Finger method of judging graphic design

Katie Cunningham mentioned this in her blog post today. Since I was asked what that was meant by several people I decided to write it up so you can see one of my rants.

The method is simple:

• Put your design on a screen.
• Your hand goes on the screen with fingers horizontal. Ignore the thumb.
  
• Count how many fingers it takes from the top of the screen to content. If you run out of fingers on one hand that means your wonderful design is going to force users to scroll to content. Maybe not on your huge desktop monitor, but on the sort of desktop monitor or laptop that has become ubiquitous, absolutely!
• I have tiny hands for a guy. So for you people with big hands, try it with two or three fingers.
  

Now lets take a look at how the Python community matches up to my finger method.

• http://python.org is just one of my fingers! Python.org FTW!
• http://djangoproject.org is two of my fingers! Good job Django!
• http://plone.org has a new and improved site that is two to three of my fingers, depending on the location. Plone does good!
• http://www.turbogears.org jumps between three and four fingers. Acceptable.
• http://code.google.com is two and a half fingers to content on project pages. Definately workable!
• https://github.com gets it with three fingers.
• http://pinaxproject.com is over four fingers to get to content? Boo!
  
• http://code.pinaxproject.com makes up for the parent site with two fingers to get to content.

So the Python community does pretty well on average. So does Facebook, Twitter, and the other good social networking sites. Now think about the sites that never went anywhere and how my finger method applies.

How about some some abject failures from outside the python community?

• CSS Zen Garden is lovely. And yet the designs are often unworkable to anyone outside of a group of graphic designers looking to hand each other design awards. You get designs that take ten (10) fingers before you get to content. WTF?
• http://www.apple.com/mac fails at over four fingers.
  
• http://www.microsoft.com/windows/help-how-to.aspx goes over four fingers and includes my thumb.
• http://www.adobe.com is as bad as the stuff on CSS Zen Garden.
  

Is this scientific? Heck no. Yet it is a quick and cheap gauge as to why you rarely get repeat visits to your site or why they only visit your download pages.

Changing over to .NET

After a lot of thought and meditation I have decided that it is time for a change. This change has been in the works for a long time. I want to belong to something monolithic and proprietary, and I think that .NET on Windows is the way to go.

The .NET platform empowers me with the ability to choose from a host of languages like C#, asp.NET, vb.NET, Boo, IronPython, IronRuby, and many more. And after long and careful consideration I have decided that my next language of choice will be C#.

C# is under the stalwart auspices of Microsoft itself, instead of some guy from Denmark. It has static typing and thanks to compilation most bugs are caught quickly. The curly braces clearly delineate code blocks, and the semi-colons show me when a statement ends. Partial classes will let me spread my object code across many files, and lambda expressions will let me compress complicated functionality into generic functions. Documentation is done via XML rather than the RestructuredText used across the Python community.

Of course, Visual Studio has a lot of visual elements. I am not sure what that means, but being Visual is obviously superior to the TextMates and EMACS I have used in the past. I can't afford Visual Studio yet, but if I don't buy any groceries for myself, wife, and son, I should be able to pay for my copy in only 2-4 months!

In summary this year looks very exciting.

Update: This was an April Fool's joke.

The Dark Side begins its seduction...

...but I don't think many will convert.

I'm talking about the Python community embracing the Microsoft Silverlight Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR). This lets us write Iron Python for the browser, in the same way that Action Script is used in Flash, or Java in Applets.

It just seems odd. Plus, Iron Python, for all its virtues, has to do some Microsoftisms in order to work. This means that unlike moving my code wrote using cpython on Windows to Mac OS X to FreeBSD to UNIX to Linux, I have to worry about when I move from cpython to Iron Python. So this means we will have a big code set (Iron Python) in DLR that won't work anywhere else.

Bleah.

Here is to hoping that Silverlight does not take off well.