I recently had a discussion with a colleague about the design of a feature our team was working on. One component was a particular sticking point for this fellow.

There's that story—apparently apocryphal—of how NASA spent hundreds of thousands of dollars developing a pen that would work in the microgravity of space...

Okay, here's some terminology for you. Some of it is tongue-in-cheek, but it's useful (I think) when discussing design issues.

"In French, oeuf means egg, cheese is fromage... it's like those French have a different word for everything!"
- Steve Martin

"In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French...

I love these things called regular expressions. I think they're the coolest. The kinds of things you can do with regular expressions is incredible...

I've often likened working on computers to playing Simple Simon: if you told a computer to "put your shoes and socks on", that's exactly what it would do: put its shoes on, then put its socks on... because that's what you told it to do...

There's a fellow in Greek mythology named Sisyphus who—for his sins while alive—was condemned for eternity to roll a boulder to the top of a hill in Hades. Just as he got it there, it would fall apart and roll back down to the bottom...

I saw an old review of Steve Maguire's Writing Solid Code, in which he gets lambasted (with considerable ad homiems, I notice) by a reviewer that I think missed the point.

You hear the term intuitive frequently when it comes to interface design. Unfortunately, intuitive means different things to different people. Like the saying goes, "Common sense often isn't."

It's surprising how often poor design stems from shortsightedness. "Oh, we never expected it would be used for that."

Imperfect indicators are those which closely parallel a state you're trying to watch, but are themselves uncoupled from it. Being uncoupled from that state, of course, means that isn't always accurately representing that state.

We have an expression at work: Don't lose the O-Rings...

One of the things I plan to do on this forum is to call out little "Design Pebbles"™—little faux pas or oversights that, like a pebble in your shoe, are tiny things, but become major irritants with repeated use.

I got this doodad while attending a function a while ago. It's one of those retracting cord things. One side is a standard USB connector, and the other is a fitting that plugs into a particular cell phone's charging jack...

Code serves one purpose: to communicate intent. It does so to two audiences: the compiler that will reduce the code to machine instructions, and the hapless souls who will have to look at your code in the future.....

Since this section discusses design, I thought I'd take a light-hearted excursion from the practical into the realm of "nice, but Thomas, you're never going to convince anybody." A bit of "fun" design.

I've come down pretty hard on the HP6315, and I think I've made my case why. I'm not alone: complaints about the HP6315 are quite abundant on the web...