Are you a Flex developer that love UX and cool  application design? Do you love Erlang and want to build something with it? Or are you interested in Linux customisation/tuning or even embedded devices? Yes? So why not work together? Our company is looking for developers that want to work on cutting edge technologies. If you are interested do not hesitate to contact me for more information.

I am not an UML fan, but I have to use it from time to time. To create models I am using Enterprise Architect from Sparx Systems. It is not industry leading software and I think it has good  relation between value and price. It is quite complex tool with a lot of features and some of them are little bit tricky to use. Overall experience is quite good, but what I am missing is UX  strategy or concept. UI is not simple nor intuitive as many complex tools these days are. One IMHO crucial and critical issue that make me angry was toolbar especially Undo/Redo buttons. As you can see from screenshot icon usage is totally confusing. Your right brain hemisphere gained experience that icon with floppy drive represents saving to disk file. Usage of this icon in different context is more than unhappy decision. I have to say that I clicked it number of times before I remembered this “if”.

While  I am thinking about myself as OS agnostic person, I do have some preferences or opinions about what is an ideal OS form me. I switched my personal computer to Linux a few years ago, but my workstation OS was usually chosen by my employer IT department. To be honest I did not try Vista, I was happy with XP and this was true even after a lot of my colleagues moved to Vista (and back  to XP again). For software developer there are more essential things than Aero or new security model. Developer needs to write code, compile and debug. I have to say that best development experience on Microsoft platform was with combination of Visual Studio 2008 and Windows XP.

I am fan of Erlang and have been playing with him for couple of years. I tested all editors/IDEs from ErlIDE, Emacs (mode), Vim (mode) or ErlyBird. I used some of them for quite long time. But I was still unhappy with experience. Well so back to headline, from my point of view, there is no ultimate Erlang IDE right now on the market. Yes ErlIDE looks promising, but Emacs with Erlang mode still rocks .

I am long term Microsoft Visual Studio user (not only of course ). I used more than six versions in my professional history. This week I read an article about new Visual Studio 2010. It was full of new features like more support for testing, Agile and… Well I have to say that I am a bit sad about all that new features. My personal most wanted feature from VS.NET is speed, responsiveness and extendability. Unfortunately none of them is on a road map. Just bloating…

Because I am trying to use keyboard as much as possible, I am using an application great launchers  Gnome-Do (for my Gentoo) and Launchy for Windows workstations. Gnome-Do is especially cool, because of it functionality, usability and managed code plugin system. If you are interested in productivity definitely take a look at it.

If you are using Pidgin IM on Windows you may be faced this annoying beeping while backspacing text from send dialogue. It really hurts! It make me crazy and it was really close to be painful and IMO harmful. Solution is quite simple and can be found here. So shortly open the file C:\Program Files\Common Files\GTK\2.0\etc\GTK-2.0\gtkrc using Notepad (or any other text editor)  and put following line at the end of it:

GTK-error-bell = 0

Smashing Magazine posts a nice article about some trends in user experience and usability in general. I think it is quite nice overview of what is possible to improve on UI using today’s technology. If you are not familiar with current stage of HCI and it’s future directions, be sure not to miss this great post.