Zesty News

Kevin is about to begin the alpha testing process on his news reader product, Zesty News. Check out the announcement and the site.

Good luck with it Kevin and sign me up as an Alpha tester!

PS. Excellent logo!!!

AJAX Makes You Forget About UI

So the other day we set my wifes father up with a new computer and got him going on the web with a Gmail account. He's had a computer in the past and knows the basics of browsing to different sites, etc. I showed him around the net a bit and explained how to get into Gmail and so on.

The next day I figured we'd get a phone call or two on how to do something or other. The call came in around 8pm and he only had one question. "How do I open my mail?". So I troubleshoot with him a bit about the URL he's at, if he's logged in and so on. He had done all that, but every time he click on his mail it just turned yellow.




Of course the problem was that he was clicking on the checkbox and not the subject words. Now if you look at that screenshot above you'll notice that the checkbox is the only traditional UI widget in there. There is no indication at all that clicking the table row opens the message. No button or link.

For us technology inclined folks it's a no-brainer, but for the "average" user it makes no sense. It doesn't work like anything else on the web. So while AJAX/DHTML wizardry is very cool stuff on one level I think it's important to remember to make your applications work as expected. Some indication needs to be given about what you're supposed to do.

Now Google is obviously aware of this design decision and maybe they're trying to "change the game", but in my opinion creating a UI widget that gives no indication it is a UI widget is bad design. I've seen several other AJAX apps lately that are also using "invisible" widgets and it's a trend which I hope falls by the wayside in the near future.

Open Source CMS

"What I experienced was obtuse and complex software that was packed with gratuitous features at the expense of usability and user experience. It was software written by geeks, for geeks." - Nice little article. I couldn't agree more. Open source applications in general are very poorly done in terms of UI almost across the board. That's why FogCreek can sell bug tracking software for $100/user when Bugzilla is free and why 37 Signals can sell Basecamp when there are hundreds of open source project management tools.

If I ever start an open source project (and I hope to down the road) the first thing I'm going to do is recruit some designer/UI types. These are the type of people who are rarely if ever get involved in the open source community and it shows. Geeks and designers are kind of like oil and water so perhaps that's why the designers stay away from the Geek dominated world of open source, but that's got to change if open source wants to become as successful in applications as it has been in infrastructure.

IT Conversations

Since I've been working from home full time, I've really gotten addicted to IT Conversations. The talks make really good background for coding. Some are boring and I generally pick and choose ones that interest me. Here are a few I've liked lately:


R0ml Lefkowitz, Chief Technical Architect, AT&T Wireless


Jonathan Schwartz, President, Sun Microsystems

Philip Greenspun, Software Engineering

Update:
Clay Shirky, Ontology is Overrated (forgot this one)

Mike’s Life

"I'm at the local Caribou Coffee early in the morning, wrapping up a brief chat between a client in Pennsylvania and a friend in Manchester UK, but that's not unusual. In fact, most of my work day is spent on design and web projects for clients and colleagues in Europe and the US, and it's been that way for nearly 7 years." - Excellent post by Mike Rohde on how he came to work for MakaluMedia and his life working from the home office. Of course Mike did our logo work and is a great guy to work with.

Darth Vadar Blog

" There is a bit of bounce in my step today, notwithstanding the fact that all the diodes down the left side of my leg seem finally to be functioning smoothly. I ate a full breakfast in my hyperbaric chamber while listening to really loud music (Qui'hut Xillermott's Sonata No.26) and then popped out to tour the bridge." - heh, it's not that bad actually....

http://darthside.blogspot.com/
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ADOdb

Alex is porting Tasks to use ADOdb from straight MySQL. I've built HelpSpot from the ground up using it. I've been using it for several years and I'm really happy with it.

He mentions the trouble Postgres can be if your moving from a MySQL/SQL Server way of doing things. HelpSpot won't be supporting Postgres initially, mostly because of a lack of experience with the platform. Hopefully down the road we'll be able to add support for Postgres and Oracle.

Star Wars TV Spots

The first 3 Star Wars TV spots are out. Well............ um............... they stink baaaaaaaaaaad.

The trailer a month or so back really gave me hope. It was dark and had appropriate music, etc. These spots are just awful. It's almost like a commercial for a cartoon movie. The music is upbeat and the voice over guy ..... oh the horror.
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Stanford University Newspaper Sells Links to ANYONE

Update to the Update: Looks like it was initially correct and as JD points out below the ads are on the .edu domain as well. Pretty shocking stuff.

Update: Looks like this might be BS since it's on a .org domain. So now I'm just a little surprised Stanford hasn't sued their pants off.

Wow, I can't really believe this. Stanford, the school which owns many patents Google uses and the home of Google are essentially using their school newspaper website to give pagerank to spammers. For $300/month anyone and I mean anyone can post a link directly on their homepage. Check it out:


http://daily.stanford.org/

Look along the left side and at the bottom. Alot of casinos, drugs, poker, etc.

Does Stanford really need the $300 bucks? Here's what their endowment page says:
"Stanford is fortunate to have one of the largest financial endowments among U.S. institutions of higher education. As of August 31, 2004, the value of the endowment was $10 billion."

I used to work at a college and I'm really surprised they would even want to be associated with these types of organizations. The college I worked at was very careful about that sort of thing.

(via SEO Book)

Help Desk Priorities

I found this link via del.icio.us. It's a guys tribute to the worst help desk technician he knows, it's kind of interesting but not the point of this post. What I want to talk about is the screenshots of his help desks request tracking tool. Take a look:



It's obviously a simple Access Database, which I don't have a problem with but What I want to talk about here is priorities and urgency. You see these two fields in just about every commercial and noncommercial help desk application out there. As you can see here they default to medium. My guess is that they stay at medium most of the time. Right there that makes me a feel a bit like having both these fields is redundant and unnecessary.

Now if you think to the next step, let's say something is urgent. Well you would mark it urgent and most likely make it a high priority. Well wouldn't all urgent requests be a high priority by definition? OK let's take it the other way and say it's not urgent and in fact the help desk technician decides it's a low priority.

In all my time talking with users about their problems few would every classify them as low priority. They may not be urgent, but low implies that a leisurely pace can be taken with finding a resolution. So what I'm saying is that I just don't believe in prioritizing customer service requests. It ends up taking a bunch of time to figure out is this low, medium, high, low urgency, medium urgency, high urgency and in the end it usually just ends up being a guess by the help desk associate not a real indication of priority.

That's why in HelpSpot there's only one choice. A simple checkbox that indicates if the request is urgent or not. It's usually easy to tell if something is urgent or not (lots of yelling ). I think it's going to be a time saver for the help desk team as well as making life a bit easier for level 2 support since they don't have to worry about what something marked priority medium high urgency means.

VisiBone

I just got a nice email from Bob Stein of Visibone. He pointed out that in my logo creation article my comment about VisiBone could be taken the wrong way. I love the VisiBone Color Lab and have used it for years. My only point was that a programmer shouldn't be the one picking the colors and fonts for their corporate logo using any tool.

On a happy side note, Bob let me know that the article triggered a purchase of one of his products. Excellent!

Sorry if I came off a bit harsh Bob


Update: I took his email a bit too seriously, Bob actually really liked it. He followed up with me and I think his exact words were "You can't buy PR like that, very flattering". Heh, we all knew that already Points to alot of stuff I talk about here.
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Credit Where Credit is Due?

I'm a huge Dave Winer fan, but he's really getting a bit wacky lately. Today he released his spam fighting tool for Manilla. It works by searching for strings and erasing posts with strings the system knows about (mostly urls you have to manually enter). The wacky part is he seems to think this is a new way of fighting spam and wants credit if it is. Huh? It's got to be the oldest way of fighting spam and honestly doesn't work very well as he sort of even admits. If you forget to add the "latest" spam url then your sites get full of spam until you do. I'm pretty sure all the major weblog tools already have this feature built in. I know Wordpress does and I'm pretty sure MovableType does as well. I think it's time for Dave to download some of these other tools and get caught up with the systems he helped invent. He's been using those out of date tools too long.
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Linux Can’t Kill Windows

Linux Can't Kill Windows - via the dot

I tend to agree. I'm a Mac user so I'm on the Unix/Linux bandwagon and all that, but Linux isn't going to beat out MS anytime soon. Certainly not within the next 20 years or so. It has nothing at all to do with marketing, desktops (look how perfect OSX is and still only 3% market share), or ease of use. Operating systems are this centuries infrastructure. It's simply too inefficient to have multiple choices in this area, the world naturally gravitates towards a monopoly.

You wouldn't want there to be 5 bridges right next to each other going over a river or 4 train lines right next to each other going from the same place to the same place. Businesses aren't going to pay for training and support of multiple operating systems in their organizations and it's all about business. People use at home what they use at work and until it makes financial sense for businesses to have multiple OS's Windows will be king.

It also has nothing to do with quality of one vs another. Let's say Red Hat takes off and all the sudden they become what is on every users desktop in every organization in the country. What have the businesses accomplished? They've traded in one monopoly for another. You don't think Red Hat would start charging like they were a monopoly? I do. So why should businesses take that risky path of swapping out one OS for another which may only be slightly better?

Finally you have Office, which is the real key to the Microsoft empire. Until there is something to compete with Office nobody is going to switch out of MS products. There's simply too much productivity on the line to mess with switching to another Office like solution. By the way Open Office and the like are not the answer. MS has 40 BILLION dollars sitting around. You're not ever going to catch them in the business software market by trying to copy them. The only thing that can unseat Office is a revolutionary new product, like the Spreadsheet was 20 years ago. Something so new and which enhances productivity so greatly that businesses have to switch or risk losing ground to their competitors.

Scoble usually follows Slashdot, it will be interesting to see his take on it.

#1 Sign Your Wife’s a Dork

When she sends you an email like this:

START EMAIL


http://go.mappoint.net/mcdonaldsx/PrxResults.aspx?&LOC=41.6832716365646
%3a-73.8452185889965&CT=41.6832716365646%3a-73.8452185889965%3a14.
2501126753095%3a10.6875845064821&DSN=MapPoint.NA&GAD2=&GAD3=
12603+(postal+code)%2c+New+York%2c+United+States&IC=41.6832716365646
%3a-73.8452185889965%3a33%3a&GAD4=USA&NR=20



Look at all the mcdonalds that have wifi near us...

Jamie Landsman
Manager, Travel Systems
Strategic Procurement Services

END


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Wife

How I explained REST to my wife...

"Some days the Powerbook gets more attention than the wife and so she snoops over my shoulder and starts asking a bunch of questions about whatever is on the screen. She doesn't really care, this is just the cue to shift my attention over to her. I usually do just that and say something like, Oh, this is some interesting stuff but nothing you would care about.

But on this day I decided that I would play along a bit and see how far I could take her into my world before she ran away screaming in terror."
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FireFox Less Stable than IE?

ColdFusion guru Ben Forta asks the question.

I have to say I tend to agree. FireFox on the mac crashes on me about once every few weeks but the tab interface, better rendering, and web developers plugin are too much to give up.

Russell Beattie’s RSS Ads Drive me Nuts

I love Russell Beattie's weblog, but the ads in his RSS feed drives me crazy. Don't get me wrong, I think anyone with a popular product should be allowed to monetize that if they want to, but this format just doesn't work for me. On top of the fact that it intrudes on my pristine RSS environment is the issue that the ads rarely if ever match the content. Why is there an ad for Dell here?



How about a Sprint ad or something at least relevant? Personally I'd rather see Russell push some products he likes using Amazon or see if he can wrangle a sponsorship with a mobile startup like a game or mobile app company. Anything but these useless ads.

Tiger

Kevin notes the imminent release of Tiger, the latest version of Mac OSX. Looks pretty sweet. Another $129 going to Mr. Jobs :-(

Creating a Dashboard widget to hook into HelpSpot web services sounds like a cool little stress relief project. I'll have to put that on the todo list.

Nike Ad

Cool Nike ad created by Joseph Jaffe. If you saw the masters this weekend it was a pretty dramatic moment and makes a very cool commercial. (link via Scoble)


Update: I had a little trouble downloading the movie, probably because Jaffe is being Scobledotted. Dave Winer has the file here:
http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/movies/justDidIt.wmv
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RSS Stalled?

Interesting post by Steve Rubel on if RSS is stalled and what it's going to take to "tip" RSS use for the less technically inclined. I still view RSS adoption alot like Web adoption. For just about 100% of the less technical people I know if they had to install a web browser to use the Internet they wouldn't. To me RSS is in the same boat. The average person isn't going to use it until an RSS reader (whatever that is, maybe even the OS or browser) is installed on everyones desktop.

RSS needs the equivalent of "clicking on the big E". Until I can tell someone in one sentence like that how to get on RSS it's not going to have huge penetration into the mainstream (meaning hundreds of millions, etc)
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