iTunes

Folks... hello??? What the heck is wrong with you guys?

Controls that don't provide visual feedback on activation; a "new" watermark that never seems to vanish; when you're in the midst of the download and then have to switch off the 'puter, after switching it on again, the download doesn't restart. You have to find the mechanism to restart it inside of some obscure non-standard menu. And when you download 2 or more things, you don't get any information about that.

And here I was, thinking that apple was overpriced and arrogant, but at least they knew how to hire usability experts for my money.

Have you eaten fruit that didn't smell good, or something?

A Change Of Style

It used to be that I insisted on my conditionals alwaysinghave the positive part in the front, like so:

if (isOkToDoStuff)
    doStuff();
else
    throw new Exception('unable to do stuff');

My logic was that the use of !s should be minimized, that the positive part naturally should come first, and that you should have the actual code for your function on top.

However, in recent times, I find myself liking another idiom better: handling exceptional and error cases first, and then doing what the function is supposed to do, like this:

if (!isOkToDoStuff)
    throw new Exception('unable to do stuff');
if (!otherPrerequisiteINeed)
    throw new Exception('unable to do stuff');

doStuff();

The advantage being no (ugly!) indentations or (unreadable!) &&-ed expressions for additional error conditions. Which will always creep up after the first deployment, or at least after the initial coding session. 

Plus, no occasion to forget adding curly braces to the if clause. ;-)

The other, more important advantage, is that the idiom doesn't change over time. You always have the error conditions first, the code to ultimately run at the end, and the actual code is not buried under 16-indentation-weights forged out of nested ifs.

Somehow, it isn't as elegant. But more practical. Which, mostly, is to be preferred, whether we like it or not.