Tesmond's Useful Design

I release my initial post on building excellent software may have sounded a bit anti-UX. The UX "movement" is all about providing an excellent, unique, crafted user experience that rewards the user and delights them with your product. I perhaps implied that "features" don't matter. Yet little rarely used features are often the ones that delight us the most. I recently owned a Samsung Galaxy Note. With the stock Samsung firmware it was extremely feature rich, there was lots of nice stuff like sending the screen easily to my TV, some nice gesture support, eye tracking screen time-outs. However, I chose to install a custom firmware that was extremely stripped down by comparison. This was purely because the standard firmware was too slow for my liking, I felt I was always waiting. Of course I missed some of the features but the large increase in responsiveness in 99% of the actions I would perform on the device more than made up for the missing functionality. I ha...

My work machine has recently been "upgraded" to Windows Vista. I have an application which works flawlessly under Windows XP. One of the applications features is to generate reports to rtf file. When I attempt to do so Vista warns me that I cannot write to the users\documents folder because it is readonly. Yes that is correct apparently Vista believes that the users own Documents folder, created by Microsoft for the purpose of writing data, cannot be written to by the user. Now the permissions are such that the user, administrators, system and network service all have full control of this folder. Now the user is able to save files from this application to a network drive, and can create files from outside of this application to the user's documents folder, but combining the two fails. However, if I disable UAC then I am able to write to the folder. Amazing UAC makes my personal documents folder readonly for some applications against my will... UAC appears to offer e...