Why Must I Still Fill Out My City, State, and Zip Code?
A pet peeve of mine for a long time has been telling a form my city, state, and zip code. If I am providing a zip code for an address in the United States, why should I be made to enter my city and select a state? The drop down select list for the state is especially annoying when navigating through a form using the tab key doesn't work correctly.
Sure, JavaScript enabled forms are somewhat new... but even the "Web 2.0" sites out there fail at this.
The usability complaint I have becomes even more apparent when I am filling out a form that validates my input. The common validation is for a shipping address where the system corrects the address to include the formal USPS spelling and the ZIP+4 code. These systems commonly make this validation an additional step in the process, which is far less annoying than having to enter the city and state. But these systems still force me to enter my city and state!
Enough already! There are free zip code databases available in CSV format. And for businesses that want to go the extra mile, there are pay databases that provide extra goodies like demographics. For this, check out ZipCodeWorld. ZipCodeWorld also has sample code to do things like calculate distances between locations for use in many programming languages - check out their developers area. ZipCodeWorld also has some foreign databases so there is no excuse to provide this feature for just users in America.
So please, make my life (and everyone's) a little bit easier by making your forms a little bit more intelligent. I do ask that you don't throw in some GeoIP to guess the location or limit users to use only their zip code to enter the location.
My last request with regards to forms requesting my location: Don't ask the question unless you're going to mail/ship me something. It's likely that I'll lie anyway.
NetBeans Fail
NetBeans Failes to Show Compile Errors
It only happens on my windows workstation, but NetBeans will randomly fail to indicate in the left navigation that there are problem classes that won’t compile. So annoying.
Java 1.6 + NetBeans 6.5 + OSX
I hadn't actually had a real need to force use of Java 1.6 yet. I did have a Java platform definition in NetBeans for 1.6 and would use that. But recently, my project has become more 1.6 heavy and I've had to switch to a JDK 1.6 source and binary format.
I found a very useful blog post that explained the upgrade here: http://point2blog.wordpress.com/2009/02/17/defaulting-to-jdk-16-in-netbeans-65-on-osx/
This is the relevant excerpt from the blog post by Damien Gabrielson:
Locate the NetBeans config file, typically located at “/Applications/NetBeans/NetBeans 6.5.app/Contents/Resources/NetBeans/etc/netbeans.conf” and open the file in your favourite editor Set the “netbeans_jdkhome” parameter to the JDK 1.6 home directory (ie. netbeans_jdkhome=
/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6/Home)
But that wasn't good enough for my use. I am developing a web application that runs on the Glassfish application server. That too needs to be running Java 1.6. The fix is easy:
- Open the "asenv.conf" file. In my case, it can be found at: /Applications/NetBeans/glassfish-v2ur2/config/asenv.conf
- Set the "AS_JAVA" parameter to the Java 1.6 directory. My entry reads:
- AS_JAVA="/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6.0/Home"