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As developers who realized that no one will care about our product or clients more than ourselves, we took the design of our new product iteration onto ourselves. These are the 15 things we learned about user interface design in the process. Color is a communication tool... but did you know 9 percent of men are color blind?
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: Color is a communication tool... but did you know 9 percent of men are color blind?
I'm red/green color blind, which means I have a really hard time discriminating between various shades which use these colors (reds/greens/browns, blues/purples, etc.).
To all developers/designers: Please stop using JUST color to communicate something. If you must, please use shapes with the color. Example: You want to show a quick glance status of something, so you have a circle that changes color, Red, Green, Yellow. Rather than a single shape showing multiple colors, have a Red square, a Green circle, and a Yellow triangle.
As of late 2008, 10% of Code Project respondents are color blind: http://www.codeproject.com/script/Surveys/Results.aspx?srvid=850[^].
Be The Noise
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I remember 20 years ago when people would throw color into web pages, and it was horrible. Still see web pages with horrible contrast.
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Karl Sanford wrote: As of late 2008, 10% of Code Project respondents are color blind
Most people start using Code Project with normal vision, but the longterm exposure to orange / green forces them to become color blind.
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Orange and Green you say? Huh, learn something new every day. 
Be The Noise
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It's not so much blindness as ignorance of every other color.
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No 9: Visual Studio 2012 Explained
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"If people are doing a difficult task, decrease the level of arousal by eliminating any distracting elements such as colors, sounds or movement."
What? What type of interface are we on about here? 
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The Visual Studio 2012 interface?
cheers,
Chris Maunder
The Code Project | Co-founder
Microsoft C++ MVP
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- Your application will receive about 10% of the attention of a typical user.
- You are not a typical user.
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Visual Studio 2012 is absolutely the best IDE in the world and, with the latest version, it has sorted most of the big problems (from my point of view the previous version was a bit slow). I’m not a big fan of extensions because they often make Visual Studio unstable and/or slow, but I’ll make an exception because in this case it’s incredibly cool! What are your favorite extensions?
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What I would like is something that would create UML diagrams. The class diagram that Microsoft provides with Visual Studio is only of limited usefulness (almost useless). Would like some free add-in. Getting my company to pay for it, ha 
modified 24-Aug-12 12:58pm.
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Vim emulator for VS - VsVim[^]
[Edit - fixed the link]
modified 27-Aug-12 9:10am.
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Some folks honestly hate vi.
Veni, vidi, vici.
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CPallini wrote: Some folks honestly hate vi
Must be emacsians 
In fact, I am pretty sure the downvotes are due to the broken link I left (and fixed in the meantime).
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Nemanja Trifunovic wrote: In fact, I am pretty sure the downvotes are due to the broken link I left (and fixed in the meantime).
I suppose your are quite optimist.
Veni, vidi, vici.
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I’m not really a hard core gamer anymore, but my fascination with programming did begin with video games (and specifically, rendering algorithms). So when I saw John Carmack’s 2012 QuakeCon keynote show up in my feed, I thought I’d listen to a bit of it and learn a bit about the state of game design and development. What I heard instead was a hacker’s hacker talk about his recent realization that software engineering is actually a social science. It’s about social interactions between the programmers or even between yourself spread over time.
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Anyone can write a spec. What matters is what software is supporting the protocol, what content is available through it and how compelling is the content. RSS won not because of its great design, but because there was a significant amount of valuable content flowing through it. Formats and protocols by themselves are meaningless. Show me the content.
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Do people expect to achieve something more when they use encryption? Probably yes. Often people think they secure their application if they magically use encryption. Now we get to the point. Encryption itself is most of the time useless as is. Encrypted data is malleable, which means the adversary can change the contents of your plaintext by modifying the ciphertext. This is something a secure system should not let happen under any circumstances. Encryption is not a magic unicorn that makes your app secure.
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Sorry, but my BS meter just went off
Quote: History has shown that letting people choose arguments like encryption mode leads usually to no good
History has actually shown that letting people mess around with tried and true encryption methods leads to no good.
Encryption should be something that is a nice, smooth, black box. You pass in your text, you pass in your key, and you're done. Better security is enforced by having different levels of keys (a different one per installation, per machine, per user, and for really secure stuff, per message). But the actual settings should not be something that can be manipulated by the user in a way that results in a less secure ciphertext.
No one reads the manuals. Write your systems to accept this.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
The Code Project | Co-founder
Microsoft C++ MVP
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