So this is not a tutorial but a bit of a rant. Why do so many computer programs ask you "are you sure" when you ask it to do something? I asked the program to do that. Right? The computer is dumber than a dog when it comes to its ability to think. Right? Then why in the heck does it claim to know better than I do when I ask it to do something? Yes darn it. Do as I ask!
I remember my first job in the television broadcast industry managing R&D for a company that built hardware for that market. We had a device that generated computer graphics/Text ("CG") that you see superimposed on your television programming. I was talking to the developer and was surprised that it let you delete things without above confirmation. I had never seen anything like it in the computer world. So I asked him if the customers were not upset that there was no confirmation. Answer was that if there was a confirmation they would shoot you! I asked why. He said that if they mistype something in prime time and someone catches it, they need to fix it in a millisecond. There is no time to confirm yes or know when they try to delete the text.
That got me thinking. Why do programs insist on a confirmation? Answer is simple: the developer is too lazy to provide another feature -- the undo! Think about it. If you can undo any action, then it doesn't matter if the user made a mistake. They can hit undo and correct it. If we had unlimited undo, then there would never be the need to ever ask for confirmation.
So I asked the development team to put unlimited undo in the hardware we were building. I got lucky that one of my new hires was from the computer industry and jumped on the task without hesitation. And he built the mother of all undo systems. You could have had the machine up for a week, hitting every button and changing every configuration. By hitting undo you could go back to when you first turned on the machine!
The product got released and that feature became quite a hit. People had never felt such freedom. It is like having a video DVR. Once you have it, you don't know how you lived without it.
Fast forward to now. I am a multi-tasker when it comes to browsing. I usually have 10 to 20 tabs in my browser open to various sites and locations within them. As some of you know, my favorite browser is Chrome. As with other browsers, it thankfully lets you close a tab without the confirmation. But unlike IE for example, it has a feature to re-open that tab if you closed it by accident! Simply right click to the right of your tabs and select "Re-open closed tab" or control-shift-T and it brings that page back as if you had never closed it! Undo for the browser world!
The above is pretty trivial to implement as compared to the undo feature of the broadcast equipment but it is a great time server relative to searching in the history. Worry-free browsing!
I remember my first job in the television broadcast industry managing R&D for a company that built hardware for that market. We had a device that generated computer graphics/Text ("CG") that you see superimposed on your television programming. I was talking to the developer and was surprised that it let you delete things without above confirmation. I had never seen anything like it in the computer world. So I asked him if the customers were not upset that there was no confirmation. Answer was that if there was a confirmation they would shoot you! I asked why. He said that if they mistype something in prime time and someone catches it, they need to fix it in a millisecond. There is no time to confirm yes or know when they try to delete the text.
That got me thinking. Why do programs insist on a confirmation? Answer is simple: the developer is too lazy to provide another feature -- the undo! Think about it. If you can undo any action, then it doesn't matter if the user made a mistake. They can hit undo and correct it. If we had unlimited undo, then there would never be the need to ever ask for confirmation.
So I asked the development team to put unlimited undo in the hardware we were building. I got lucky that one of my new hires was from the computer industry and jumped on the task without hesitation. And he built the mother of all undo systems. You could have had the machine up for a week, hitting every button and changing every configuration. By hitting undo you could go back to when you first turned on the machine!
The product got released and that feature became quite a hit. People had never felt such freedom. It is like having a video DVR. Once you have it, you don't know how you lived without it.
Fast forward to now. I am a multi-tasker when it comes to browsing. I usually have 10 to 20 tabs in my browser open to various sites and locations within them. As some of you know, my favorite browser is Chrome. As with other browsers, it thankfully lets you close a tab without the confirmation. But unlike IE for example, it has a feature to re-open that tab if you closed it by accident! Simply right click to the right of your tabs and select "Re-open closed tab" or control-shift-T and it brings that page back as if you had never closed it! Undo for the browser world!
The above is pretty trivial to implement as compared to the undo feature of the broadcast equipment but it is a great time server relative to searching in the history. Worry-free browsing!
