Scott Hanselman

A few days ago, I visited the Xamarin.com website and noticed this. The word "Pricing" looks like "Prioing."

It's not an illusion. It looks wrong in Google Chrome. See this zoomed-in shot.

Here's the same menu in IE. Note the subtle"bites" that have been taken out of the g and s, but the c is OK. The hinting is OK, but the font is somehow "wrong."

I emailed support@xamarin, and mentally blamed Google Chrome as it's well know they've been having trouble with their Web Font rendering of late. In fact, Jin Yang (@jzy) had to abandon Montserrat, our Web Font of choice, for a more conservative one whilst doing the Hanselman.com redesign due to Google Chrome's poor font rendering on Windows. (It's lovely on Mac.)

I also happened to be at the Xamarin Evolve conference this week, so I mentioned it to the team down there, thinking they could pick another font.

Fast forward, and I'm on the plane, checking my email with Gmail Offline (the HTML5 offline version of Gmail) and noticed this.

These fonts look like crap too!

What's going on here? What's changed? Doesn't it seem like "What's changed?" is the question we engineer-types ask the most?

Well, what's changed is that I gave a talk at Xamarin Evolve this week, and in preparation, installed Helvetica Neue. It's a lovely font and I think it worked nicely for my talk and looked great in PowerPoint.

However, Helvetica is super common font that is mentioned in Stylesheets - often explicitly when CSS is designed on a Mac - and Arial on Windows usually steps in as the replacement on Windows.

The Helvetica Neue font that I installed for my presentation is very poorly hinted (if at all) at small sizes like the one's being used. It's just not a Web Font, and while it's great for the giant sizes I needed for my talk, it's lousy for the web.

Both  IE and Chrome were picking up that my system had a Helvetica available on the system and used it instead. The Stylesheet said "hey, gimme Helvetica" and the browser said "Cool, here's one."

While it's obvious it would have major effects in retrospect, I had never realized that a machine-wide "common" font installation like this could mess up font rendering in my browser. I think the best solution (even though I'm deleting Helvetica Neue) would be to use an explicit Web Font in your stylesheets when possible rather than relying on a system font like Helvetica, even though they are the ultimate fallback. Any designers want to  weigh-in the comments?

Here's Chrome now on Windows with Helvetica Neue removed:

And IE

I hope this post helps someone who might bump into this font issue. My sincerely apologies to the lovely Xamarin employees who took my "bug" seriously! Thanks to Damian Guard for his Font insight!

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. I am a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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My buddy Damian and I both recently bought the Lenovo X1 Carbon Touch. It's got Intel SpeedStep technology so it changes the CPU speed dynamically based on load. These two laptops of ours are identical. However, here's Damian's Task Manager when mostly idle.

Here's mine.

What the heck is going on? His CPU is reporting 0.60 GHz of a potential speed of 2GHz, indicating that the chip has chilled out. Mine is reporting "full speed ahead!" at a speed that it doesn't even support, 2.49GHz!

We went around and around on this for a while until we realized that I had turned on Hyper-V Virtualization for Windows Phone Development and my Ubuntu VM. He hadn't.

We installed CPU-Z, a low level and very smart CPU utility and got the truth. In fact, both machines are stepping down, but my Kernel is running within the Hypervisor and it's CPU speed is being reported incorrectly to Task Manager. Task Manager is showing the MAX speed, and not the real (Hyper-V virtualized) speed.

NOTE: CPU-Z is lovely but the Download.com wrapper that they put around it is evil spyware and you need to really pay attention when you install or you'll end up installing a bunch of toolbars. Be warned.

I hope this helps someone! It wasted 30 minutes of my life.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. I am a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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My blog and all the sites in and around it are a mix of .NET 2.0, 3.5 and 4. This blog engine is currently .NET 3.5 and runs at http://hanselman.com/blog, but the application at http://hanselman.com/ (the root) is .NET 4.

You can happily mix and match applications across .NET versions on a single IIS instance. You can see how mixed my system is in the screenshot at right there.

However, things got messy when I changed the parent / application to .NET 4, but kept the child /blog as .NET 3.5 (the 2.0 CLR). I got lots of errors like

• Unrecognized attribute ‘targetFramework’. Note that attribute names are case-sensitive. The targetFramework attribute was inherited from the root .NET 4 Web.config file in the Default Web Site root using ASP.NET configuration inheritance and confused the /blog .NET 2 application.

I didn't want to change the /blog applications' web.config. I just wanted to stop it from inheriting the settings from the parent application. Turns out you can wrap whole sections in a location tag, and then tell that scoped tag to prevent child applications from inheriting.

What you do is change the parent .NET 4 app's web.config to indicate its settings shouldn't flow down to the children, like the .NET 2/3.5 /blog app.

<location path="." inheritInChildApplications="false">
   <system.web>
    ...your system.web stuff goes here
   </system.web>
</location>

You can actually read about this in detail in the ASP.NET 4 "breaking changes" documentation. Of course YOU read those closely, don't you? ;)

I chose to change this settings for all of System.Web, but you could do it on a per-section basis if you preferred.

Hope this helps you!

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. I am a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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A few weeks back I ranted in Everything's broken and nobody's upset and it found its way around the web. Some called it a poorly  organized straw man and others felt it was a decent jumping-off point for a larger discussion about software quality. It was likely both of these and more.

On the subject of bug reporting, there's a wonderful gem of a program that ships with Windows 7 and Windows 8 that you and your users can use to report and record bugs. It's the Problem Steps Recorder and it's like TiVo for bugs.

Hit the Start button and type either "Steps" or even "PSR" or to run the Problem Steps Recorder.

Click Start Record and reproduce your bug. You can even click "Add Comment" to highlight an area of the screen as a call-out.

It's kind of a poor-man's screencasting tool. Rather than a heavy full screen video, the Steps Recorder is taking a screenshot on each click or action.

The user can then save the whole thing as as ZIP or just click "Email." I plan on using this the next time my non-technical parents have an issue they want to report.

Since this little app ships with Windows, why not launch it directly from your product's interface or 'Send Feedback' link? Then you could automate the receipt of these recorded problems and directly inject the resulting files into your bug reporting system.

What do you think?

Related Posts in this Three Part series on Software Quality

1. Everything's broken and nobody's upset
2. A Bug Report is a Gift
3. Help your users record and report bugs with the Problem Steps Recorder

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. I am a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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There were lots of reactions to my blog post Everything's broken and nobody's upset. Some folks immediately got the Louis CK "Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy" reference. Some folks thought it was a poorly worded rant. Some folks (from various companies) thought I was throwing developers under the bus, accusing them of not caring. Others saw a meta-goal and started a larger discussion about software quality.

The questions I asked were these...but the most significant one was added a few hours later, suggested by a reader.

• Is this a speed problem? Are we feeling we have to develop too fast and loose?
• Is it a quality issue? Have we forgotten the art and science of Software QA?
• Is it a people problem? Are folks just not passionate about their software enough to fix it?
• It is a communication problem? Is it easy for users to report errors and annoyances?

After the post I went back and tried to file bug reports for all the issues I bumped into. For products where I couldn't find an easy bug reporting site I used Twitter. Google and Microsoft were universally pleasant when I reported the bugs and seemed sincerely interested in helping.

Is it easy for your users to report a bug? Does you app automatically report crashes? Is your site friendly? Are you support people friendly and engaged? Are your bug support forums filled with reports but no company representatives? Do you use GetSatisfaction or UserVoice?

Anatomy of a Good Bug Report

Ideally the "best" bugs are those that can be reproduced given enough context. You can save developer time and trouble by giving them as many details as you can. Developers can save everyone time with bug reporting tools that collect that information for users.

For example, on Windows if you run "msinfo32.exe" you can get a complete snapshot of your system.

Send a Frown and Send a Smile

I am a big fan of the "Send a Frown" way of getting bugs.

The Office 2013 Previews even have hotkeys for this!

Sending feedback is even better with screenshots.

The help menu for Skype includes a Give Feedback menu as well as "Skype Status."

As a user, if you can include information like:

• What were you doing? What were you trying to do?
• Advanced folks: What weird add-ins/extensions or hacks are you using that you haven't mentioned but you really should? *cough* Adblock *cough*
• Can you make it happen every time?
• Can you include a screenshot? Bonus points for a screencast!

This is a lot to ask of a user!

Some examples of where to file bugs

Here's some sites you can use to report bugs in certain applications. Note that some are fancy, some spartan, some just forums, some actual bug tracking software, made for and used by developers.

• Google Chrome/Chromium - http://new.crbug.com
• Firefox and all Mozilla products - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/
• Spotify - http://www.spotify.com/se/help/support-forum/
• Internet Explorer - http://connect.microsoft.com/IE
• Visual Studio & ASP.NET http://connect.microsoft.com/visualstudio and 
  • Suggestions http://aspnet.uservoice.com and http://visualstudio.uservoice.com

Or, the ultimate place to file bugs for your favorite software, as my friend Anil points out:

@shanselman on Twitter, duh!

— Anil Dash (@anildash) September 24, 2012

How hard does the user have to work to file a bug? It's OUR bug but the user not only hit the bug but also has to work to report it!

Every click or manual step that our users have to invest in our bug is a click too many. A bug is the pain that hurts the user and keeps hurting as they report it! A good bug report is a gift that keeps on giving and we should treat it as such.

I'd love a world where all crashes are automatically reported and there's a "Send a Frown/Smile" button on everyone's computer that offers to record a short screencast with just a single "record/stop" button.

What product do you think has the best bug filing experience? Sound off in the comments!

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Related Posts in this Three Part series on Software Quality

1. Everything's broken and nobody's upset
2. A Bug Report is a Gift
3. Help your users record and report bugs with the Problem Steps Recorder

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. I am a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

Sponsored By

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