Most common UX blunder: Icons

FUCK icons. The big problem with them is they assume a level of familiarity with the product. Someone who has never seen a folder before won't know what a button with a folder icon on it does!

This can be remedied with text NEXT to the icon, giving the button a readable purpose. But guess what? THAT SHIT AIN'T COMMON ENOUGH.

Here's a good example for you; cars. I am familiar with cars, but there's some fucking icons that I can't even figure out. And imagine if you aren't familiar with cars? That's what happens all the time; there's a hundred unused buttons on a car's interior these days because painted upon them is an icon, and only an icon! And who the hell cares enough to take out the manual and finger through it until you find that specific icon. In my experience, almost nobody.

Let's bring it back to software. It's the most overlooked UX sin to have icons without labels or some sort of describing text. As programmers, you and me have seen and can instantly recognize thousands of icons. But to get the typical user's experience, load up a complex program like Blender (assuming you aren't familiar with it yet) and see if you can tell me what all of the icons mean. Or don't, here's a screenshot from Blender 2.8 Beta. None of these icons have any labels.

Fucking frustrating, isn't it?

Don't rely on tooltips! Nobody wants to hover over every fucking icon and wait for it to pop up just to find what they're fucking looking for! Don't forget that a lot of users DON'T EVEN KNOW THEY EXIST! (This number isn't shrinking as fast as you'd expect with the newer generations, because many of the newer generations use touch devices where tooltips don't exist at all)

There's my UX rant. Remember that users are afraid to click things which they don't know what they do. For the most positive user experience, give users something to read; a way to understand what the fuck is going on without experimenting, and without waiting for the tooltip to appear.

tl;dr:
The Debian 10 live disc and installer say: Heavens me, just look at the time! I’m late for my <segmentation fault

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tl:
The Debian 10 live cd and its new “calamares” installer are both complete crap. I’ve never had any issues with installing Debian prior to this, save with getting WiFi to work (as expected). But this version? Ugh. Here are the things I’ve run into:

Unknown root password; easy enough to get around as there is no user password; still annoying after the 10th time.

Also, the login screen doesn’t work off-disc because it won’t accept a blank password, so don’t idle or you’ll get locked out.

The lock screen is overzealous and hard-locks the computer after awhile; not even the magic kernel keys work!

The live disc doesn’t have many standard utilities, or a graphical partition editor. Thankfully I’m comfortable with fdisk.

The graphical installer (calamares) randomly segfaults, even from innocuous things like clicking [change partition] when you don’t have a partition selected. Derp.

It also randomly segfaults while writing partitions to disk — usually on the second partition.

It strangely seems less likely to segfault if the partitions are already there, even if it needs to “reformat” (recreate) them.

It also defaults to using MBR instead of GPT for the partition table, despite the tooltip telling you that MBR is deprecated and limited, and that GPT is recommended for new systems. You cannot change this without doing the partitions manually.

If you do the partitions manually and it can’t figure out where to install things, it just crashes. This is great because you can’t tell it where to install things, and specifying mount points like /boot, /, and /home don’t seem to be enough.

It also tries installing 32bit grub instead of 64bit, causing the grub installer to fail.

If you tell it to install grub on /boot, it complains when that partition isn’t encrypted — fair — but if you tell it to encrypt /boot like it wants you to, it then tries installing grub on the encrypted partition it just created, apparently without decrypting it, so that obviously fails — specific error: cannot read file system.

On the rare chance that everything else goes correctly, the install process can still segfault.

The log does include entries for errors, but doesn’t include an error message. Literally: “ERROR: Installation failed:” and the log ends. Helpful!

If the installer doesn’t segfault and the install process manages to complete, the resulting install might not even boot, even when installed without any drive encryption. Why? My guess is it never bothered to install Grub, or put it in the wrong place, or didn’t mark it as bootable, or who knows what.

Even when using the live disc that includes non-free firmware (including Ath9k) it still cannot detect my wlan card (that uses Ath9k).

I’ve attempted to install thirty plus times now, and only managed to get a working install once — where I neglected to include the Ath9k firmware.

I’m now trying the cli-only installer option instead of the live session; it seems to behave at least. I’m just terrified that the resulting install will be just as unstable as the live session.

All of this to copy the contents of my encrypted disks over so I can use them on a different system. =/

I haven’t decided which I’m going with next, but likely Arch, Void, or Gentoo. I’d go with Qubes if I had more time to experiment.

But in all seriousness, the Debian devs need some serious help. I would be embarrassed if I released this quality of hot garbage.

(This same system ran both Debian 8 and 9 flawlessly for years)

There are a lot of things I don't understand in life, but the fact that I need to press tab three times in xcode to select the item in the popup tooltip is just ... I don't know fucked up?

I have a var called: isItemSelected, I need to press tab three times for it to use this option while in all other IDEs I used if it is highlighted then one FUCKING PRESS ON TAB BUTTON SELECTS THE HIGHLIGHTED SHIT !!

Fucking Apple shit -.-

Go to hell, VSCode... What good is a tooltip that lasts a millisecond!!??

Today I spent hours trying to figure out how the hell to add a Material-UI tooltip onto the ClearIndicator for a react-select multi-select component to warn the user that it would clear _all_ of their selections. Followed the examples in the react-select docs on how to make use of replaceable components, but all of their examples used a different library for the tooltip component, and there was no way I was going to bring in _another_ library that was going to add even more dependencies to the application.

In the end, my problem was that all of the examples were with components that could carry a ref and the component _I_ was targeting was a <path> element, which apparently can’t.

Solution? Add a div between the tooltip and the component I was replacing.

*facepalm*

take it easy
even you do not like w3schools as first result when searching for some related content? *** I just searched bootstrap tooltip *** bootstrap tooltip you heard it //

That moment when a divs tooltip is going under another...

Not the worst, but deserves a mention due to how common it is.

Say your whatever object has a method called Configure. You can infer a lot from the configuration parameters or type that it takes, but for whatever reason something is unclear or doesn't work.

Tooltip from xml comments: Sets the configuration.
Official guide: Sets the configuration <br />.
Technical API reference: Sets the configuration.

I would create a support ticket explaining how this is unclear if I wasn't half expecting the suggested solution to be "you know what I mean".

Announcer: Its Tim the tooltip man!
Tim: Excuse me while I mansplain what this button is supposed to do.

Should one takes a research assistant job at school to do an impossible task, something like vscode as a chrome extension that auto completes function names within a github repo and then generate on hover tooltip links that peak into the source code? There will be 2 interns doing the actual job 🤣