Lloyd's Lounge

Talk about coincidence; Slashdot just linked to an article by ESR talking about his horror story configuring CUPS. I mentioned in my last entry about recently configuring CUPS myself but I didn't go into any detail. Yeah, it was a bear, but I've come to expect that from anything I want to do with Linux. Setting up Samba and running CUPS through that was the solution to my network printing problem. Getting that to work with CUPS was non-obvious as well.

This is one of the many reasons I purchased my powerbook instead of an IBM laptop to put Linux on. ESR is absolutely correct in his rant. I also approve of his use of the word 'fecklessness' because on the grounds that I enjoy the antique way it rolls off the tongue. This phrase sums up the rant well: "Rule 1 of writing software for nontechnical users is this: if they have to read documentation to use it you designed it wrong".

In other news, I really like OS X's Interface Builder. Its ability to place widgets in relation to one another is beautiful. Getting things to work correctly together required a bit of banging my head against the wall but Apple's docs came to the rescue and I learned how to control-drag. This aspect I think falls into the category of non-obvious interface design but it works so well in practice I can't complain. It's not like "Aunt Tillie the archetypal nontechnical user" is ever going to be running Interface Builder.

Expect to see version 1.1 of the Drop Saver up fairly soon.

I love how those guides show up automatically as you move the little widgets around in Interface Builder. Perfect for the super-anal, like myself. My adventures w/ Cocoa have slowed a little now that I'm back in school full swing and mostly coding in straight C. Luckily, my instructor also teaches the object-oriented classes w/ Java and C++ so he tends to try to put everything in perspective of OOP. If it were up to him, C would be an elective instead of a prerequisite for the other classes.