Beyond Compare 3 is out in beta. It supports 3 way merges!
I found this out literally minutes before I started what turned into a 2 day mergeathon between two large and divergent branches in TFS, with *lots* of merge conflicts to manually resolve, and I can honestly say I'd probably still be merging if I hadn't downloaded it. It's just fantastic.
I'll probably post some screenshots etc... soon, but if you're struggling merging with BC2 and/or the built-in diff/merge support then you really should check it out.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Monday, June 23, 2008
MSDN Downloads and the fly-out menus trauma
Raymond's just posted about the rationale behind the windows menu show delay, and goes on to point out various web properties that blatantly ignore the underlying usability requirement.
Sadly finding examples is like shooting fish in a barrel. I remember Jakob Nielsen winging about this last millennium, but as the technology moved forwards: Director, DHTML then Flash, the ease with which anyone can design their own UI and distribute it widely over the internet has lead to a flood of bad UI. Even as Vista attempts to move forwards, the new Silverlight version of MSDN Downloads re-re-implements the fly-out-menus concept, with almost unusable results.
Maybe this is a necessary pain we have to move through, but it kinda sucks that we can't explore novel and interesting UI concepts without making them totally unusable. I'm no UI designer, but at least I don't pretend to be, or work as one.
The templating within WPF is a great example of an enabling technology here, where the usability can be codified into a control by 'experts', but still delegate most of the 'funky look' to the end-designer. In this case if WPF / Silverlight had shipped with a decent fly-out menus control, maybe the MSDN Downloads team wouldn't have got it so horribly wrong, and I wouldn't have had to uninstall Silverlight in frustration.
I guess there is hope then that this isn't just another enabling technology that enables people to make a real arse of things.
PS: Check out this bizzarro comment on Raymond's blog:
"Let's not get into the "gynaecologist's interface" that is Vista's Start Menu, shall we?"
WFT?
Sadly finding examples is like shooting fish in a barrel. I remember Jakob Nielsen winging about this last millennium, but as the technology moved forwards: Director, DHTML then Flash, the ease with which anyone can design their own UI and distribute it widely over the internet has lead to a flood of bad UI. Even as Vista attempts to move forwards, the new Silverlight version of MSDN Downloads re-re-implements the fly-out-menus concept, with almost unusable results.
Maybe this is a necessary pain we have to move through, but it kinda sucks that we can't explore novel and interesting UI concepts without making them totally unusable. I'm no UI designer, but at least I don't pretend to be, or work as one.
The templating within WPF is a great example of an enabling technology here, where the usability can be codified into a control by 'experts', but still delegate most of the 'funky look' to the end-designer. In this case if WPF / Silverlight had shipped with a decent fly-out menus control, maybe the MSDN Downloads team wouldn't have got it so horribly wrong, and I wouldn't have had to uninstall Silverlight in frustration.
I guess there is hope then that this isn't just another enabling technology that enables people to make a real arse of things.
PS: Check out this bizzarro comment on Raymond's blog:
"Let's not get into the "gynaecologist's interface" that is Vista's Start Menu, shall we?"
WFT?
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