Moving Forward

With this chapter, I moved away from the more obvious usability issues such as GUI design and into the less obvious, but equally important, usability issues of good code design. I really did try to compile a huge program with gcc on my notebook computer, and the fan did come on, and the computer got incredibly hot. Would the computer have burned up? Possibly; I wasn’t about to test it to find out. Remember, then, that usability isn’t just for the people designing the GUIs. Usability impacts every aspect of programming.

In the next chapter, I work from both ends of the usability stick, the GUI end and the coding end, and talk about the issues of software startup and shutdown. And with this I also talk a bit about exceptions, because they can cause your program to die a sudden death. And if you’ve been reading this whole book up to now, you already know why a sudden death is so bad: It will cause frustration and, in turn, lost sales. Read on!