Technovangelism

One of the most used features of an IDE or a text editor, whether you realize you are using it or not, is the line numbers. When compiling, how do you know where to find the mistake you made when the compiler didn’t succeed? When debugging, how do you find exactly where an exception was thrown?

Line numbers are a valuable, time-saving feature of an IDE, yet, they are so rarely turned on by default. Remember the last time you installed Visual Studio, or any other text editor/IDE for that matter, and when coding your first project, you wanted to see which line you were on? Without cheating, what is the process for turning on line numbers? If the process isn’t, “Nothing. Line numbers are already turned on,” your editor is doing it wrong.

Why must developers, designers, anyone, go through so much work to see something that should be there by default? Some IDEs, like Netbeans, make it a little easier to turn on line numbers; the option is in the highest level of the View menu. But why does Visual Studio tuck this option away? It doesn’t just tuck it away, it makes you come back for each langauge you are writing in. Finally figured out how to turn on line numbers in C#? Now go figure out how to do it again when you open a XAML file.

Perhaps the only developers who don’t appreciate line numbers are the developers of IDEs. Or perhaps they haven’t learned to eat their own dog food.

Downloading anything from a website is such a common practice, but providing nice and usable methods for the user to do the actual downloading is much less common. A lot of sites I visit are software websites and the only thing I am interested in doing on these sites is downloading their latest release. If this is my, and most other users’ only intent, why do sites make it so difficult to do exactly what I came there to do?

One site I visit regularly to download from is Wordpress. Wordpress makes it incredibly easy to download the latest release. From the Wordpress.org homepage, it takes one (well-highlighted) click to reach the download page, and one more to download the release. Not only is that second click simple, but it is a direct link to the file you are actually downloading. So if you like, you can copy the link location and use it elsewhere, such as from the terminal for a wget http://wordpress.org/latest.zip.

Another site I have been to a few times recently is the NAnt site. Just like Wordpress, all I want to do on the site is download the latest (stable) release. On the NAnt page, there is no download link on the page when you first visit it. You can even try using your browser’s find tool and search for “download” and you will get nothing. To find the download link, you must expand your way down the “Releases” tree view. After a few clicks, you are finally given the option to download what you were looking for.

Luckily for Wordpress and NAnt, their target platforms do not vary widely enough that they need to have separate release for different operating systems. But a product like Firefox does, and once again, most users are only visiting the site to download it. Thankfully, the Firefox website does some work for the user by presenting the user a link to the download the correct, operating system specific release. When I visit the site on my Mac, I get a link to download a disk image, and when I visit it on a Windows machine, I get a link to download an exe installer.

Unfortunately, the developers of many products’ websites have not caught on to these huge improvements in usability, and leave you to do the unnecessary link-hunting on your own. But the good news is as I continue to find software worth downloading, I am finding more and more sites are improving the way a user downloads from them.

After running a web site that has forums as one of its main components, I have discovered that users are much more likely to delete threads and posts they are dissatisfied with rather than edit them. On the forum, all post revisions are saved, including deleted posts, so I can easily how many times a user actually tried to edit a post. When I post on the forum and do not like what I said, I edit the post, but I also have a very deep understanding of exactly how the forums work and the rest of the users are far less technically savvy than I. On the forums, there are 13,561 total posts, 236 of which are deleted and 854 have been edited at least once. That means out of the 8 percent total post that have been modified in some way, over 25 percent of them are deleted posts.

For the most part, deleting posts does not make sense. The edit and delete buttons are equally prominent and right next to each other in each post. When you edit your post, your original text is already included in the post, making it much easier to change the grammar or fix a typo instead of trying to remember what you wrote earlier before you deleted your post. And finally deleting posts results in more mouse clicks. So why are so many users more likely to delete their posts rather then edit?

Users on the forum are allowed to enter certain html tags in their posts, and the most likely cause of post deletions, is poorly written markup. If a user writes out a post with bad markup and submits it, the post will show up on that thread page for all to see. In order to prevent all other users from seeing this incomplete post, the easiest course of action is to delete the original post and start over.

So to save my users from the painful process of posting, deleting, revising, and reposting, I have added a live preview of new posts. As users type their posts, the preview will display exactly what will be seen when the post is finally submitted, markup included. Any errors will be instantly obvious, and there is no threat of embarrassment of submitting incomplete posts.