User interface design is not about dumbing things down for the poor stupid user.

We software developers, understanding the software as we do, find it easy to look down upon those who lack our understanding.

This is wrong.
- These things I believe.

My one-weekend project became a two weekend project and a bunch more time was shoe-horned in here and there for bug fixes and improvements until it was finally usable. And then we really got serious about the other launch and development got forgotten; it was released and functional and - dare I say it - even useful but neglected.

I now present to you “Applican“, a Rails-based resume/applicant/job tracker designed (as much as it has been) as an internal tool for small & medium-sized companies. For more details see the proto-documentation here.

I consider the current release to be about v0.4: it works, it’s useful, it undoubtedly has bugs, they’re may not be critical, there’s definitely functionality to be added. It’s free, it’s open-sourced, it’s available on Github and it require Rails 2.1.

(Apologies to Robert Rodriguez for stealing and bastardizing one of the best lines in cinema history).

DreamBank merges gift-giving, social networking and charitable contributions into one place to provide a means for people to get what they want while also helping others get what they need.

We’re pretty proud of this endeavour and I am very much looking forward to continuing to develop and improve the site for all our users. I hope you enjoy it too!

(And if you’re feeling particularly magnanimous, here’s my dream )

(In the dystopian version of this future: everyone tries.)

I’m not sure if PMC installments are a product of Wil going back on the meds or off the meds and I don’t care; you sure can’t beat technical writing like this:

Hmm. Now you think. Think think think. I think better if I distract myself from the problem and let my hind-brain take over. So I went and played Assassin’s Creed, and murdered some fools who had waged war on their fellow man, or made the mistake of calling me peasant, or gotten in my way, or looked funny, or stood around yelling too much about how Salem Ali is a strong man. Honestly, once you start stabbing people in the neck it’s hard to stop.

And it contains helpful life-lessons and morals and wisdom-laden guidance to boot. PMC has made my morning - thanks Wil!

On Windows:

After the unpacking, the install process itself took 10 minutes. I could only thank Adobe’s engineers, presuming they were filling up my hard drive with yummy icons, tasty DLLs, and amazing 3D JavaScript add-ons. No matter — the 210 MB it required was there to be used.

On Mac OS:

System requirements call for Mac OS X 10.4.11 or later, G4 or later (including Intel), 128MB RAM, 405MB hard disk space and Safari 2.0.4 or later.

One fifth of a gig and half a gig, respectively. Are you serious?

I urge you to forget Acrobat ever existed, and on the Mac this is easy to do. Use Preview (a svelte 64.2 MB) to read your PDFs and us the Print command to produce them. Use Safari to browse, it renders PDFs natively without the need for Adobe’s Acrobat plugin.

Just say “No” to Adobe’s “your computer is our garbage dump” approach to software.

Update Gus Mueller decomposes the Acrobat 9 installer and Mark Pilgrim imagines an Acrobat-induced dystopia.

In my opinion, good design is whatever results in a shipping product, using the least amount of code, in the least amount of time.

I’d only alter this slightly to read “…using the least amount of the simplest code possible…”, which Phil adds as a caveat later in the paragraph that sentence is abstracted from.

“Don’t bother the senior engineers for an hour when an hour of research would get you the same information: respect them. Do bother them when an hour of their time will save you all day: respect yourself. Bust your ass, and ask a lot of questions. Carry a notebook. Write everything down. Never, ever ask the same question twice.”

Common Denomination is not the Enemy

Seems like it should be pretty obvious but nothing I was coming up with was doing the trick. The node was always deleting yet so were its children. Then I googled upon this forum and the solution was found. When executing a before_destroy filter on a class that acts_as_tree, put the before filter first:

class VettingStage < ActiveRecord::Base
  before_destroy :extract_self_from_chain
  acts_as_tree :foreign_key => “parent_id”, :order => “name”
  …
end

That was easy.

…
Original body redacted. In hindsight this post was snarkier than I’d intended and contributed not one whit to the discourse about beneficial software design. Thus I’ve removed it from the public sphere.
..

We owe the users a bit more than this, yeah?