Think of the User

I’ve jut spent the day in the programming labs looking at first year work. When I go to bed I will not be counting sheep, but Sweepy Cleaner games and Bank applications.

Some of the work was astonishingly good. One thing I did notice though was quite often the applications (I’m thinking mainly bank here) were a bit hard to use. Sometimes to achieve an action you had to move to a menu, type something in, press a button, click a confirm dialog and then click another dialog to acknowledge a message that you’d done the task. I often made the point that if there were 1,000 bank accounts to be entered these actions would add up pretty quickly and lead to a bunch of very unhappy users.

If you are making anything with a user interface you must show it to some users. Saying “I did it this way because I thought it would work the best” is not really a recipe for success. Getting someone to use it, or using it yourself for a few transactions will quickly bring home whether or not an application is easy to use.

Weather Flow for Windows Phone

There are loads of weather applications for Windows Phone. Today, on a whim, I bought one. Weather Flow looks lovely. It also has really nice Live Tiles. There are only two things I don’t like about it. It can be a tad slow to find the weather information (although nothing terrible) and it doesn’t have exactly where I live on its list of locations.  Worth a look though.

Recovery For Idiots

I’ve just invented a new policy for all those important disks that you get with cameras and computers which become so important when you subsequently try to sell your old stuff on ebay.

As soon as I get them I’m going to throw them in the bin.

I’ve just spent a chunk of the day looking for a set of mysteriously vanished drivers and they would seem to be completely lost. If I’d chucked them away as soon as I got them, rather than put them “somewhere safe”, I’d be in the same position as I am now, but at least I’d have not wasted all the time getting here.

Don’t Buy Dodgy SD Cards

Some time back I bought a couple of economically priced cheap SD cards. They were rated at category 10 (the fastest you can get) and were huge (32G). They were from a shop based in the Channel Islands who have sold me good stuff in the past. I can’t precisely recall their name, but I seem to remember that they are open all week.

Anyhoo, one failed shortly after purchase and the other has developed the interesting ability to turn filenames into guacamole and move datestamps into 2315. Having thought about this properly I’ve decided that perhaps I should have spent the same amount of cash on cards that were around a half (or perhaps even a quarter) the size but were from companies that I’ve actually heard of. It is very unlikely that I’ll wander out and take 650 pictures in a single trip (even assuming I’ve got enough battery power to do this).

I’ve come to the conclusion SD cards are one area where false economy will not just fail to save me money, but also raises the possibility that I might not get my pictures back home.

How to put files in sensible places

I’ve been in the lab marking student work all day. I’ve watched around 25 or so demonstrations of software. Great fun. You might find it surprising, but I actually like this part of the job. Very hard work, but worth it just to see what students have done with the problem that we set. Every now and then I tell a student about something and they say “You should blog that”. And so here goes.

One of the things you often need to do is store a file from your program. You want to put the file somewhere sensible, for example in the user’s documents folder. If you want to find out where this is you can use an environment variable:

string docPath = 
    System.Environment.GetFolderPath(
                         System.Environment.SpecialFolder.MyDocuments);

string fileName = docPath + @"\MyFile.txt";

The code above creates a string variable called docPath which refers to the documents folder for that user. It then creates a filename (remembering to put the backslash path separator in and use the string notation that stops it from turning into a control character) which can be used to create a file called MyFile.txt in that folder.

If you use Intellisense you can find lots of other special folders, including the ones for music and photos.