Hey everybody, it's 2:00 am right on the dot and I can't sleep. My girlfriend however seems to be having no trouble sleeping. The combination of her and logging onto the CS345/545 website to check the calender reminded me of an interesting little story I thought I'd share.

It was about a week ago, we were both working on some homework. I was tackling the great issue of figuring out why our app didn't look right at all on every screen resolution except one. As I was changing one thing, running the program, change another, run it, repeating, Roseann looked over at my screen to see what fascinating thing I was doing. She saw how everything looked to be thrown about randomly and started to criticize and tell me to fix it. No matter how many times I explained to her that there weren't two sets of buttons but rather our actual background contained the buttons on them along with the actual buttons, she never understood it and just told me, "Remember, technology hates me."

Now, I don't think technology hates her rather than she has a short timer on how long she'll take to figure out a piece of software before she gives up, but it made me think of something, Roseann is how everyone thinks.

No one wants to take the time to figure how a piece of software works. If it takes someone more than a minute to find something, they'll get frustrated and say that the program is bad, myself included. The only difference is how well the user knows where to look.

While I was messing around with this, I was also filling out the spreadsheet for different configuration testings, and the screen resolutions section was rather embarrassing. Like I said above, no one wants to take more than a minute to figure something out on software, and I am just like that, I tried different things for about 20 minutes and I was just about to say: "Well, the app is still USABLE as is, it just has UI bugs. I COULD potentially pass it and put a note by it that it has UI bugs." And just like the Grinch, I puzzled and puzzled until my puzzler was sore. And after all the puzzle, I decided no.

Our goal as software developers is to develop software that people want to use. Roseann was right there saying that she didn't like the way it looked. It was just as functional, but it made me realize that everyone would download it, run it, take one look at it and think a bunch of idiots designed it, uninstall it, rate it 1 star. And I know that's what I would do too.

Later that week, I spent some time on it, figured out how to work a relative layout, whipped up a new set of button pictures, changed the main screen background to match the rest of the app (something I had wanted done for awhile) and made it work.

I'm glad to say that the app looks great on all screen resolutions except SmallScreenLowDensity (something I think will need it's own specific layout built for it) and I'm proud of what I've accomplished in the past few weeks. It ironically has taught me what I signed up for this class for, to learn how to build User Interfaces. It took a few weeks, but I now feel that I really do have a strong knowledge of how to build and implement GUIs.

So remember true believers;
Skys are sunny, bees make honey, and don't you go changing