Design, Coding, and Linux blog by Mehron Kugler
I audit applications and websites that I feel have bad design or bad behavior, and explain how to make it better.
As an example: Notepad++ is one of my favorite Windows text editors. I can trust it to restore my previous working session. I use it to quickly open new notes and store information that I need on-demand. I never need to save the data because the application always saves the state correctly. I have been…
Using Jira is a bit of an alienating and disempowering experience. What gives? The UI regularly lies to me Q: How is it that I don’t have access to something I created?A: I’ve been logged out of the system by their software, but the software has no idea it logged me out. My powers are…
Currently on Windows 10 I’m not able to set Firefox as the default browser. This falls into a clever category of “useful bugs” so trivial that it’ll never be fixed. Hey, if the competitor’s product doesn’t register properly in our system, whose fault is that?
I went to install Docker for Windows today. It told me that in order for Docker to work, I had to enable Hyper-V, which would make VirtualBox unusable. So in order for it to “work”, it needs to disable the competition. Convenient. “Hyper-V and Containers features are not enabled. Do you want to enable them…
Give users the ability to escape any system notifications, with no strings attached. Notifications should respect users’ freedoms. And no more daily nags!
I can operate my Macbook in “closed-shell” mode but I never knew about it until I accidentally shut my laptop with my external monitor plugged in … and my monitor stayed on, to my surprise.
Recently the Tables dropdown menu was taken out of Google Docs with no warning, and no user survey was issued to me to discover my work preferences. There’s a better way to make changes.
I plug in my phone to start charging it. The Android File Transfer app auto-starts on my Mac, and moments later, a popup invades my screen and makes me stop whatever I’m doing. “Can’t access device storage,” it says, along with some other noise. It’s time for a redesign.