Breathe life into your software. Give it 'personality' | Hacker News Reader

Breathe life into your software. Give it 'personality'

blog.eyesandfeet.com

12 pointsluxative9 comments

Cute, but it can easily be taken too far, as with that MS Office paper clip thing.

Panic comes to mind as a company that makes software with personality, just look at their site:

http://www.panic.com

The reminder seems nice, except for the fact that its using one of those godawful modal dialog boxes that prevents you from doing absolutely anything else. That crap needs to die a quick death.

No. BLOCKING errors should generate modal dialog boxes. Warnings, hints, information, etc. shouldn't.

He presssed "send" to move on to the next page. He's done with everything, but he REALLY shouldn't go forward or do anything else until he's taken care of this.

Right, it should block the action he was doing, which is within one web page. But the browser modal dialog box blocks all interaction in every tab open in that browser window, which is beyond obnoxious. It's easy enough to pop up one of those lightbox style popups within the webpage instead of blocking the whole damn browser.

I believe we've seen this here before.

That's a little too big-brotherish. I know you're analyzing my email but don't bring what you know to the forefront like that.

  if($('email-body').value.match(/I have (attached|included)/i)) {
    confirm('Did you mean to send an attachment?')
  }

Oh cmon man that's disingenuous. Detection of a user choice of an attachment is conscious transmittal of intent. Message analysis is a different layer of intrusion.

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