It’s here!

My book User Interface Design for Programmers, which originally appeared in these pages, is now a dead-trees book from Apress.

The printed version of the book has several bonus chapters which are not on the web version. It has lots more illustrations and it’s been beautifully designed by the great folks at Apress.

You’re Here!

This site has moved to a new server.

Change your bookmarks, links, etc. to https://www.joelonsoftware.com.

The old URL will continue to work for a long, long time, but will eventually just redirect you.

Cool Toys Department

I’ve been playing with MP3pro, a new file format that is exactly half the size of MP3s, with higher sound quality. The even neater part is that you can play MP3pro’s with your old MP3 player. It sounds great. And it eliminates Windows Media’s technical advantage.

You can download an MP3pro encoder and player from RCA. (Remember RCA? I thought they were long gone.)

News.com writes: “None of the Big Five (record labels) are going to distribute without security,” said Gartner analyst P.J. McNealy. “Unless that’s there, (MP3 proponents) are unlikely to get any of the Big Five.”

Hello? Who cares what record companies do?

One of my neighbors abandoned this cool stereo receiver. It’s a Beomaster 2400 from 1980. In 1980, I really lusted after these kinds of things. So I took it home.

I know, it looks the same to you … but this version of Joel On Software is actually running on a new server inside the Fog Creek offices.

I’ve been having a lot of fun (!) discovering all the places in Manila where URLs are hardcoded. Even though we’re going to redirect the URL joel.editthispage.com to the new computer, I’d like to get rid of as many hardcoded URLs as possible to make sure the site stays portable. There are zillions of links to static.userland.com, a server back at UserLand, which I’m manually adjusting to point to some machine inside Fog Creek.

Did you notice the cool new search box on the left?

Thanks to Kishore for the idea.

New experiment: working 9 to 5.

Today I actually left work at 5 PM, not because I was done, but because I have a distinct theory that if you force yourself to leave work after 8 hours, eventually you train yourself not to waste time during the day.

I just read Slack, by Tom Demarco, one of the authors of my favorite software management books, Peopleware . Demarco is a big fan of the 7.5 hour workday, which got me thinking about it again.

It’ll never last.

Slack itself is one of those books that should have been an article. It’s got one very good idea at the beginning, then it repeats some of the good ideas from Peopleware (like Lister’s Law: you can’t think faster, so trying to force knowledge workers to work “faster” in the same way you try to get Nike shoe makers to make more shoes per hour will never work.) But then Slack devolves into a typical lightweight bizniss who-moved-that-cheese kind of book about Managing Change, albeit an intelligent one, but I didn’t learn much after the first couple of chapters.

TechInterview: A man has two cubes on his desk. Every day he arranges both cubes so that the front faces show the current day of the month. What numbers are on the faces of the cubes to allow this?

(P.S. Michael and I are going to move TechInterview to a faster server in the Fog Creek office as soon as we can. This is taking longer than expected because he is on a fishing trip and I’ve been leaving work at 5!)

From the Fun Toys Department:

Tomorrow I’m starting on a Windows CE project. For the last 4 years I’ve been furious every time I try to find something in MSDN, and the bloody WinCE documentation kept getting in the way. After I finally figured out how to delete the WinCE stuff from MSDN, of course, I find myself starting a WinCE development project. Blah.

Jef Raskin: “On the day I resigned, I made a last attempt to be helpful, suggesting that the CEO use her full name, ‘Patti. Hart,’ in her email address, because the form she was using had an unfortunate pronunciation. The reply said that my note would not be passed on because Ms. Hart was accepting ‘revenue generating messages only.’ Until she left to become CEO of ExciteAtHome last month, she still used her old ‘phart’ email.”

By the way, whenever usability experts point to Microsoft Office products as an “example” of horrendous usability, they are usually being disingenuous and just pandering to the crowd. In my opinion they’re just attacking the products with the biggest market share because most of their listeners will have experience with some Microsoft UI problem. The dishonest part is that they never seem to offer any specific improvements. Designing UIs for a program as complex as Word or Excel is extremely hard and the very best designs are still often difficult to use, and that applies to any program with a reasonable level of complexity. Before you hand-wave about a bad UI, explain what you would do differently and tell us why that would be easier to use. When Jef says “… everybody knows that Microsoft Word, Excel, and other popular programs can be maddeningly frustrating …” he reminds me of Scott McNealy telling really stupid jokes about Microsoft at Sun developer conferences because it never fails to win applause. Good for you, children. Now say something interesting without just making fun of the fat boy.

TechInterview

You have 20 blue balls and 14 red balls in a bag…

I’ve been watching videos from Reboot, a web conference in Denmark. Mark Hurst tells some interesting stories about usability lessons from the web. My favorite: when your checkout screen prompts for a username and password, some newbie users will type in their AOL username and password. Why? They’re not reading the text that says “returning customers, type your username and password.” More proof that people don’t read, but also evidence that people will assume the simplest possible program model — i.e., that their new AOL password works everywhere — until they learn otherwise.

(Feel free to fast-forward over the pompous negroponteisms like his slide titled “This is the Age of Bits.”) The video is here.

Techinterview: How does one find a loop in a singly linked list in O(n) time using constant memory? You cannot modify the list in any way (and constant memory means the amount of memory required for the solution cannot be a function of n.)

People seem to think that just because I advocate eating your own dog food, that means that I don’t approve of usability testing.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Cheap “hallway” usability testing is one of the 12 requirements of The Joel Test. There’s a whole chapter on usability testing, and how to do it the right way, in my upcoming book.

Carl Zetim wrote a critique of my article called “Eat Your Own Dog Food, but Not as a Substitute for Usability”. Sorry, you can’t read it, he works for Giga and they charge for their ideas. His critique basically said that eating your own dog food is “one of the most pernicious barriers to doing true usability,” and then he gives the unlikely example of Microsoft, which actually does tons of usability testing.

Just because I said “eat your own dog food” doesn’t mean I don’t advocate usability testing. It’s just a logical fallacy. They could have said “Eat Your Own Dog Food, but Not If It Means The Dog Will Go Hungry.” It just doesn’t follow.