jacobslusser.com

Perhaps this has happened to you:

1. You’re editing a large text field in the browser window.
2. The cursor mysteriously jumps out of the text field without you knowing.
3. You hit the Backspace button to make a correction and BAM!… the browser navigates back a page and all the text you entered is lost.

It happens to me all the time. Especially lately since I’ve been making large textual changes to the SweetNES project Wiki. I finally decided that enough was enough and looked for a way to disable the backspace “feature”. I found several Firefox extensions that were made just for this purpose but the idea of having to install another extension just to handle this annoyance seemed a little much. Then I found it can be disabled via the Firefox config page. Here’s how:

1. Open a new Firefox window.
2. In the address field type in “about:config”.
3. Once the page has loaded you can filter down to just the option we’re looking for by typing “browser.backspace” in the Filter field.
4. Right-click on the the browser.backspace_action item and select Modify from the menu.
5. In the Enter integer value popup window enter the value “2″ in the field and click OK.
6. Restart Firefox.

What this does is “unmap” the backspace button effectively disabling it. According to the documentation at MozillaZine (link below): a value of 0 makes the backspace button navigate backwards in history, a value of 1 will scroll up a page in the current document when the backspace button is hit (perhaps more annoying than the first), and “Any other integer value will simply unmap the backspace key.”

Resources:

• Browser.backspace action - MozillaZine Knowledge Base

Visual Studio is the first and only IDE that I’ve ever used. It makes my life easy and miserable all at the same time. Here’s a little gem that I see on a regular basis:

Study this for a moment and you’ll find several usability issues… a popup dialog that states it’s a “background thread”… a cancel button that’s disabled… the list goes on.

I’ve always found it unpleasant when I have a number of files to upload and the website I’m at only allows one file upload at a time. If you have multiple files to process it can seem like an eternity. Just ask my wife when she’s uploading all those family photos to her blog.

One possible solution is to place several file input controls on the page (say five) thereby reducing the number of roundtrips to the server, but that is still an artificial limit. What I wanted was a control that would dynamically allow any number of files to be uploaded all in one shot. Something that would increase usability and not take away from it.

Here’s what I came up with:

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I can’t describe how excited I was when I learned of a new theme/skin for Windows XP. In the several years that I’ve been running XP (I haven’t upgraded to Vista yet), Microsoft has released virtually no additional XP themes. Sure there are other programs like StyleXP and WindowBlinds but I’ve not had very good experiences with these programs. Both rely on hacks to change the appearance of the UI. In addition, I’ve found that most of the user-created themes are not very good, have bugs in them, or worse, make it too difficult to do everyday tasks. What I really wanted was an “official”, digitally signed, and professionally created theme with Microsoft’s stamp of approval.

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I primarily consider myself a User Interface guy. I certainly know my way around the other established tiers of a well architected program (i.e. - data access, logic, etc…), but I most enjoy working on the UI. I think I enjoy working on the UI because I feel that is where the tire hits the road, so to speak. It’s where my user interacts with the software I’ve written. Without a good interface, the user will not be able to take full advantage of the potential of the software (or garner all the compliments ).

Over the years this has made me keenly aware of flaws in interfaces that I come across. It’s much easier to look at an interface and recognize when it’s bad, because, ideally one will never take notice of a good UI. A good UI will allow you to accomplish the task at hand with little thought of how it needs to be accomplished.

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