Ed’s Tech Blog

How to improve UI for me.

Media Player:

Let me access the damn CD drive from the Library! What moron blocked the CD/DVD drives from this view? Obviously, no one at Microsoft has ever tried to DJ a party with their player? A DJ has to be able to adjust the playlist without stopping the current music or losing the current playlist. If I pop in a new CD and want to add some songs to the playist, it can’t be done. I can’t even use Windows Exporer to drag a song to the playlist. Fix this.

Also, the library feature just sucks compared to winamp and itunes.
Winamp and Itunes.

One thing MS got right was the seemless movement between video and audio file. I queue up a playlist of music videos and mp3s. Media Player correctly switches between the video to the visualization without switching screens. Itunes and Winamp, Learn from this. Don’t put Visualizations and Video in different windows that conflict with each other. Guess how many times a user wants a video to run in a separate window at the same time as a visualization? Zero.

Winamp and MediaPlayer:

Itunes gives you basic controls in full screen mode without losing full screen mode. This is the correct behavior.

All:

Don’t make the music skip when going from fullscreen to windowed mode. Ever.

Itunes:

Don’t crash the entire program when you import an unknown video file. Winamp and Media Player never crash on importing any of my files. Itunes crashes on several. There’s no excuse for this.

Well hell, I just found the preference in Itunes to give the correct video to visualization option. Nice. Now it just needs to stop crashing when importing my media so that I can actually use it.

btw, here’s a smart feature.

Let’s say I make a playlist, and then the music gets shuffled around on the filesystem. No player can recreate that playlist even though all the music is in the player’s media library. How about a feature to at least try to repair the playlist. It ain’t that hard if you think about it. Not hard at all to get it partially right.

One word: “stupid”.

No three words: “stupid”, “stupid”, “stupid.”

They don’t cover it in the TexnicCenter help. I’ve been through three online tutorials and no one has given the correct instructions for producing a left hand double quote.

Inexcusably bad usability.

Usability should be a required class for all Computer Science students. It would save the world a lot of time.

Google Spreadsheets are not encrypted, but Google’s Help section tells the user over and over again that the entire experience is secure. That’s Evil.
Think anyone on the spreadsheet development team stores their bank account login credentials on a ’secure’ Google spreadsheet? Would a developer tell his own mother that it is secure to store her passwords in a google spreadsheet?
Well, the jackasses that wrote and approved the Help section just told every mother in the world that it is safe and secure.

Evil.

On the other hand, many other google offerings in their office suite support SSL for the entire experience.

https://www.google.com/calendar/

https://docs.google.com (Supports secure Word Processing, but clicking on spreadsheets from here removes the encryption.)

https://mail.google.com

-Ed

Terrible, terrible, terrible. From installation to end.

a. Installer didn’t work. Had to get a registry hack to get it installed. (should have tipped me off.)

b. Repeatedly crashes importing my library of music or videos.

I’m done.

My roommate has an ipod. She got angry just telling me about how terrible her experience was. Nothing worked right, good functionality was missing from version 6. Ipod wouldn’t synch. Crashed all the time.

Crap.

Oh, and I used latest available: 7.0.1.8

Running Winxp sp2. All latest drivers and security updates.

Steve must have been shitting himself during the keynote presentation when he showed off v7.

Or maybe it’s only the windows version that is jacked.

I’m going back to Winamp.

Mac PowerWhatever Laptop with 4 cores.

Vmware ESX Server w/ OSX, Windows XP as the main OS’s. And at least one linux flavor too.

Also Vmware should dual boot with another small partition of either XP or OSX for times when you ESX Server truly wipes out performance of the hardware. For example, 3D intensive tasks.

Probably put an image of Win2k3, OSX server on there for development.
Next hardware option for workstation laptops:

2 hard drives for:

a. Raid 1

b. Speed: so all these OS images don’t have to share one drive.

gwave:
$4/mo

Areacode 415? Yes
Forwarding:  to any number is included. no extra charge.
Voicemail: Included, yes custom greeting.
Voicemail messages: Forwarded as wav files via email
Voicemail alerts:  Voicemail alert via sms and/or email.

skype:
$4/mo

Areacode 415? Yes
Forwarding:  to any number is charged per minute, mobile phones cost more per minute
Voicemail: Custom greeting
Voicemail messages:  Only through skype client
Voicemail alerts:  Only through skype client

There are many more features available for both, but the features I looked at make the decision clear for me.
Winner:

Gizmo/CallWave

We can finally synch Google Calendar with Palm and Outlook. http://www.companionlink.com/clgoogle.html
But Airset does that for free, plus you can pay them to synch to your mobile phone over the phone company’s network.

Will Google want to use the Big 4’s networks for that, or will they focus only on synching over the internet (and push for more ubiquitous wifi?)

hmmm, Google innovates consistently, but the Big 4 mobile phone companies stifle innovate products and services at the drop of a hat. My guess is that part of the 4 will cooperate with Google to let users synch Google calendar and part of the 4 will want to create their own calendar app, and charge for it monthly.

Of course, how good does Google Calendar look and respond if I try to view it with a mobile phone web browser?

Hmmm, scatch all this. Somebody already made a mobile phone syncher for free using Java:
http://www.gcalsync.com/

But it is not polished.

Security?

If a business is going to move confidential data over the mobile phone network, then it needs to be securely.

Interesting: If I switch either calendar manually to https on a normal computer browser, they both work fine. However, I don’t see a preference that will force secure viewing each time upon a secure login.

Todo: Check for secure synching and viewing over the phone network as well.
So, I need to start synching both of these to both Outlook and my phone: Airset and Google Calendar.

Costs:

Airset.

Synching Palm and Outlook: Free

Synch over mobile phone:

“AirSet Mobile is a subscription service, available through Verizon at a price of $6.49 per month. Airtime charges are incurred only while synchronizing, which typically takes 30 seconds or so, resulting in 1 minute of airtime utilization. ”

Cost with non Verizon Java enabled phones?

Google:

Synching Palm and Outlook: $30 per user, but some known bugs
Synch over mobile phone: Free with Java J2ME enabled phones, but buggy.

Conclusion:

I lean towards Airset, depending on how they work out the J2ME client. They say it will be a monthly recurring charge. Which seems fine since most of our office users would be using only the Outlook, Palm synching for free. That makes it cheaper than Google option. Plus, Airset is committed to developing the synchronization software. Since Google is not pursuing professional development of synchronization, I would give Airset the edge.

note: This all changes if Google releases professional synchronization. However, synch is such a dangerous function because it touches ALL THE DATA for a user. And bad synch’s can destroy every single bit of data for a user. I think I want a dedicated team getting paid to make sure synch does not ever lose a client’s data. Airset.

Can I copy an existing computer installation into a Virtual Machine?

Advantages (if possible):

- Freedom to make more daring tests without running risk of losing data

- Ability to instantly revert to original status if a given fix did not work

Furthermore,

For business machines, it would be great if I could order the following from Dell.

Linux secure install on the base hardware. (and set to autoupdate drivers and security patches)
Vmware Player or Server preinstalled.

Windows XP VM installed. (and a backup installed as well.)

Have VMware set to create snapshots periodically. (and copy Outlook snapshots nightly).

So, if the user gets a new machine. I just copy the old virtual machine of XP over to it, and I am done. awesome.

If user gets nasty spyware, virus, deletes system files, etc. I just pull the latest vmware image snapshot, and we are 95% finished. (5% is reverted to the saved Outlook pst if necessary.)

a. ignore the gui program for critical updates. It’s worthless.

b. Open a terminal. Type: yum update

c. Watch in amazement, as that command actually works.

d. Wonder why you have to search Google to find the hack to get critical updates to work in Linux? Me too. Shitty Usability.

e. Wonder why ‘Everything’ in Linux  ends up being a hack? Who cares. That’s just the reason it will never be a desktop option for the world. Hacker mentality and my mom’s desktop don’t mix.

Just not able to even begin to run basic Use Cases. Just unbelievable.

Please. Get a Usability guru from Apple to sponsor Linux usablility for a year. Just hand that person the reigns, and let them transform Linux (from a users point of view) into something reasonable.  No voting, no community input. Just let an expert ‘MAKE IT HAPPEN’. B/c the current community has failed.

Linux needs a torvalds of  usability.  Get  someone/someteam to make the UI great (like Apple did with BSD.)