Bad Interaction Design - Installing Acrobat Reader

It just so happened that two day after I was impressed with Firefox' good interaction design, I was utterly annoyed by the installing process of Acrobat Reader.

What is so wrong about downloading an exe file that is an installer (using any download manager that I want), run it, and choose the location that I want to install the program???

Oh no... You need to install the nice "Acrobat Get", which is either an ActiveX control for IE or Firefox plugin, which of course means that you have to set the security setting on your browser. Then you have to wait for that thing to come up, start downloading, and silently install the program at the place where it sees fit (which happens to be my C drive that has only 1.5 GB left).

So I ended up with even smaller space on C drive (40 GB free space on D drive). And guess what, my computer hung during the process and I had to do a hardware shutdown (holding on to power button for 5 seconds).

Update: Tom just commented and provided this link to download the installer.

ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/win/8.x/8.1/enu/AdbeRdr810_en_US.exe

Thanks! I love internet!

Test Doubles

This is a nice article that covers the topic very well. Stub, Mock, etc., are all part of the test double.

Pay attention to the very first paragraph. Going out of this context is how mocks are getting abused.

Good Interaction Design: Closed Tab List

I was very delighted to discover the "Recently closed tab" feature in firefox!

If you accidentally close a tab, you can now recover it through the menu "History-->Recently Closed Tabs". And guess what, your history is available as well!

Now that is a good interaction design.

Remote vs Collocated Team

There is a heated but surprisingly friendly discussion about Remote vs Collocated Team going on right now at Yahoo! agile-usability group. I have just started paying attention (and try to follow it) this weekend because the daily digest I get each day is full of it now.

It is pretty interesting to read. Well, if you have done XP coach or consulting at a firm that is not so hot on everything about agile, you might appreciate it more.

It is also interesting to point out that the very first post started with this:

Maybe this is not a hotly debated topic any more since ...

rSpec 1.0.4

Busy with BuildMaster, selenium-ruby, and Entrance, I have not looked at rspec for a while.

Until the Code Kata with rSpec we did at BayXP last week.

Boy have they changed...

And all for the better I'll say, after converted one file last night. Personally I liked the 'specify' more like 'it'. Actually, I thought they would go with 'should' since I type that at the beginning of the every specification name.

But that is small thing. With the new version, it would be a lot easier to come up with new matchers, re-use behaviors.

Update: Check out the rspec report I have after converting to this version! It is actually cool to see the broken tests report, more so than the passing report that rspec has itself

http://buildmaster.rubyforge.org/rspec/