We’ve all done it, we’ve all received them:

Sorry, sent the email too fast :/ I was saying…

The email was sent too fast. Gmail helps out a little bit if you try to send an email without subject:

But to me that’s not enough because most of the times when I get to write the Body of the email, the recipients and Subject have been already filled, that’s what email clients lead you to. First To, then CC, BCC, Subject and finally the Body. So by the time you get to the Body, you’ve most likely filled both To and Subject and if for some reason you are too quick to fire up, all the mandatory fields are filled and validation looking for empty fields passes.

To prevent this I’ve taught myself to leave empty To and Subject fields and write the Body first. Only when I’ve written (and read-proof) the Body I fill To and Subject. This has reduced a lot the number of unfinished emails I send.

So I was thinking about re-arranging email clients like this:

See? First the Body, then Subject and the recipients of the email at the end.

Of course this won’t help much when replaying to an email, since both Subject and recipients would be automatically filled, but the current layout doesn’t prevent that either, so that’s a tie.

You guys think this makes sense? Would this help reduce the number of accidentally emails sent? Or am I just talking non-sense?

** Ubuntu (on any window):

CTRL + H (toggles on/off hidden files).

OS X, the paradigm of usability MY ARSE.

(And please don’t embarras yourself saying that Mac users don’t need to know about hidden files)

I was trying to duplicate a folder in the folder where it already is via Copy & Paste. In most systems you get a “file (copy)” duplicate and that’s the case with files in Open Box, but not with folders where you get an error. So I tried to rename it first using the F2 short cut. After some attempts I got the fascinating Error – Success error.

BTW, I’m assuming it’s Open Box’s fault, but I might be wrong, sorry in advanced if that’s the case!

Again, Linux and Windows behave almost the same way, but some geniuses at Apple decided to go creative, and this time not in the nice way. To name a few:

* There’s a Ctrl key, but doesn’t work as you’d expect.
* There’s CMD key that you don’t know what’s for.
* You have the F keys but they don’t work as you’d expect either.
* You have end/beginning of line, PageUp and and PageDown keys, but guess what? You bet your ass they don’t work as you’d expect.
* If you want to select words in a line instead of just letters, the key combination is Alt + Shift instead of Ctrl + Shift.

Not enough? Then check this out: even though you can solve some of these features editing dark configuration files somewhere in your hard drive the changes are NOT consistent through all your applications. Some of them follow that new configuration file, like TextMate, some others don’t, like Firefox or the console.

Apparently it has to do with being a Cocoa application, but I’m going to play here the “I’m a dumb user, don’t give a shit about your geeky stuff” card and say: “I don’t give a shit about your geeky stuff, all I want is that my applications behave consistently”.

The reason for this odd behaviour on Macs? I have no idea. What I think is that this feature is not an advantage (like a nice innovation as, let’s say, the iPhone interface), just a different way of doing things, a deviation from the standard. Why keep using it? Remember that defaults are arguably the most important design decisions you’ll ever make as a software developer.

Please.

ps: Why can’t I say “Blank lines are free” without my mind racing to sing this?

But one problem I hadn’t see hit me the other day. What about 2 users using the same nick? Even Zarate is difficult to pick up in sites with a little bit of traffic, so what about “John Smith”, “Rachel” or “Wadus”? Most likely 2 or even more users are going to have them. And because they will be registering with an OpenID provider, there’s nothing you could do to prevent the collision.

Now let’s say you want to do something meaningful with the nicks. What if you want to offer nice URLs based on the nick only? Now you are screwed. If you control all the registration process, you can easily prevent duplicates and the hot nicks like suPerFUcker77 are given away on a strictly first-come-first-served basis.

To bypass that you could do various things. For example StackOverflow adds their internal user ID to the URLs (see me here) which is an acceptable solution.

But this problem is also a usability problem. People are going to find several users with the same nick and they are not used to it. Let’s say a forum implements OpenID and they get me hanging out and posting. You get a bunch of posts by “Zarate” with my nice Gravatar by its side. Now, 6 months later another Zarate comes in. As opposed to the first one, new Zarate turns out to be a clever guy and on top of that he has another avatar. User will be confused: “What? This Zarate now is clever? And what’s up with the new avatar?” Eventually they’ll figure out what’s going on, but sure there’s going to be some confusion.

And that’s because on the internet we are not used to duplicated nicks. In real life it’s perfectly normal having 2 people in the same group with the same name because they have different faces, different voices and you just can see they are different. But there’s only one Zarate in unvlog, there’s only one Zarate in Planetaki, etc.

Maybe this is something that is inevitable in the long term as more and more people have an internet life, but today I think is a little bit of a problem that adds up to the OpenID list. If you are interested here you have a bunch of links about OpenID, help yourself.

* Using OpenID how do you handle 2 accounts with the same nick
* OpenID for non-SuperUsers
* Security risks associated with me using OpenId as the authentication method on my site
* OpenID Is Why I Hate The Internet
* How to address OpenID providers downtime?

I switched from Windows to Ubuntu and I didn’t have a single usability problem. Full stop*. I had many problems, but not usability related. So here comes the first round of the Incredibly annoying Macs.

Desktops or spaces (Apple’s marketing team dixit) work in Linux as you would expect. For example, this is my usual working environment in Ubuntu:

Desktop 1: Working stuff, usually involving Firefox opened with whatever I’m doing.
Desktop 2: Music player kicking plus Firefox opened with GMail opened.

Nice’n'easy. Now, let’s go to the Mac. Open FF in desktop 1, switch to desktop 2, click on FF and……. ops! I’m taken to desktop 1. WTF???? How on earth you justify from an usability point of view that opening an application switches desktops? C’mon…

You have to Google the problem to find out that you can go to Preferences > Exposé and spaces > Spaces and click on “When switching to an application, switch to a space with open windows for the application”. Fuck me. What about “Keep all application’s windows in the same space”?

Anyway. I have a ton more, I’ll post them as soon as they hit me again. Of course feel free to blog about “incredibly annoying Windows” or “incredibly annoying Ubuntu” or “incredibly annoying whatever”. The difference is that they don’t proclaim themselves as the most usable system in the world.

Have a nice day!

* Ok, I shouldn’t lie. In Windows when you are on the console both “cd ..” and “cd..” work. In Linux (and Macs!) only “cd ..”.