Time to fake the rationale

Not really! (Title taken from famous paper on faking design rationales). It's actually time to do some rather boring tidying up, removing final bugs, and getting ready for public showing at VL/HCC. Along the way, this has involved returning to things that were already boring - Java persistence, for example, as changes since my last big persistence binge a few months ago have broken it in new ways.

But in presenting to an academic audience, some more explicit rationale will be required. Some of it has been published along the way in this blog, but there are lots of minor decisions, not interesting enough to be included here. A recent example is that the "secondary notation" device, despite being one of the earliest things implemented, had almost no usable function. A change this week has allowed secondary notations to pass on a value from whatever layer they are annotating. This became useful in the context of more complex combinations of functionality, such as the use of multiple event trigger layers at the same time. In classic visual language usability style, it quickly became impossible to tell which of the nearly identical visual objects was which.