My Axure grievances

Hi, I have now used Axure RP for some months now (I used to use Keynote) and before you read this post I want to assure the reader that I still think it is an awesome tool and essential for my work. However, there are a lot of things rotten in the state of Axure and these are the things that get on my nerves on a daily basis:

Interaction

1, What's up with the Windows 95 interaction style? Dialogs upon dialogs and then there are more dialogs. You would think that a product for people in the field wouldmake use of a more modern design pattern like the inspector pattern. This becomes blatantly obvious when you move from Keynote to Axure RP. Why are so many modal dialogues (case editor being the most obvious example)!

2. There's no drag 'n drop for lists, just a bunch of up and down buttons. Once again this make me feel all 1995 inside.

Weird stuff/annoyances

1, Double clicking on a big chunk of text doesn't take you to where you clicked butrather to the middle of the text field. How does that match anyone’s mental model?

2, Weird auto-scrolling in lists. Using the dynamic panels panel to edit stuff and then when closing the dialogue the list scroll to another position. Once again I fail to see how that matches anyone’s expectations?

3, Why doesn’t hidden stuff stay hidden? If I have master with a bunch of dynamic panels and I set them to hidden they show up in on the page where I use that master anyway, usually blocking important stuff. It's frustrating when making mockups of dynamic panels or popup menus.

Features

1, No compound-elements. I cannot say that all these elements belong to an other element without resorting to dynamic panels and adding state.

2, No assigning events to multiple elements. This gets especially tedious when you have a button with an image and a text. My solution is to add a transparent rectangle on top of it all and adding the case to it, but then you miss all the niceties such as roll-overs en onclick behaviour.

3, No ruler guides. This is a major omission. Since there is an automatic snap to grid it becomes a massive annoyance when you want to align with something that is off the grid.

4, Text layout is sorely lacking with line height being the most obvious omission.

5, No ability to mark something as "fixed" (like the CSS property).

6, Some frequently used event types are missing such as onscroll and onkeydown.

CUA of the Month

Guess who is Certified Usability Analyst of the Month?

Creating Successful Style Guides

Stumbled across this interesting read at Johnny Holland Magazine:

Creating Successful Style Guides

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Tomcat Manager for Mac OS X

Finally some recognition :)

Tomcat Manager on Softpedia

My Impressions of REALbasic - No refactoring, seriously?

I've started using REALbasic for a project at work for a while now. It's a legacy product and someone somewhere decided to go with REALBasic and when you pick REALBasic you also pick the IDE from REAL Software whether you like it or not.

After using it for a couple of days I can honestly say that it's not as bad as I thought but it's not a pleasant experience.

First off, I must say I applaud the effort of trying to create a development environment that let's you create apps for both Mac OS X, Windows and Linux in a graphical IDE. But there are some serious issues with it that I think people need to know about before getting started.

My biggest grievance is that there is no proper refactoring tool, if you are used to working in Eclipse or Visual Studio it's back to search and replace. This is not a problem for small project but it quickly becomes a big problem when you realise that you forgot to rename the main window and have tons of references to "Window1".

The second biggest problem is that it enforced bad architecture in the same way that Visual Basic does. It's easy to be tempted to duplicate the event handling code under every control.

Third, If you like Basic syntax it's great. Unfortunately I don't. Stuff like using the equal sign for equality and assignment is just error prone.

Forth, you need to buy the professional edition to get access to container controls. Without them creating dynamic user interfaces is really really really tedious and cumbersome. You also need to resort to showing stuff in message boxes for quick debugging. Only in the professional edition do you get access to writing to the console.

Fifth, Why can't I just browse the source code? Why am I restricted to viewing it a piece at a time through clicking on events in the editor?

I'll post more on this as I progress...

Cudos to Google regarding spell checking

I've found myself using Google Chrome more and more in favour of Safari. And today i discovered what might be it's greatest feature if you like me need to switch between languages a lot.

This is the standard Apple Spell checker. Everything is hidden in dialogues and menus. I might as well be using Microsoft Office.

Behold the awesomeness of Google Chrome. It is not a super advanced innovation they just effectively reduced the number of clicks by half and increased visibility while doing so. It's so great that I don't even care that it's not properly localised. Go Google go!

Again with the Mac OS X spell checker...

As an expat in the Netherlands you constantly have to battle with getting the definite articles "het" (neuter) and "de" (masculine, feminine and plural) right. They are easily the Scylla and Charybdis of the Dutch language and just like our definite articles in Swedish ("den" and "det") there is no good rule to help you know when to use which.

During my Dutch course at Vrije Universiteit I got thought the rule that if in doubt use "de" since it is the most frequently used of the two.

I recently wrote a presentation in Dutch and I really wanted to get the Dutch text on the slides correct. I thought that selecting the user "Check Grammar" in the Mac OS X Spell checker would help me but unfortunately is seemed to do very little.

So I did a little test to see if the check box had any effect on the following sentences:

Dutch
De paard loopt snel. (wrong)
Het paard loopt snel. (correct)

English
The horse fast runs. (wrong)
The horse runs fast. (correct)

Swedish
Hästen fort springer. (wrong)
Hästen springer fort. (correct)

According to the spell checker all of the above sentences are correct. I have no clue what is meant by "Check Grammar" according to Apple but it certainly does not involve word order or articles. Thanks be to the almighty for online dictionaries and Wordfinder.

And shame on the UI team at apple who put the checkbox there without checking if the programmers actually had implemented the underlying functionality.

... of course Microsoft Word would be the other extreme warning about old fashioned sentence constructions left and right as soon as there is a deviation from the subject verb object word order.