http://www.didaparent.com/Site/Blog/Blog.html Name: Brad Tittle<br/>Interests: Skepticism, Religion, Epidemiology, Flash, PHP, Perl, Ruby, Global Warming, Computer Models<br/>Location: Northwest, USA iWeb 2.0.2 http://www.didaparent.com/Site/Blog/Blog_files/Miscellaneos%20071.jpg http://www.didaparent.com/Site/Blog/Blog.html http://www.didaparent.com/Site/Blog/Entries/2008/1/15_TypeError%3A_Error_2007%3A_Parameter_child_must_be_non-null..html 87dc5cdc-4050-4d16-8b8f-1c347fc4e2ec Tue, 15 Jan 2008 14:18:30 -0800 <a href="http://www.didaparent.com/Site/Blog/Entries/2008/1/15_TypeError%3A_Error_2007%3A_Parameter_child_must_be_non-null._files/WL002666_Entry_a.jpg"><img src="http://www.didaparent.com/Site/Blog/Media/WL002666_Entry_a_2.jpg" style="float:left; padding-right:10px; padding-bottom:10px; width:338px; height:223px;"/></a><br/>This mysterious error through me for a loop today. I had a flash application that needed a progress bar to show loading status. There may be other solutions out there, but we made our own. It didn’t take long, just created an index.fla that then loaded the big swf and then displayed the progress bar. No big deal. Everything seemed to work just fine, but there was as minor glitch the scroll bar wasn’t showing up. Everything else was working, but the UIScrollbar was generating the above error. <br/><br/>After some experimentation, I discovered that the UIScrollbar has to be in the Library of the index.fla. Don’t know why this is, the UIScrollbar was included in the swf that was loaded, but hey, this is about making things work not figuring out exactly why it doesn’t work. <br/><br/> http://www.didaparent.com/Site/Blog/Entries/2008/1/6_Intuitive_Design.html 1b6d2385-ef12-4404-ba37-187d619d4fcf Sun, 6 Jan 2008 15:20:36 -0800 <a href="http://www.didaparent.com/Site/Blog/Entries/2008/1/15_TypeError%3A_Error_2007%3A_Parameter_child_must_be_non-null._files/WL002666_Entry_a.jpg"><img src="http://www.didaparent.com/Site/Blog/Media/WL002666_Entry_a_3.jpg" style="float:left; padding-right:10px; padding-bottom:10px; width:338px; height:223px;"/></a>As a web application developer, I am confronted with this concept regularly. Salesman push it. Managers taut it. Programmers dread it. The mythical ability of a an application to be understood and used without any training whatsoever. <br/><br/>It is mythical. There is no such thing as intuitive. People will point at Apple’s interface, at the iPhone, at iWeb (the application I am using to type in this blog), or even at a telephone and say, That’s intuitive. <br/><br/>Yeah RIGHT.<br/><br/>No offense to Apple (because if anyone gets close to intuitive its Apple), but all interfaces are are learned. A stop sign may seem intuitive, but only because you have seen it a lot of times. <br/><br/>If you have never seen a behavior before. If you have no reference for that behavior, it must be learned. There is no way to make it INTUITIVE. <br/><br/>You people in the marketing department, keep on using it in the promotional material. Hey it works. I like things that work. Just don’t come back and tell me “It’s not intuitive enough”. Show me how the behavior is inconsistent with other behaviors and I will shake your hand. Tell me a person needs to be able to use a product with no knowledge of what they are doing and I will call you nasty names (it might be under my breath).