Monthly Archives: July 2008

I love Wikipedia.

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The other day I had to hook up some code via JSON. Having no idea what JSON is, I looked on Wikipedia. Basic data types, examples, syntax, and a link to RFC 4627 later, and I was set. Cool!

I wanted to implement a hash map, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do what I’ve done in the past, which is to represent each hash bucket with a linked list, or if I wanted to use a list. Unsure of the pros and cons, I looked up Hash tables on Wikipedia and got a reasonable overview discussion.

I’m finding there is a lot on Wikipedia that provides a good cursory overview of different protocols and algorithms, and more importantly, points me to the relevant research, descriptions or RFCs which describe the thing in greater detail. And while I tend to take Wikipedia with a grain of salt (you never know if the guy who wrote the article knew what he was talking about, or if the page was vandalized), the cursory overview (even inaccurate) combined with pointers to scholarly research or published standards makes a great reference.

I know this is old news: however, in the past few days I’ve found myself using Wikipedia as a starting point for a lot of CS related searches.

Another gotcha to remember.

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For some reason a development profile seems tied to the computer as well as the specified phone on the iPhone. What this means is that when you move the device from one computer to another to work on some software (say, a personal laptop to a personal desktop and back again), you need a way to clear out the development profile before things will work again.

I learned this the hard way yesterday when I blew away the contents of my iPhone, only to have things not work correctly (and deleting all my music at the same time).

Turns out the profile certificates are accessible and can be deleted from the iPhone itself: under “Settings” navigate to “General”, then scroll down to “Profiles”: this will show a list of profiles installed on the device which can then be deleted. Delete your development profile(s) from the device before plugging it into the new machine, and Xcode will load the profile for that platform onto the iPhone and things will just work again.

It’s why God created tool tips.

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Don’t hide or disable menu items.

This is what separates the User Interface men from the User Interface boys: the suggestion “Instead, leave the menu item enabled. If there’s some reason you can’t complete the action, the menu item can display a message telling the user why” is the most Gawd-aweful suggestion I’ve heard in a long time.

The correct answer, of course, is to create a tool tip which pops up over the disabled item which indicates why the item is disabled. That way we have instant feedback on what a user can do, and if the user is puzzled, he can easily discover why a particular item isn’t currently selected.

In Java, you can do this by calling JMenuItem.setToolTipText(); set the value to an explanation why the menu item has been disabled, and the explanation will pop up when the user hovers over the disabled item.

On the Macintosh, with Cocoa you can do this by setting the ToolTip text field in the IB .xib file with the text describing the item; call NSMenuItem’s setToolTip: method in order to update the text for the disabled menu item.

And even Windows has the ability to create tool tips for disabled menu items, though it takes a hair more work: by watching for WM_MENUSELECT notifications you can then pop up a CToolTipCtrl, or update a status bar text line, showing the appropriate text if the item is disabled.

So as much as I appreciate Joel’s comments on the software development industry, on this particular item, ummmmm… No. I agree more with John Gruber: you’re much better assuming your users are clever. But if your menu command structure contains commands which are just odd or hard to puzzle out at first glance, tool tips are much better than an idiot modal dialog box. It’s just more elegant.