From Wikipedia: In user interface design, a modal window (often called modal dialog because the window is almost always used to display a dialog box) is a child window which requires the user to interact with it before they can return to operating the parent application. Modal windows are commonly used in GUI systems to absorb user awareness and to display emergency states.

I have been trying literally all day to get CFEclipse working again. When I open a cfm or cfc, I get an error saying it can't open the file and I get a long Java stack trace. I've uninstalled Flex Builder, put on plain Eclipse, tried different versions, nothing works.

But while installing, I got irritated and so another tip on usability: Modal windows.

1. The Flex Builder 2 installer is an attention hog. In the last half of the installation, it keeps stealing back OS focus.
2. I installed Flex 3 onto Eclipse 3.3 and got an error at the end, telling me where to find the log file of the error, but the error window was modal over the entire OS (not technically, but it immediately retook focus and moved to the front when I clicked elsewhere), I couldn't browse to the file until I closed the error.
3. The other week I was using Outlook and Word and something happened such that the address book in Outlook was modal over my Word document.

Three very bad examples of modal usage. A window should only be made modal ONLY if the user MUST give that window attention before the app can continue doing anything. But certainly, one app should never be able to pull focus from another.

Another fun MS example is the "Updates were made, restarting system in 5 minutes" countdown window. You can either "Restart Now" or "Restart Later". But the second option is really "Remind Me Later" because 5, 10, however many minutes later, that restart countdown pops up over everything and you have to stop it again. The window doesn't tell me the benefits of restarting (the updates will take effect, so what? What are they?). But I do know restarting will disrupt my work for 5-10 minutes so I put up with clicking option two until lunch, or a break, or a meeting, or just click it all day until I shut down my laptop at night.

And Ray Camden is my hero even more now. I accidentally closed this tab twice while writing this entry and both times the content was still here when I came back. About time I start writing entries in Google docs I think.