Hacker News

The example of Pages from the article has actually since been changed to do the same thing.

Red "Delete" on the far left, then on the far right a gray/neutral "Cancel" button, and an orange (the app's primary color) "Save"

I try to keep to that, but sometimes the flag is turning on a negative feature, disabling that which is the default and will remain so for compatibility reasons.

Sometimes it is worth the effort of going through and changing the logic elsewhere to keep the boolean positive, sometimes that would be too much effort to retest at the time.

Another option I like, when I have a config object interpreting things so I'm reading doing “if (config.IsWhateverThatThingIsEnabled)” then I can just have paired properties to pick from when I want to check IsEnabled or IsDisabled.

Agree. And I've been flagging double negatives in PRs for years (e.g. `not undead`). It makes me feel like the Ned Flanders of programmers.

But RuboCop detects `!!something`, and I actually like that idiom, because I prefer to convert into true boolean types before passing them to a method, since it makes the intention clear in the code.

I agree that such forced choices are insulting. It's about the same as also including a disabled "No" button with hover text that reads "disabled because fuck you".

Remember in 1990 (the pictures are from around then) there wasn't unlimited fast disk space. There was a good chance you were saving to a floppy disk which not only was slow, but might not be in the drive all the time. At least in 1990 you could assume a hard drive - but you couldn't safely assume there was enough free space on the drive to save anything, since 40mb drives filled fast.

35 years latter we live in a different world where you can assume an unlimited fast data connection to a data center. Saving and allowing undo is possible today.

In the world of 2TB SSD’s, it does seem silly to risk inadvertently deleting an important ~2kb word document.

Sydney Padua's awesome, mostly true, steampunk graphic novel "The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage" jokes about the error messages that might have produced by the difference engine. One example occurs when a character tries to stop a sequence that may or may not destroy a precious manuscript:

Annulation lever activated!

Do you wish to continue?

Engage STOP lever to continue. Engage CONTINUE lever to stop.

Time remaining 5..4..3...

Aspirin had (though this is increasingly dated) unique cultural currency as a headache medicine for quite a while after it stopped being the overwhelmingly dominant first-line OTC remedy.

Pretty sure "causes Aspirin sales to soar" is an attempt at cleverly saying "gives people headaches"

"Maybe later..."

Rip John C. Dvorak, writer of the Abort/Retry/Fail column from PC Magazine.

On a different note, never underestimate the value of a modal dialog that gives you a chance to retry an IO operation that failed. Loose USB cables and network shares over Wifi can make those happen a lot more often.

As I remember, standard operating procedure was to retry 4 or 5 times, then turn off the computer and walk away in frustration.

For a site about usability, I was going to gripe about the tiny font, low contrast, and unresponsive layout until I saw that. It does look more suitable at 1024x768.

Good year