handicap. Or, are drunk. Which I can imagine very well.

  2. Pages that don’t have a descriptive title. Come on, people. It’s about time to adopt this groundbreaking new technology. Also, try to make the title descriptive even if there are only the first 30 or so letters visible because you can’t fit everything on a tab title bar that you can fit on the window title bar. For example, have the subpage title first and then your homepage title.

  3. Text links that look the same whether if you have visited them or not. There is a reason why they should look different: computers are tools made for us stupid, stupid people so they can act a bit less stupid. In my case my computer tends to remember things better than me so it’s nice when once in a while it reminds me I have clicked a link already during the past few weeks.

  4. Text links that look just like normal text. No, I don’t have the time to check every piece of underlined text for links. Better leave the links either underlined or blue, that way most people automatically associate them to text links (because, like, in the old-school interwebs the text links were blue and underlined — always).

  5. Pages that change the mouse pointer without any good reason. Yes, there are different pointers available but they exist only to offer information to the user. And you can’t even click properly that pixel size 5 text (very often seen with other shitty design traits) with a hourglass pointer.

  6. Links used to trigger JavaScript that have the onClick attribute set but also have the href attribute set to “#”. You should put the href point to “javascript:yourFunction()”. I don’t care if that’s some voodoo to make it work on IE, it still annoys the hell out of me when clicking something that should open a popup or something also makes the browser scroll the page to the top.

  7. Usage of new “Web 2.0” techniques to push usability back to Web 0.5. Yes, it’s really nice if you can fade the page black and show an image over it. Even though that also makes the image not display progressively as it loads and generally overrides how the browser would show it. OK, it’s not really nice, it’s stupid.

  8. Finally, the most annoying thing is that the people who are guilty of the above most likely make more money than me.

17 May

Viewer2 Build 1407

  • Better tagging system (drag and drop etc.)
  • Improved search (for exact patterns, i.e. no substring matches
  • Somewhat smoother image loading (this will have to do until we go multi-threaded)
  • Note: This version could be a little unstable with random crahes while loading a lot of thumbnails

viewer2-installer-1407.exe

14 May

-mthreads, -mthreads, -mthreads…

This falls in the obvious category but I’m posting this just that someone will see this even by accident: always use -mthreads when using threads under MinGW. I repeat (so that I remember this in future): always use -mthreads when using threads under MinGW. I just spent hours using gdb instead of -mthreads.

I.e.:

g++ -mthreads -o game.exe game.c

The mentioned option makes MinGW use thread-safe stuff internally. It is not enough a library claims to be thread-safe (well, actually it probably claims to be thread-safe as long as the runtime providing malloc et al is safe, which indeed is not the case when not using -mthreads).

At least Viewer2 is fast now.