The Old New Thing

User interface design for vending machines – answer to puzzle

January 13, 2005 Jan 13, 2005 01/13/05
Raymond Chen
Last time, we ended a discussion of vending machine design with a short puzzle: What problems do you see with numbering the products from 1 to 99? I'm not saying that these are the only possible answers, but they are ones that came to mind when I thought about it. Ilya Birman was the first to point out the "bounce-effect" problem, ...

User interface design for vending machines

January 12, 2005 Jan 12, 2005 01/12/05
Raymond Chen
How hard can it be to design the user interface of a vending machine? You accept money, you have some buttons, the user pushes the button, they get their product and their change. At least in the United States, many vending machines arrange their product in rows and columns (close-up view). To select a product, you type the letter of the ...

Marriage as a cross-branding opportunity

January 11, 2005 Jan 11, 2005 01/11/05
Raymond Chen
Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt have decided to besmirch the institution of marriage by deciding that the "until death do us part" thing was neither legally nor morally binding. "Brad said that they spent the rest of the holiday working out how they would release the news of the split. They worked out together the reasons they would give and ...

Why doesn't \ autocomplete to all the computers on the network?

January 11, 2005 Jan 11, 2005 01/11/05
Raymond Chen
Wes Haggard wishes that \ would autocomplete to all the computers on the network. [Link fixed 10am.] An early beta of Windows 95 actually did something similar to this, showing all the computers on the network when you opened the Network Neighborhood folder. And the feature was quickly killed. Why? Corporations with large ...

Why doesn’t \ autocomplete to all the computers on the network?

January 11, 2005 Jan 11, 2005 01/11/05
Raymond Chen
Wes Haggard wishes that \ would autocomplete to all the computers on the network. [Link fixed 10am.] An early beta of Windows 95 actually did something similar to this, showing all the computers on the network when you opened the Network Neighborhood folder. And the feature was quickly killed. Why? Corporations with large ...

Seattle Snowstorm 2005 (insert swooshy sound effect)

January 10, 2005 Jan 10, 2005 01/10/05
Raymond Chen
As others have reported, it snowed here in the Seattle area yesterday. One whopping inch. You'd think that Seattle, which gets snow a few times a year, wouldn't go completely apoplectic the moment the flakes starts falling from the sky. Especially since it all melts away in a few hours anyway. I didn't watch the local news last night, but ...

A rant against flow control macros

January 6, 2005 Jan 6, 2005 01/6/05
Raymond Chen
I try not to rant, but it happens sometimes. This time, I'm ranting on purpose: to complain about macro-izing flow control. No two people use the same macros, and when you see code that uses them you have to go dig through header files to figure out what they do. This is particularly gruesome when you're trying to debug a problem with ...