Software Development

useless error message

“Positive” Error Messages

For me, “positive” error messages are alerts that tell you something “failed” because the user has already done it before and so there’s no use in doing it again.

Like in the example screenshot above. The user added, at some point in history, a photo to their favorites. Now they stumble upon this photo again in some user’s photo stream and add it to their favorites again. And this error pops up, telling them they’re an idiot for not remembering it’s in their favorites already.

Necessity of Feedback

Giving the user feedback on what they do is very important, no argument there. But you have to be careful not to cross the line from giving helpful feedback to just being outright obnoxious or worse, unnecessarily interrupt the user’s workflow.

Alert panels are a good way of telling the user something went wrong when it needs their (immediate) attention. But halting the application to tell the user something has already been successfully done – what’s the use in that?

Example: flickery

flickery is the app where I run into this most often. “Photo already in favorites”. “Already in Group”. “Already in Set”. “Already in Gallery”. “Already member of the group”. etc.

Early versions of flickery did have these alerts in them. Actually, I hadn’t given it much thought at the time. But using the app a lot myself it quickly became clear to me that it’s just plain annoying.

flickery does have a “flying” animation when adding photos to favorites, sets, groups and galleries. Isn’t that all the feedback necessary in that case?
The user is informed something happened and that’s what counts. And if it’s already in there – who cares? Putting it in there was the point all along.

I do the same thing in ScreenFloat. When you add a shot to a category and it’s already in there, you won’t see an error panel telling the user it’s already in there. That was what they wanted anyway.

So, what’s the point?

Short and simple: avoid alerts, if you can.

They disrupt the flow of the app and take the user away from what they’re currently doing. There are many better ways to let the user know something happened – especially if it’s positive feedback.

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picture credit: Apple, Inc.

What is ESSVideoShare?

ESSVideoShare is a framework Cocoa (Touch) developers can use in their projects to easily implement uploading videos to the popular video sharing services YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr and Facebook.

With a few lines of code, developers can implement this functionality and the framework will do all the heavy lifting.

Now available for iOS, additionally to OS X Lion

Originally, I had designed this framework for OS X Lion only. However, since the code base is mainly dependent on the Foundation framework which is available on both the Mac and iOS, I figured it would be a) really neat and b) easy to bring this framework to iOS as well.

The actual process of implementing the framework in your iOS project is a little different than for OS X – on OS X, you build the framework from the source and then add that framework to your project, on iOS, you take the source files of the framework directly and copy them to your project. Other than that, everything else remains the same.

Sample Projects and Links

ESSVideoShare open source project on GitHub

OS X Lion Sample Project (~250 KB)

OS X Lion How To

iOS Sample Project (~3 MB)

iOS How To

 

Enjoy – and please let me know if you use this in your projects, I’d be happy to hear about it 🙂

 

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Hi, everyone.

I wanted to try something new, so instead of a blog post, I’ve recorded this ~6 minute podcast for your listening (dis-)pleasure.

Here are the relevant links and time codes in case you want to jump to a specific section:

00:00 – Intro
00:25 – New website (http://www.eternalstorms.at)
00:47 – Yoink (http://www.eternalstorms.at/yoink)
02:46 – ScreenFloat (http://www.screenfloatapp.com)
03:21 – flickery (http://www.flickeryapp.com)
04:06 – GimmeSomeTune (http://www.gimmesometune.com)
05:09 – New apps (http://www.eternalstorms.at)
05:39 – Outro

I hope you enjoy it 🙂

Podcast-download (best viewed in QuickTime Player or iTunes for chapter selection)

Take care,
Matt

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