I know there’s a been a lot of anti-video ranting about this, but I think it’s brilliant. My camera takes both photos and videos. When I first started using a digital camera (in 1999), I took many photos and not too many videos. But as memory increased and video got easier to share, I’ve been taking more and more video. So for any event in my life, I have a mixture of photos and video. But there’s never been a single workflow for getting the memories of the event into the hands of my friends (and thus, I never really shared videos). Flickr is solving that, and I think it’s great. Good work Flickr.

I’ve been a bit lazy about posting stuff to my blog here. I guess “lazy” isn’t the right word. I guess I’ve just been a bit uninspired. But I am still reading and commenting on blogs, and I’ve been sharing interesting articles via Google Reader (clicking a button is so much easier than writing a post). If you’re interested in my shared reading list, you can bookmark this link (and get a feed from it if you wish), or you can scan them in this handy box below, which at some point will go into my side bar over there, if I can get it to look non-ugly.

Enjoy!

... what PC developers have been doing to them for years.

Safari for Windows is out. And so far, I’m not liking it. I am a PC user, but I own a Mac machine as well and I’ve used Safari on it a fair amount.

So what am I hating about it? First and foremost, Apple broke the golden rule that every PC software developer that ported to the Mac was shamed for doing: Apple has forced their OS’s s look/feel and UI conventions onto another OS. Take this screen shot of the Safari for Windows Preferences panel:

Read the rest of this entry

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

AKA: I blame Google

I’ve been using LinkedIn recently. LinkedIn is like Myspace for career networking, but it’s got so many design problems that their various UI components battle each other gladiator-style for the honor of pissing me off.

I was using it the other night, looking in vain for the the list of contacts that is displayed with most profiles. I knew it was there because I had seen it before. I was simply missing it. Finally, after perhaps 10 minutes of searching on the page and looking for options that might hide/show them, I saw it: Read the rest of this entry

Almost immediately after posting my blog about Google Maps and Yahoo Maps lack of multi-line address input I had an idea to write a quick little tool that will take a multi-line address and pass it on to Google Maps or Yahoo Maps Beta , formatted correctly of course.

Here it is:
Multi-line Input for Google Maps and Yahoo Maps

This little tool fixes a bit of Bad User Interface in those mapping sevices.

Google and Yahoo: See, that wasn’t so hard was it?

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.

Another Web2.0 trend : The public Beta. You know, when a website runs for years with a little label stating it’s beta, as if it’s an excuse to have bugs or unfinished features.

Citations: flicker , gmail

I still cringe when I hear “web 2.o” thrown about. I completely buy into what it stands for, and where it’s going, but I believe the label is hype,because I don’t see many aspects of Web 2.0 as being new. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been running a web forum for a few years now. But I’m off-track, perhaps another post.

Here’s a list of a few web2.0 trends I’ve spotted these days:

Missing Vowels
Boy, vowels must be selling for a premium these days, since they seem to be missing from a handful of Web 2.0 sites.

Citations: Flickr, Frappr, not to mention the hipper-than-thou phones at Motorola: The RAZR, PEBL, and ROKR.

Vanilla Design
I think Google popularized the trend of no-frills websites as a “cool” thing, but the Web 2.0 version of the vanilla website seems to use a little more CSS than Google.

Citations: Wordpress, Flock

Multi-sized type
The trend is to post a series of words or phrases in different point sizes. This looks very amateurish to me, like something I did when I first used the GEOS word processor in the mid 80s-- more WYSIWYG1.0 than Web2.0. I spotted it on the Flock preview page as well, but it seems to be gone now.

Citation: Wordpress forums, Ning near the bottom.