Benjamin Rister's dashboard

Benjamin Rister replied on April 20, 2009 13:20 to the problem "Page up/page down/home/end don't work in content scroll view" in atebits:

It's good that there's some way to do it, but it's not really an acceptable solution to have to remember separate keystrokes for separate applications. Tweetie's scroll view should respond to the same keystrokes as every other scroll view in every other app.

Benjamin Rister reported a problem in atebits on April 20, 2009 12:16:

Page up/page down/home/end don't work in content scroll view

This means that people like me, who just pop into twitter occasionally and want to catch up with the state of things page by page, have to click and hold on the mini scrollbar instead of flipping through.

Benjamin Rister replied on June 25, 2008 22:30 to the problem "Lots of wonky button/UI/layout choices" in Slife Labs:

It's inconsistent both with the official HIG and the unofficial standard usages of controls and icons. It's your call if you want it to look/behave different than people expect from a Mac app, but expect users to be surprised/confused e.g. when they click on the gear and it doesn't open an action popup like everywhere else they've ever seen that icon.

Different is fine if it's *better* and serves a purpose. IMHO, this is simply inconsistent.

Layout problem: leftmost controls get cut off by source list when window is horizontally shrunk. Also, all controls move as a block right-justified when window is horizontally grown, which looks awkward and imbalanced.

Benjamin Rister replied on June 25, 2008 19:48 to the question "What is the meaning of the different rows of dots in Day view?" in Slife Labs:

What's the benefit of spreading the event dots spatially? Deciding on a particular layout and then trying to find some justification for it seems to be putting the cart before the horse. Form should follow function.

What is it that the user is supposed to learn/observe from looking at that graph? The only thing I can really retrieve from the current layout is the relative density of dots in the different areas, and that information could be more clearly conveyed in other ways. Revisiting the basic design of this is probably too major to be happening in the immediate future, but spending some quality time with Tufte and a sketchpad might not be a bad idea. =)

Benjamin Rister replied on June 25, 2008 19:06 to the problem "Duplicate Slife icons in Day view" in Slife Labs:

I'd definitely suggest using the generic application icon from CoreServices instead of Slife's icon.

Benjamin Rister asked a question in Slife Labs on June 25, 2008 17:27:

What is the meaning of the different rows of dots in Day view?

I don't understand what the different rows of dots mean in Day view.

The same window appears in different rows at different times with no apparent rhyme or reason. Plus, there's numerous instances of windows appearing in different rows even without any other windows open from the same app, so it's not to indicate multiple windows being open at once (though doesn't Slife only scrape the frontmost window anyway?).

Benjamin Rister reported a problem in Slife Labs on June 25, 2008 17:21:

Duplicate Slife icons in Day view

In the left column of the Day view, the Slife icon appears no less than 6 times. Each has different data, so I can only assume that they're other applications and the icon is just getting confused, but since there's no name attached to the icon, either visible normally or as a tooltip, that renders info on all of those applications unusable.

Benjamin Rister replied on June 25, 2008 15:06 to the problem "Activities setup unclear" in Slife Labs:

Just to add another bit of awkwardness to this—the W&DT list happily accepts new rows that are identical to existing ones.

Benjamin Rister replied on June 24, 2008 17:35 to the problem "Left pane's selection behavior confusing" in Slife Labs:

Hmm. How about a tooltip on the icon/line to help people discover that functionality? I can't think of any other source lists that involve double-clicking on their rows, so it's not exactly something somebody's likely to just randomly do.

Also, I'd not posted this before, but I'd expected that the little icon next to the activity would light up when that activity was considered "happening" at the time. Seeing them all sitting there yellow makes me think that nothing is considered active at the time, and likewise with nothing indicated in the menu extra's menu.

In any case, that doesn't answer why it's selectable. The biggest problem with having it selectable for no reason is because it induces a fear in the user that something's happening they don't understand or know about, and that the results they're looking at might not be what they expect. I know I personally spent time trying to figure out how to show events from *all* activities...

Benjamin Rister marked one of ethomaz's replies in Slife Labs as useful. ethomaz replied to the question "Getting event logs for activities".

Benjamin Rister replied on June 24, 2008 16:21 to the problem "Activities setup unclear" in Slife Labs:

(a) Not the activity title, the Web & Document Title. Say I create my first activity. The W&DT area is empty, so I click '+' and add "MyKeyword." (Why is it unchecked by default?) That's all I want for that, so I go to set up my second activity. I find a keyword I don't like in the list, so I select it and click '-'. (Oops.)

Basically, I think the problem is that the acts of editing "titles for this activity" is too closely mingled with "available titles for any activity." The two first solutions that pop to mind are either getting rid of the shared title list (do you really expect document titles to be shared among different activities regularly?), or banish the editing the master list somewhere else, say by replacing the +/- with a button "Edit titles." I think the first option is much better, and of course there may be other better solutions.

But it's just too enticing when you have a list of things and a big +/- button, and you don't want a title to be used for that activity, to select the thing you "don't want" and click '-'.

(b) I don't think I *do* want it as AND, I think that's just the way the current layout/text spoke to me. When I created my first activity, I thought "OK, this activity happens in these applications *check* *check* *check*, but only when the window title contains the following <list>."

Could just be me, of course. But some simple text changes could make it clearer for people like me who are easily confused. =)</list>

Benjamin Rister replied on June 24, 2008 16:02 to the idea "Hierarchical activities" in Slife Labs:

Well, my initial thought had been a hierarchical setup—anything charged to ProjectA also counts for Business.

But tags is another valid approach. You could tag activities and get reports on the tags as well. Tags are certainly the new hotness these days, but my intuition says that the UI for that would probably be more awkward than a simple hierarchy, while not offering that much more benefit. But it's worth some more thought and a mockup or two, at least.

Benjamin Rister started a conversation in Slife Labs on June 24, 2008 15:36:

I criticize because I care =)

OK, after totally flooding your board here with complaints, I figure it's best to try and counterbalance that. I think that Slife 2 has a lot of potential, it just needs a lot more usability polish. And as a software developer myself, I know that extensive and clear feedback is shockingly hard to get out of people, so I try to provide as much as I can to other devs.

I haven't decided yet whether I'll keep using it now or whether I'll wait a couple maintenance releases for these to be addressed, but the fact that I'm considering it at least means that I think there's enough good substance to the app to make it worth dealing with the overall awkwardness.

So congratulations on the major new release, there's a lot of great stuff there. I'll be looking forward to subsequent releases.

Benjamin Rister reported a problem in Slife Labs on June 24, 2008 15:29:

Lots of wonky button/UI/layout choices

In particular, right now I'm looking at the Activities list:

- Entire bottom button area very wasteful on space. All of these controls should probably be merged into the top bar with the date.
- +/-/* buttons are *huge* for their content; that icon resembles the standard "gear" icon but isn't it, and doesn't behave like every other instance of the "gear" icon (action menus). Also, they're typically gradient buttons, not capsule buttons.
- Day/Month button types also incorrect for their usage; that style might work OK in a toolbar implementation, though, up with the date
- Layout doesn't correctly respond to window resizing

Many of the same/similar problems occur throughout the application.

Benjamin Rister reported a problem in Slife Labs on June 24, 2008 15:20:

Activity sorting has no apparent scheme, also inconsistent

The activities list in the left pane is sorted in no apparent order to me now, and can't be changed. Though it could possibly be the creation order, that means nothing to me now that everything's already been created—it certainly doesn't help me find an activity I'm looking for in the list.

Also, they're not sorted the same way as the Activities list in the main content area when Activities is selected. That one at least has a fairly clear ordering based on time spent (at least among the activities that have accumulated some time). This inconsistency may be somewhat more problematic to remedy, however, as I don't think the left pane should be constantly resorted by time...

Benjamin Rister reported a problem in Slife Labs on June 24, 2008 15:11:

Left pane's selection behavior confusing

OK, say I'm in "day" view. I now click on one of my activities, and the row visibly selects. But...nothing changes anywhere in the content. No filtering, no highlighting, nada. In fact, as far as I've found so far, selecting activities in the left pane has zero functionality, anywhere.

Benjamin Rister reported a problem in Slife Labs on June 24, 2008 15:05:

Weird non-standard scrolling in Day view bad idea

This actually started as a report that "clicking on an application icon in Day view causes time to jump backwards," except that apparently that seems to be the intended behavior.

If I want to see what's happening earlier/later in the day, clicking on a random column on the left/right side of the window is *not* what springs to mind. Non-standard and unintuitive.

What's more, say you want to get to the 11pm hour. It's currently 11am. Okay...click on 4pm, I guess—it's the rightmost visible column. Nope, not enough. Now I can click on as late as 8pm. Well, that got me through to 10pm, guess I can now click on that too. Oh, but that only exposes *half* of the 11pm hour, so I now need to click on it *again* to be able to see the rest of the hour.

What's wrong with a scroll bar, like every other application? Not only is it clear and easy to use, you also get behavior like automatic support for horizontal scroll-wheeling on Mighty Mice and laptop trackpads. You use a scrollbar for vertical scrolling—why is horizontal any different?

Benjamin Rister asked a question in Slife Labs on June 24, 2008 14:49:

Getting event logs for activities

Is there a way to see a log of the events that contribute to a particular activity, or a log of events that didn't contribute to *any* activity? It'd be a good way to make sure that they're capturing everything they should, but nothing more.

Ben Rister reported a problem in Slife Labs on June 24, 2008 14:43:

Activity editing window should be resizable

Given that every Web & Document Title and Application shows up in the list for every activity, it gets very cramped very quickly.

Ben Rister reported a problem in Slife Labs on June 24, 2008 14:41:

Activities setup unclear

You should somehow make it clearer that:

(a) The "Web & Document Titles" list is shared among all activities and the intended action in the window is only checking/unchecking. I was getting frustrated setting up activities because I'd set up an activity, then go to set up another one and it'd have a title in there I didn't want and so deleted it, and then when I went back to the previous one it'd been un-setup!

(b) Applications/W&DT settings operate on an OR basis, not AND. I expected that when I set applications, it would only count time when I was in one of the checked applications AND the frontmost window contained a chosen title.