I’ve been Punk’d. By Google -- they got me good! But ya’know what I want to know? How long has Google been playin’ me? I know it’s been going on for more than just April 1st. Read the rest of this entry

Google screwed up and published a web page that was stolen from Yahoo’s own design. You can learn all about it on Yahoo employee Jeremy Zawodny’s blog. It’s not a big deal, and people seem to be missing the bigger tabloid headline that this underscores: That Google is playing follower to Yahoo.

But then Google employee Matt Cutts, in a left-handed compliment, pointed out how Yahoo had stolen the look and feel of Google’s sponsored links. Twice. Even Robert Scoble jumped in with some commentary about it.

But stealing good UI is different than stealing good art design.

This is my second post in my Gmail UI rant series. I started this series to point out why I prefer Yahoo Mail over Gmail. I don’t think Yahoo Mail is perfect, but Gmail to me is just downright nutty, and has many-a-time left me feeling like a n00b, which is something that I really don’t think email should ever do to anyone except the elderly (that’s a joke, please no hate mail). This time I’m discussing the shortcomings in Google’s labels-instead-of-folders approach, and the difficulty in telling read messages from unread ones. Read the rest of this entry

A few months ago I wrote a little rant about how none of the map websites accepted a single paste a of multi-line address, and how lame that was. I followed up with writing my own little hack to make it possible with Google Maps and Yahoo Maps.

Shortly after writing these blog posts, I was asked to do a User Interface presentation at one of the major search/maps companies in Sillicon Valley Read the rest of this entry

I just got back from Game Developer’s Conference (it was along drive from San Jose to Mountain View) and boy are my legs tired. I’ve been going to GDC for about 6 or 7 years now, and I mainly go to meet up with video game friends old and new (from both LucasArts and from the Indie Game scene).

I’m going to post a quick list of highlights:

• Having a near miss with Richard ‘Lord British’ Garriott (of Ultima fame) while living it up in the VIP pre-party for the IGF awards. Had I known he was there, I would have geeked out a bit. Perhaps next year …
• Playing the new Nintendo 2d Super Mario bros. game. It’s like the old-school NES Super Mario Bros game on steroids. Check out this teaser video.
• Meeting up with the Adobe Shockwave/Director guys, including Tom Higgins, The Habbo Hotel guys, and Darrel Plant who has a bunch of GDC posts himself.
• Meeting all the indie and casual (their term, not mine) game developers at the Minna Mingle. It’s nice to know that there’s people out there who know about and care about my games.
• Seeing the recently-aquired-by-Google SketchUp in action. It works in the same way I think about objects in 3d space, and it’s gotten me excited about 3d world building again.
• There are only two major chapters in a person’s life: Before seeing Bob Saget in person, and after seeing Bob Saget in person. As of Thursday night in the lobby of the San Jose Fairmont, my girlfriend and I are now in that second chapter. Strange, I don’t feel any different.

... and so much more stuff that I can’t even list ehre. Every year the GDC re-energizes me and gets me excited about games again. This year was no different. I can’t wait for next year!

Gmail has some UI problems. Recently I blogged a bit about the bugs in Yahoo Mail Beta and in that entry I said that even with it’s slowness, Yahoo Mail Beta is still better than Gmail. A few people have chimed in to let me know their own thoughts, and one poster took issue with my Yahoo vs. Gmail comment:

your right about one thing: its antaganizingly slow. horribly slow.

your completely wrong about another: it is in no way shape or form, better than gmail. gmail is a MUCH better online email service. nothing really compares to gmail as of yet even with yahoo’s new offering..

I admit that Gmail does have Yahoo Mail Beta beat in the speed department. But I still feel that Yahoo Mail Beta is better than gmail. Read the rest of this entry

I’ve been using Yahoo Mail Beta for the last month or so, and it’s really starting to drive me buggy.

When I first started using it, I was quite impressed. It featured drag-and-drop folder operations, multiple tabs, and more. But a recenty a few aspects about it have really been bothering me.

My good friend Chad Spacey has told me a lot about Picasa. It’s a photo thumbnail/organizer from Google. Kind of like Adobe Bridge, Adobe Photoshop Album, and my personal favorite ThumbsPlus.

But Picasa is from Google. And it’s free. And it looks like it has some cool features. And I trust my friend Chad’s opinion (he has great ideas). So I decided to give it a try. Once I got it working it seemed pretty cool (although I still prefer ThumbsPlus) but getting it working was another story. Read the rest of this entry

For years and years and years, I’ve written addresess like this:

Mr. and Mrs. Fakeperson
123 Fake Street
Monolux, California 92001

See that? It’s on three lines. The address itself is on two. That’s how we were all taught to do it in school. It’s often how addresses are written in emails, and websites, on envelopes, and on the note my Dad pins to my shirt when he lets me out of the house alone.

But Google Maps and Yahoo Maps Beta both only have one address line. So If I get a two-line address in an email and I try to paste it into one of these map sites it fails miserably. The frustrating thing about it is that wanting to map a two line address seems like an extremely common use case. In fact in my life it’s more common than having a single line address.

When you paste a two-line address into Google Maps, only the first line survives. So you have to go back and copy the second line, return to Google Maps, and paste it in there, along with a comma.

The new Yahoo Maps beta pastes both lines into the field (yay!) but won’t reconize the Carriage Return, so you get a run-on sentence like this:

123 Fake StreetMonolux, California 92001

This might lull one into thinking it’s going to work, but after hitting enter it’s revealed that it doesn’t. Still, it’s significantly better than Google Maps, because all you need to do is just add in the comma. Yahoo, you’re soooooo close! Yahoo’s old UI was multiline, but instead of being one giant text field, it was multiple single-line text fields, so that didn’t work either.

I’m kind of shocked that with the new map revolution, neither of these systems are optimized for the copy/pasting of addresses. After all, the web has supported multi-line text fields for as long as I can remember. Come on Google Maps and Yahoo Maps, get with it! You’re going in the Bad User Interface section of my site until you fix this.

Quick update: I’ve created this multi-line address mapper tool to solve this problem for the time being.