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Sound familiar?

I'm not here to explain Defensive Design for the Web. 37signals have already done that, after all. What I am here to do is point out how helpful it is having a mindset that doesn't expect things to go smoothly all the time. In fact, I'd like to rephrase that: Expecting the worst is probably the best you can do.

Let's start with software developers, and something I've noticed with most of them: They assume that their software works. Not because they're arrogant, but because in building and testing it (and even testers I believe sometimes fall into this trap), they do things the way the system is designed to. They live according to the rules and parameters. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it creates a not-so-obvious problem. You see, most people who end up using any system don't understand or care about the rules, or about how the system was designed. In many cases, they don't even really understand the problem the system was designed to solve in the first place. They use the system because they don't want to think about that stuff. They need the system to work for them, so that they can continue to spend their time on other things the developers haven't thought about (and thus don't want to, or need to worry about). In most cases, good systems are those that guide users with the assumption that they don't understand how things work, pro-actively expecting them not to. Simple really, but still constantly overlooked.

I've become more and more aware of how important handling exceptions to what's expected really are. Not just in software, but in business (and thus life) in general. Effective exception handling is a rare skill that not many people possess. It enables you to get things done so much more efficiently - mainly because when you expect exceptions as a rule, you're pro-actively thinking about how to do things to avoid them in the first place. When you're doing that, you tend to presume that whoever you're dealing with in any given scenario doesn't understand (or isn't aware of) what you're offering/doing/asking. If you're thinking this way, you tend to plan and bring across what's going on much clearer than you usually would, and ultimately making provision for misunderstanding as a given. Personally, I think this is good.

Too difficult a mindset to have and keep up in everyday life though?

You tell me.

So I've had a few complaints from certain parties about the update frequency around here. I'd like to respond as follows:

• This isn't really a blog in the true sense of the word. I just kinda put stuff on here from time to time… Yeah, I'm lazy, I know
• I've been really really busy with some things I can't tell you much about right now. But will, in future.

That being said, I thought it'd be cool to drop in a few screenshots of what I've been playing with over the last while:

Screen 1 - oh yeah

You'd be right if you guessed.. Through the nice people at Microsoft, I recently got my hands on an invite-only Beta 1TR (Technical Refresh) copy of the all-singing, all-dancing OneNote 2007. Remember the previous post? This is the real deal The following are my favourites:

• Live Outlook task & item linking - quickly jotted down something, and need to be reminded? Flag it as a task with the hotkeys (as simple as highlighting anything, and using Ctrl+Shift+1), and presto chango, a task is created in Outlook, in realtime. Use a mobile device running Windows? The reminder gets synced to your device as well… Want to jot down a note on a contact (whether in a public store or locally)? Simply click the "Notes about this item" button, and get a hyperlinked set of notes. Damn useful. More on this in an upcoming post.
• Auto OCR - I thought this was too cool to be true on Chris Pratley's blog. Well, it is cool, and it is actually true. To test it, I casually dragged a scanned magazine article onto OneNote, and amazingly, a search for the article heading actually highlighted the slightly-skewed, blurred text. Holy crap, searchable everything is here.

Screen 2

For the last while, I've been almost exclusively using Internet Explorer 7. Comments by a few smart people got me started, even though I've been using Firefox as my primary browser for the last year or so (reserving IE6 only for testing, and for accessing SharePoint - the current version, which is 4 years old, doesn't render correctly in FF). I'm not moving back. There are a few small things I think could improve, but in my humble opinion, judging from the beta, IE is back on top.

My favourite features in IE7?

• Quick Tabs - When you have more than a few tabs open, the QuickTabs button gives you a screenshot view of all open windows, making finding what you're after oh-so-much quicker. Easy peasy.
• Favourites Center - The way the favourites (little orange star) expand on-screen, and are organised (with collapsible sub-folders) is just very slick. Nothing fancy, but it works better than any previous incarnation I've used.
• Real rendering - At last. Most people agree, the IE team has put in a stellar effort to silence the standards-compliance critics. It's not 100% yet, but they've done more than was expected by a long-shot, and only a small handful of bugs are still left.

Screen 3

I guess I've been riding the beta train lately. Feedreader 3.0 RC1 is the latest version of a free tool that quite honestly does everything I want it to. The interface was already pretty good in previous versions, but 3.0 makes things even simpler. I specifically like the Unread news view, with its collapsible categories and feeds. You can even group by tags and hide all read news in most views. Nicely done.