How’d I miss this one? Oh, right, it’s completely non-obvious and there’s no tooltip. Anyway, if you click the replied-to icon, Mail will find and show you the reply. Nifty!
Archives for the month of: May, 2009
Github makes a nice joke while you’re waiting for an archive to be created:
An icon without a label is inexcusable. I can hardly believe this one, it’s such a blatantly awful mistake, and such an easy one to fix. See these icons?
They’re lovely images, actually, but I have no idea what they mean because they lack tooltips on hover. So, cart. Someone’s going to buy it? Someone’s already bought it? What? I never quite figured that one out. Dollar sign is easy enough: Money has been exchanged. The box? Shipped? Received? Nope: it means “Shipping label printed.” Star with a pencil? Write something? Written something? At least the next one, the star with an envelope gives some clue. They’re “Feedback left” and “Feedback received.”
Why did I have to think about that? It’s not the user’s job to figure out your iconography, certainly on a web page, where fixing the problem involves nothing more than adding title="This picture means this thing" to the link tag. Epic fail.
Here was a nice surprise: Visual Studio points out which of your typefaces are fixed-width, therefore most suitable for its code view. Simple, (pleasantly) surprising, elegant. Interestingly, I didn’t notice the explanatory caption at the time; it was obvious. Even better.
Aren’t computers supposed to deal with this crap for us? This UI does a not unreasonable service: it lets me know the track I’m playing has a nonstandard string in the Artist field:
So, you know what the problem is and can tell me about it, but you can’t just make it work? How about creating an association between similar strings and not bothering me with it? “It’s not Beyonce, it’s Beyoncé” is just patronizing; “Please fix my tags”? Fix your damn interpretation of my tags. Maybe I didn’t write that tag; Maybe I can’t change it. Fail.