The most important part of selling a product: having a product
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
@PleegWat said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
@dkf said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
@Luhmann said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
You also forgot the French colleague
I've had the good fortune to only have ones who use “Re:” (which since it's a Latin-derived term is presumably not too objectionable to them).
I suspect @Luhmann's French colleagues were actually Wallonian.
"Walloons"
That sounds like a type of whale.
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@Bulb said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
@Jaloopa said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
In my first programming job, my boss would send me emails where the subject was the entire question and the body was blank
If the message is short, it makes sense. It has the advantage that the question is immediately visible in the message list and I don't really see any problem with it.
if you do that a favor either put "this space is intentionally left blank" in the body of the message or whack on a trailing "EOM" to the subject line.
otherwise I will wonder if you meant to send the blank email or if you fatfingered a keyboard shortcut and are trying to figure out where the message you were composing went.
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@coldandtired said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
@cartman82 I prefer the all-caps to the lowercase 'i's :shudder.
Filed under: Better?
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@accalia said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
if you do that a favor either put "this space is intentionally left blank" in the body of the message or whack on a trailing "EOM" to the subject line.
END OF LINE
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@accalia said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
otherwise I will wonder if you meant to send the blank email or if you fatfingered a keyboard shortcut and are trying to figure out where the message you were composing went.
A few months ago I got an email that ended with
So if you
Then a follow up saying
Sorry about the last line, I was dictating, the next word was ”click Send”
Fun times
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@fbmac said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
@accalia said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
if you do that a favor either put "this space is intentionally left blank" in the body of the message or whack on a trailing "EOM" to the subject line.
END OF LINE
optimus prime?
dude! what happened to you!?
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@accalia Power rangers?
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@Jaloopa said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
@accalia Power rangers?
probably. yeah.
the Super Sentai can be utter dicks sometimes.
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@Jaloopa said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
In my first programming job, my boss would send me emails where the subject was the entire question and the body was blank
OMG I hate that!
Like, the subject line is (apparently) an account number, and then they're like "This account is borked blah bler bluh, fix it!" And then I can't ever find the message again because subject lines with no context just get binned...
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@error That's just Apple trying to curry favour after becoming the God of the little-eye people.
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@coldandtired The appropriate term is "iDiots."
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@error I can imagine a very heated discussion between lawyer teams here. "If we use a lowercase letter on that part, the entice contract could be invalidated!" "But if we ever spell iOS with upper case I, we might lose our trademark!"
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@anonymous234 said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
But if we ever spell iOS with upper case I, we might lose our trademark!"
Doesn't Nintendo have that one?
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@Tsaukpaetra I thought it was Cisco that had IOS but I suspect a large sum of money was paid to acquire it as it's a better name than iPhoneOS.
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@Arantor Cisco is IOS, yes.
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@Tsaukpaetra One of the software components of the Wii is internally named IOS, but I don't think that counts as a trademark.
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@ben_lubar said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
@coldandtired said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
@cartman82 I prefer the all-caps to the lowercase 'i's :shudder.
HOW ABOUT TYPiNG LiKE THiS? THE HOMESTAR RUNNER WAY!
Good jorb.
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@PleegWat said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
@Steve_The_Cynic said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
@PleegWat said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
@dkf said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
@Luhmann said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
You also forgot the French colleague
I've had the good fortune to only have ones who use “Re:” (which since it's a Latin-derived term is presumably not too objectionable to them).
I suspect @Luhmann's French colleagues were actually Wallonian.
"Walloons"
That sounds like a type of whale.
Perhaps, but...
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@dkf iven if it is just a text only paper print out of a flow chart (no pretty graphics) the sales team will still try to sell it.
I have told salesmen on many occasions "Ethics is not a county on the east coast of England"
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@mott555 said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
"Hey, can you remove the THIS IS A DEMO text? I have someone who wants to buy this but they don't like that part."
"Yes. It'll take [effort needed to actually build the thing]"
Marketing people have no concept of what is and isn't simple to code anyway; it shouldn't be harder for them to accept than plenty of legitimate estimates.
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@CarrieVS said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
"Yes. It'll take [effort needed to actually build the thing]"
"Ridiculous. You're almost done, it looks pretty much there. You have a day. Stupid programmers, thinking you can get one over on us and have ages to slack off with your 'testing' and 'definition of done'. Just do it!"
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@Jaloopa Oh sure. But it can't be much harder than convincing them that I can't vertically line up elements in side-by-side <div>s.
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@CarrieVS to which you get told "(this site) did it, you figure it out" then go abuse display:table.
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@Arantor if I could have done it with display:table I would have. Short of actual tables (or a functionally equivalent use of divs that would achieve the same effect for screen-reader users), which fortunately I wasn't forced to implement because we were in the middle of a push to comply with accessibility requirements, the only hack I could find to do it at all was something disgusting that involved using a hidden duplicate version of the content to get the heights correct. I can't remember exactly how it worked.
Thankfully they weren't able to point to any sites that managed it, at least not with a responsive layout.
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@Jaloopa said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
"Ridiculous. You're almost done, it looks pretty much there. You have a day. Stupid programmers, thinking you can get one over on us and have ages to slack off with your 'testing' and 'definition of done'. Just do it!"
"Are you telling me that adding a single button will take that long? Explain it to me -it's only a button! EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!!"
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@CarrieVS I read somewhere screen readers deal well with tables, and that table less is bullshit.
I didn't check because I couldn't care less with screen readers and tableless.
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@MrL said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
@Jaloopa said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
"Ridiculous. You're almost done, it looks pretty much there. You have a day. Stupid programmers, thinking you can get one over on us and have ages to slack off with your 'testing' and 'definition of done'. Just do it!"
"Are you telling me that adding a single button will take that long? Explain it to me -it's only a button! EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!!"
"Sure, I can add the button. Nothing will happen if you click on it, but I can add it. Oh, you wanted it to do that when you press it? Making that happen will take X amount of work."
In essence, you have to explain to them that the UI is nothing, maybe less, without the plumbing behind it. (Come to think of it, here's a picture of a house. Looks nice, walls, roof, garden, driveway beside it with a car. Come on, let's live inside! Oh, wait, there's nothing inside, no interior walls, no floors, no stairs, no lights, nothing except curtains that are currently closed. The UI of the system is like that house. To make it something you can live in, you have to add all that interior stuff. Software's the same.)
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@Steve_The_Cynic You can probably use a hollywood set to make a convincing video.
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@fbmac Screen readers can deal fine with tables, to the best of my knowledge. What they can't deal with is 'tables' that make no sense when read out as though they're tables. If your content makes sense when read a row at a time then it might be fine even if it's not really tabular data, I'm not sure. This didn't.
I could have made it look how they wanted with or without tables, tables or not wasn't the issue. The issue was that the content only made sense in columns - I had side-by-side divs with unrelated content that had the same layout. To align it vertically, with or without tables, you'd have to lay it out in rows, so that whether or not it was a table, the first thing in the last column would come before then the second thing in the first.
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@CarrieVS That makes sense. Do they test the site with actual screen readers?
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
@MrL said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
@Jaloopa said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
"Ridiculous. You're almost done, it looks pretty much there. You have a day. Stupid programmers, thinking you can get one over on us and have ages to slack off with your 'testing' and 'definition of done'. Just do it!"
"Are you telling me that adding a single button will take that long? Explain it to me -it's only a button! EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!!"
"Sure, I can add the button. Nothing will happen if you click on it, but I can add it. Oh, you wanted it to do that when you press it? Making that happen will take X amount of work."
In essence, you have to explain to them that the UI is nothing, maybe less, without the plumbing behind it. (Come to think of it, here's a picture of a house. Looks nice, walls, roof, garden, driveway beside it with a car. Come on, let's live inside! Oh, wait, there's nothing inside, no interior walls, no floors, no stairs, no lights, nothing except curtains that are currently closed. The UI of the system is like that house. To make it something you can live in, you have to add all that interior stuff. Software's the same.)
Yeah, that's a very nice theory, but it's based on assumption that you're dealing with sensible people.
In reality, when you're dealing with marketing/sales, you're often dealing with
a) clueless moron
b) arrogant asshole
c) team consisting of a and b
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@fbmac I don't think they did. We had a report from some accessibility testing tool, though it never got a look at any potential solutions for that because I successfully pushed back on it. I wasn't able to get a screen reader on my own machine for development.
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@CarrieVS I imagine very few people test with screen readers, and I assume most sites are a pain to use with one.
Like when you disable CSS and all useless floats are shown up in the window.
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@fbmac the web-devs got trained on accessibility when I was there, and the trainer had dug up a YouTube video of a blind guy testing out our website using some smartphone software - just as an example, he wasn't singling us out as uniquely bad.
It was terrible. Hopefully it's a lot better now.
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@CarrieVS Then I think you're already doing much more than 99% websites I use. Some don't even support mobile firefox that is easy as dirt to test, imagine a blind user.
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@fbmac I don't work there any more. Indeed I'm not doing web-dev, or anything with a UI, at the moment.
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@CarrieVS said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
Indeed I'm not doing web-dev, or anything with a UI, at the moment.
Lucky you !
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@anonymous234 said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
I hadn't seen this before, it's magnificent.
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This post is deleted!
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@fbmac said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
I'm always worried that after I delete my post someone will pretend to quote me with something I didn't say. But I'd say it's worth the risk.
Nah, nobody here would do that.
I don't like how this feels. Let's never do this again.
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@LB_ said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
It doesn't matter if you delete it or not, nobody really check quotes.
That's true, anybody could be misquoted to death here
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@cartman82 Say hello to Enterprise Paula Beans!
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@IP_Guru said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
@dkf iven if it is just a text only paper print out of a flow chart (no pretty graphics) the sales team will still try to sell it.
I have told salesmen on many occasions "Ethics is not a county on the east coast of England"
Eh, salesmen (and many managers, lawyers, and other people) will talk about ethics without understanding it. It is like blind people talking about color.
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@MrL said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
"Are you telling me that adding a single button will take that long? Explain it to me -it's only a button! EXPLAIN IT TO ME!!!!"
I suggested that our lead programmer add a button to the application that would do what the salesman wanted, rather that what they said they wanted. When it took too long for this to be implemented, I demanded, "It's just one little button, what's the problem?"
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@ScholRLEA said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
Enterprise Paula Beans!
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@Jaloopa Hmm. That's actually a really old-school way of writing messages, which I think used to be very popular. I'm familiar with it even though I'm young, but nowadays I only see it on specific (usually really old) message boards. If the person is really savvy, then they'll add some variation of "(n/t)" at the end of the subject to let you know that the body has "no text" and you can just skim past reading the subject.