There’s a tipping point where a technology reaches enough users to be worthwhile for designers and developers to use; however, the thesis is that HTML5 isn’t there yet.

But you can apply the lessons from the article to other technologies your organization might want to use.

On a recent Monday morning, inside an unremarkable, low-slung building in Yonkers, N.Y., blue-coated technicians conducted lab work. Among their calibrated tools: Cheez Whiz, pig’s blood and Maine coon cat hair.

They’re testers for Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports magazine and website whose ratings drive spending decisions on some 3,000 product models annually, from vacuums and lawn mowers to strollers, shower heads and smoothies.

That’s some boundary analysis I wish I could try.

In the lab, technicians are always developing ways to accelerate the wear and tear products normally experience over the course of years. Treadmills, for instance, get pounded repeatedly with a spinning metal drum imbedded with rubber green balls that mimic running feet. (The device’s nickname: Johnnie Walker.) Stainless-steel grills are stationed in a conditioning chamber and pelted with a salty spray to test for rust potential. Sometimes the goal is to mimic extreme scenarios, like an accident, in which bicycle helmets get strapped on a metal head form and dropped from various heights onto sharp and rounded objects.

I try to apply that same sort of creativity when I face an application.

Meanwhile, do you suppose mechanical engineers around the world post comments on the Consumer Reports Web site about how no one would do that? Probably not, because unlike software “engineers,” mechanical engineers have a sense of shame.

Patriot Coal Corp. was found in contempt of court by a federal judge on Wednesday and ordered to clean up selenium pollution at two mines in West Virginia.

I guess that’s not something a tester is going to do necessarily, but I don’t think it’s effective branding for the automated testing product.

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Some developers will make the case that the last one refers to the Your Birthdate field, but it’s still weird to read.

I’d like to point out that I did not have to troll a bunch of contests to find these three examples. This is three out of five I visited. In 60% of the Web sites I visited, the error messages contained misspellings and other problems (such as poor placement in the last case).

A user who encounters an error and then encounters your error message, if your error message is rife with misspellings or other problems, the user might think that the error was the fault of your crappy application and not his or her problem.

So you need to pay attention to your error messaging and display as much as any other feature of your application. Because if your error message isn’t part of the solution (that is, helping the user understand what’s wrong and how to fix it), it’s part of the problem.

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The instructions? – To see results for people with the last name of “Null” type in Null*.

Hey, that’s always a good idea. What happens if I search for/enter null?

In this case, we discover that there are a lot of Nulls making good money teaching in the state of Missouri.

But I can tell a lot of thought went into writing that sample search term. Thought that could better have been spent on the title tag for the page.

The key is to take it out on the software, brothers and sisters. It’s not just a vocation, it’s therapy.

If you are writing consumer software you have to understand that you and your average user have a very different level of understanding of computers. When you first start doing support it can be a shock to realize just how vast this gulf is. It doesn’t mean that your users are stupid, just that they haven’t spent the thousands of hours in front of a computer that you have.

This echoes the Roberta scenario that I outlined earlier. When your development staff and design staff get together to design something, they need to remember that not everycat is as hep as they are, dig? Complication, and deviation from other interface standards, will induce user error, and the worst bugs of all are the bugged users.

Also, the eszett or scharfes S (ß) is used. It exists only in a lowercase version since it can never occur at the beginning of a word (there are a few loan words starting with an s followed by a z (e.g. Szegediner Krautfleisch but that is not the same as the eszett which counts as one letter).

In all caps it is converted to SS….

There’s a new unicode symbol for the capital version, but a lot of old applications will still force that into an SS. So a word like confuße might get uppercased to CONFUSSE, and if you set the string to the maxlength, uppercasing it will blow that up.

To be honest, I did discover this when I was working on an application for a German customer and I (and only I of a team of far more seasoned QA people than I at the time) sought out the German alphabet to learn its vagaries.

I just ruined a little of my mystique, didn’t I?

However, if your application might possibly be localized to German, you have my permission to use this. Use this new power only for good. Strangely, though, QA good means evil to everyone else, but that’s not our fault.

A Michigan company announced the release of software Tuesday that introduces new punctuation to the typed word: The sarcasm mark.

Sarcasm Inc. of Washington Township said the SarcMark, which resembles an open circle with a dot in the center, can be installed on computers via a program that can be downloaded from sarcmark.com for $1.99.

It’s almost worth $1.99 just for how much it will annoy your developers.

(Link seen here.)

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Try harder to not fail again, or again you must face the creepy dead clown.