If you’re like me, living in the Seattle/Tacoma area, and are either a designer or developer creating UX – then today is a day to be excited about. 

Today is the Inaugural Group Meeting.  Be one of the first to upgrade the faces and knowledge as it flows between developers and designers and start something new.

Ok, enough marketing talk – its going to be fun and if you’re in the area and have something to do with Flash and/or Silverlight, you should be there.

Like running around the house for 30 minutes trying to locate something just to discover that its been in your hands the whole time, searching for the cause of an error can slow down the creation process to the point of almost derailing the entire flow and will often burst a whole lot of energy.

My favorite?  Comparing various custom controls back and forth and not seeing any issue at all… eventually realizing the 1 thing missing was a # before a color definition.  What’s worse is when you’re in limbo working in blend where you’ve not transfered everything to app.xaml yet and still are working on that, but can’t go further to make sure you didn’t break anything until you can locate the issue that’s right there in front of you but somehow being blind to it.

UGH!

is shaking her fist at VS while it reports issues with something that never changed and worked earlier.

The power of the “Done” or “OK” button is vast.  This seems like the most basic thing, but sometimes you discover that its the most simple of things that are the most neglected.

When creating logos (yes, this is a tangent, but its relevant), I’m always having to ask myself, “What does this logo say?  Does it even convey a message?  Is it conveying the right message?  Does it have a story in it?  Is it multifaceted enough where someone could dissect it and come up with a concept of what was going on in the creator’s mind when they worked on this?”

The “done” button is not a logo, but in a very similar way, it conveys a message that is so multifaceted that most people don’t even realize what its communicating.

I’ll leave quite a few things out, but the “Done” button is… magical.  It is an assurance that what you’ve just done or entered will remain and will magically transform itself and send that information off to… somewhere.  It gives assurance that what has just been done is a true accomplishment.  Done gives a finality that is very similar to executing a task successfully and being able to reflect upon it with pride of a job well done.  The closing of a book to a “chapter”.  It says, “Ok, I have completed this stage in the process and need to move forward with what I’m working on”.

The OK button is similar, but is often considered to be much more vague than “Done” but these two are frequently used interchangeably.

My daughter has this Dr. Sues book called the Nose book.  It talks about noses, how they’re different shapes and sizes, sometimes useful, but sometimes not fun because they get stuffed up or burnt in the sun – and then it poses the question, “But just suppose you had no nose.”

In the same sense, I’d like to rephrase that for this blog, “But just suppose you had no done button” and gave only a few options: to continue using the 1 screen for entering data, allowing a cancel, which implies that you’ll lose the data entered, and an X which could mean exiting from that window with a myriad of questions as to whether that is also a cancel button, if the information will be retained, if you’ll even be able to continue to the next process if closed and be stuck in limbo for all eternity… or…. what?

Just suppose there was no done or ok button?

This very simple button portrays so much power and has such significance that you’d think that it would have prime importance in every mind developer or designer driven – but somehow its under appreciated and considered so fundimental that when its not present, its also often not noticed that its missing.

I have been using the Yahoo! Music radio for the past few months but suddenly, they’re telling me that I’ve used the max time allotment for the month available and that they’re blocking me.

What is a gal to do?  Try to see if one of my local radio stations that I flip through has a streaming audio.  I did find one, The Mountain – KMTT Seattle/Lacey.  I clicked to see what was playing and… wait.  What’s that URL?

http://den-a.plr.liquidcompass.cc/etm_plr/audio_player.php?id=KMTT&playerType=silverlight

Oh hey!  They use Silverlight!

Its nice to see.  Powered by credits point to Liquid Compass, a Denver, Colorado based company.

Poking random strangers thinking they are 1 steve when they are a different steve. Yay!