I'm going to avoid commenting too much on why I think this is bad journalism, and how I expect more from someone associated with the Washington Post (even if it is a blog). If the point was to be sensationalist and grab my attention, it did do that, though.
Instead, I'll go into how it's misleading... Supposedly, with the laptop refresh, Apple will be introducing a new manufacturing process where components are carved from aluminum. The new MacBook model is supposed to be called the "Brick." That's great and all, but I feel as if I need to remind people that first-generation Apple products are always littered with problems. I remember when the PowerBook G4 was released, I'd be able to press down on the palm wrest and scrape along a CD in the fancy new slot-loading drive, while it was spinning. I passed on the PowerBook and bought a Sony VAIO PCG-Z505 instead.
So... before jumping the gun as soon as the new MacBook is released, you may want to wait till it's known that Apple has all the kinks of their manufacturing process worked out. It may be a while.
]]>Microsoft is very rare at "getting it right," but on some things they have: one of the goals of Microsoft's Office 2007 was to help its users more easily and quickly create good looking documents. Doing it quickly makes the user feel smart; having it look good makes the user look smart too.
When I'm fumbling around with inane office equipment and devices, trying to figure out what some flashing LED with meaningless icon is trying to convey, or trying to figure out what combinations of buttons must be pushed in what order to make some device perform some magic function, I don't feel very smart. When I cannot get these devices to work the way I want them to, it makes me feel stupid and don't want to use the device again, and become bitter about it (as if I wasn't bitter enough already).
This is probably the basis for the luddite attitude of many people, for both gadgets and technology as well as computers.
I don't think this is our fault...
Besides many manufacturers' complete ineptitude in usability and market testing, many, many manufacturers cut corners and have electrical and hardware engineers write software and design interfaces, instead of hiring dedicated software engineers and usability experts. Just because an electrical/hardware engineer knows how to program, it does not mean they can produce good software, or even know what they are doing.
]]>This sounds pretty similar to Microsoft's Internet Explorer's infamous favorites icons feature. For every site a user visited with Internet Explorer, the browser would automatically request a file called favicon.ico, to be displayed in the browser's location bar and bookmarks. A lot of people were not happy--all of the sudden web servers would begin to get swamped for requests for this mysterious favicon.ico that did not exist. These requests polluted many web server logs, and were very annoying.
On some sites, especially dynamic ones, 404 errors are very expensive. Unfortunately this is true of most Drupal-powered sites, including mine. When using Drupal's "pretty URLs" which uses Apache's mod_rewrite to, well, make URLs pretty, all requests that the web server does not process (including errors) will go through Drupal. Going through Drupal means a long boot-strapping process to initialize Drupal and load all its modules, and at least one database request to find out a URL does not exist and to return an error 404. Too many requests for a non-existent file can basically become a DoS attack.
It seems Amazon's A9 developers didn't get the memo people don't like tools that request files that don't exist.
Granted, it's not too bad: I don't think this toolbar has much market penetration, so it's not as if millions of people are killing my site. The siteinfo.xml specification page also mentions that the file is fetched through A9 and cached, so the file will not be requested for every user that visits, but only for the first one.
Kudos for Amazon's programmers being a bit brighter than Microsoft's, but eh, I can't say how much more bright for designing a system that is a bit too similar to the favicon.ico debacle.
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Yes, it is a fairly benign UI that lets you set a script/program to run when you connect (aka "hotplug") a keyboard or mouse. Maybe I am incredibily dense but I cannot think of a program anyone would want to run when hotplugging a keyboard or a mouse...
I am sure it is a godsend for those who need it, but how many people really need it? Does it really need its own UI? From the desktop where "sensible defaults" means removal of useful, commonly used options, the same desktop where you need to go messing around with GConf to configure Nautilus to use a non-spatial interface--the presence of this kind of thing does not seem very consistent.
Yes, I am hating on GNOME. GNOME is very slick and polished in Ubuntu, but it still suffers the problems (that its developers deliberately mandate) that make most classic UNIX users (including me) leave it in droves.
The novelty is nice though, just like when I first used Apple's OS X. But I'm sorry, regardless of how much you hype it, it doesn't stop it from sucking (though sheep--er users of Apple's products like to "think different"). I'm timing how long it takes me to give up and switch to the KDE desktop provided by Kubuntu.
]]>Unfortunately, many of these research papers are only available for reading via PDF. Even for those papers that have full text on a normal webpage, complex login and authentication systems (i.e. I can only access said page through my university library) force me to save PDFs to facilitate later reading.
PDFs are really miserable for reading on the computer. My gripes:
Usability expert Jakob Nielson thinks so too: in 2003 he had a column PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption.
It seems that some of these problems stem from a mismatch in orientation. Computer monitors are generally landscape; PDFs and printed media are portrait.
And computer monitors just keep getting wider. While widescreen is nothing short of awesome for movies and television, its not that useful for computing. The classic use case is the accountant with a wide spreadsheet: but how many people have wide spreadsheets? Because most people use computers to create content in a portrait orientation, and that most content we read expands downward rather than to the side, it seems as if it would make sense if monitors were a portrait orientation rather than landscape.
Fortunately, this is easy to try out now. Most LCD monitors swivel into portrait orientation with a flick of the wrist. Microsoft Windows and Linux (through the XRandR extensions) have provided orientation switching support for a few years as well.
But it's not yet usable by the mainstream. For example, on Linux with nVidia's binary drivers, running in portrait means losing out on accelerated 3D as well as multimonitor support, things many people (including myself) are not ready to lose.
]]>And now, apparently Office 12 looks even uglier.
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