As a user, a disabled menu item tells me something: I haven’t selected whatever object I need to perform this command. It seems idiotic that I’d want a messagebox popping up AFTER I selected the menu telling me that I didn’t have whatever selected. Talk about confusing.
The Daring Fireball response is perfect.
Though, I dare say that there is a point to Mr. Spolsky’s observation. There does need to be some way to let users know why a menu item is disabled. Oh, it seems that Apple had thought of this already way back when with Balloon Help. (Link from Daring Fireball).
Another excellent response to the original premise by Lukas Mathias here. Lukas suggests using tooltips to aid users. (Link from Daring Fireball).
Thoughts? Is Joel right or is he treating the user like they’re a friggin’ idiot when they don’t need to be?
Among the new features in release 3 is code profiling (pro version only). Profiling lets you see where your code is spending its time. It’s very handy and is a most welcome addition.
The compiler now supports Attributes which allows you to do some fun stuff with compile-time metadata. You can see Aaron’s blog for more info on attributes.
They’ve enhanced the check project/item to provide feedback about problem areas. In particular you’ll now get warnings about code that is deprecated. This was one of my wish list items: compiler warnings.
You can have constants and enums inside of classes now as well. There’s also the usual mix of bug fixes and stability improvements – especially in the Windows builds.
The only issue I know of is with Einhugur plugins. The IDE will now complain that they’re using the old style constructors (the class name) but thankfully RB can do a temporary fix until the plugins are updated. There’s also an issue with the Einhugur plugins not getting keydown events. Fogbugz entry here. This appears to be a Mac only problem but the Fogbugz entry hasn’t been updated yet.
So all-in-all I think this was a pretty good release. Even the documentation is updated with the new attributes information. Only time will tell, but for now I give RS kudo’s for doing a good job.
