Marius Bancila’s Blog

Dear Microsoft,

I have recently read the two blog posts about the new “developer experience” with Visual Studio 11 (part 1 and part 2). I don’t have the IDE yet (since the beta will be made available on February 29), but from the blog posts I see that you once again changed the look and feel. Why do you have to do this all the time? Can’t you sell a new version without redesigning the UI? We don’t get used well with a version and you change the game again. And like it wasn’t bad enough to do such a big changed, you decided to go with a chrome theme. This is what I call “Windows disabled”; you can’t get a good feeling of what is enabled and what is not. Everything is in tones of gray and confusing.

Why do you have to invest all that time in redesigning the UI with each release? Why don’t you focus on making the current UI more responsible (for instance VS2010 takes 1 minute on my machines to start) and less buggy? Why don’t you invest that time in building features that make our lives easier? Like providing multiple windows for search results (not just two) or supporting auto completion (like it was in all versions until VS2010) in the folder selection fields in the New Project dialog?

So dear Microsoft, please

1. make it possible for us to change the Chrome theme to the old colored theme
2. don’t change the UI with each version

Sincerely,
A concerned developer

PS: I still can’t get out of my mind the horror or scrolling with the mouse on Windows 8 maybe 5 screens of colorful tiles to get to the app that I want to launch. Awful! As it stands I see big failures on the horizon.

I recently read an excerpt from Joel Spolsky’s book User Interface Design For Programmers available on his (former) blog. This is a great book about designing user interfaces, with examples of bad and good ideas. I’m getting the printed version and I recommend this to all building UIs.

Now, yesterday I had a problem with Google Documents (which no longer worked on my WinXP machine with any browser, as it continuously unsuccessfully tried to download a 237 bytes file called download.gz) and I though that deleting the cache might help. So I opened Google Chrome options dialog and then the Clear Browsing Data dialog. It looks like this.

I was stunned to see the dialog started with the phrase “Obliterate the following items”. For God’s sake what is obliterating? I want to delete the cache, I don’t care about obliterating, and whatever that means. I don’t want to fetch a dictionary and look-up for the meaning of the word. Excuse me Mr. Google Programmer, that I (probably like many of the people of this world who are not native English speakers) don’t know what “obliterate” means. Yes, it does sound archaic, it does sound like J.R.R. Tolkien but it stops me doing my work. All I wanted to do was selecting what to delete and delete. Instead I spent time figuring whether that means to select what to keep or select what to delete (luckily it didn’t say purge). I had doubts so I had to search for the meaning of the word. Sure, now I know one more (fancy) English word, but overall, I lost one minute doing anything else but deleting the cache.

So, my recommendation to you Mr. Google Programmer is to read Joel Spolsky’s book. I’m sure there are things you can learn from it. And start using simple words and sentences that everyone understands.

As for what “obliterate” means, here it is:

• Mark for deletion, rub off, or erase
• Make undecipherable or imperceptible by obscuring or concealing
• Remove completely from recognition or memory
• Do away with completely, without leaving a trace