Archive for June, 2009

Scribbles

I was cleaning and found this piece of paper. I have a habit of doing stuff like this, especially when I’m on the phone; this is how I take “notes.”

scribbles

There has to be some hidden meaning in there, right?

Refresh

I was with the Windows 7 RC yesterday and noticed something really cool. I was watching a video on Hulu (using the web client) and as the mouse hovered over the Internet Explorer icon in the taskbar, I noticed the thumbnail view of the page was a live rendering, showing the video playing in real-time. It’s perhaps not terribly useful but it is pretty cool and a testament to what can be achieved on modern hardware.

Thinking along the lines of powerful hardware and immediate feedback and representation, I was, unfortunately, struck with this disappointing bit,

windows 7 folder refresh

The folder refresh option in the context menu. It’s somewhat sad that this still exists and updated data from the file system isn’t polled, updated, and displayed automatically by the OS. (There may very well be valid reasons for not doing this [e.g. cost due to hard disk seek + latency] but it’s disappointing none the less.)

I also bring this up because it was something that came to mind in the design of Fragment Sync. If you used an early version of FS, you might have noticed a refresh link in the Setup window; you would click it and it would updated the list of devices to show/update which ones were active or inactive. I reached the conclusion early on that this was horribly annoying and it would cost next to nothing to automatically detect and display such information, and at this juncture I conjured up a rule that there should be no “refresh” buttons, links, or whatever else in Fragment Sync, and all state changes should be detected and addressed automatically, without user intervention.