Silberbauer Says:

Last weekend I decided to move to Gmail for real and say bye bye to Thunderbird for good. Easy as pie? Well… no, not if you want to do it right. But it’s worth it.

I’ve had a Gmail account for years but I’ve always stuck with my “old” account and my trusty Thunderbird. Don’t get me wrong: Thunderbird is a very good mail client. The best, in fact – but it’s still a local app, and we can’t have that, can we?

Also, as I’m using 3 different computers on an every day basis, even Thunderbird and an IMAP account isn’t the perfect solution. The SPAM problem was getting on my nerves too. I’m running a pretty aggressive SPAM filter on my ISP’s server but still a lot of crap slips through. Applying the Thunderbird SPAM filter (not bad, but not perfect either) and on top of that the very aggressive Spamato filter collection helps. But Spamato keeps filtering mails from my mom(!) and most of you will understand that precisely that kind of false positive is disqualifying. Above all: Thunderbird is not Web 2.0, because Web 2.0 is about trusting Google with all your data, remember? So here goes.

Switching to Gmail is of course easy. I transformed my ISP’s IMAP account to a simple forward, so that all my mail is still scanned for SPAM and viruses by my ISP and then forwarded to my Gmail account. No sweat.

But I still have 7651 old e-mails (not counting the thousands of mails I have sent since 2002, but they will stay on my harddrive for now) in my local mailbox on this very Dell Latitude D410. Among this immense pile of mails there just may be something of importance, so I want it all on my Gmail account for fast searching and easy access – and because I like Gmail’s neat labelling function.

First off I tried the GML (Gmail Loader) but turned out to be very slow and unstable. GML also uses forwarding to send the mails to Gmail, so the original headers are not preserved.

I decided to use the “Redirect” extension for Thunderbird instead. Doing a redirect the headers should be preserved – even though Gmail chooses to date stamp these mails with the arrival time anyway. Thus, each conversation (Gmail lingo for “thread”) is datestamped with the time ofarrival, but the date stamp of the original mails inside the conversation seems to be preserved. Good enough for me as all my old mails will be archived anyway.

So after having set up a Gmail filter to archive all incoming mail immediately and having deleted the largest of the old mails in my Thunderbird mail storage I started redirecting over 7.000 mails to my Gmail account. It worked, but my ISP’s SMTP chose to go into raving spamanoia overdrive and throttle me down. I had to kill Thunderbird a couple of times to get the redirecter up running again and found out that clearing c:\documents and settings\local settings\temp, seemed to help.

Anyway, here I am with 7000+ e-mails in my Gmail neatly stacked into 3.000-and-something conversations and furthermore compressed from more than 600 MB on my disk to 99 MB on Googles disk.

It’s fast – opening Gmail in Firefox is in fact faster than opening Thunderbird. And Thunderbird still is a Formula One car compared to that old freight train they call Outlook.

Yup – Gmail works like a charm. It’s just a really great service and the interface is so well designed. It’s not beautiful, to say at least, but it’s brilliant layed out and the use of Ajax makes it snappy in just the right places.

Sadly, I can’t get the Gmail notifier to work. A firewall or router somewhere between my home and Google just won’t let it through.

Web 2.0 marks the dictatorship of the presentation layer, a triumph of appearance over architecture that any good computer scientist should immediately dismiss as unsustainable.

“O’Reilly as Tito?” What a pile of geeky bs. Mr. Thompson is really pissed that real people stole his wet dream and made up a trendy name for it.

Of course the presentation layer rules, Mr. Thompson. Because that is the one part of the system that we all see. So nice data presented in a nice way, yes please. A solid, scalable architecture – that’s great, but as long as the system delivers, I really don’t care.

Maybe, Mr. Thompson, the users got tired of waiting for you developers to get your shit together and to start producing interfaces and services that made sense on top of that nice code that you do. So they chose the systems that provide valuable services in a nice, usable way. Who wouldn’t.

The web right now is developing much like an organism. Not everything is perfect and not everything is build to last – nor should it be. But never before has the web delivered so much value to so users.

Nobody said the Web 2.0 paradigm is perfect, but it’s there, and that’s more than you can say about your promised metaverse of a new generation, scalable, modular 8th generation internet med for people that speak hex. Amazon, Google and even Microsoft are delivering – you’re just talking.

If O’Reilly is Tito, then you’re that young German guy who, seeing the colorful decadence of the Weimar Republic, decided to make us all walk in line towards that promised Third Reich: Ze plaze in which all zystemz will wörk in the zame way and no one will waste prezious coding time on that filthy rich user experienze.

Arh – just kidding. But so were you, right?

I’ve just launched our DRs new corporate site: http://www.dr.dk/omdr
I did: strategy, Project Management and IA.

I think it went really well: (we got minor issues with supporting Firefox… i know…)
What do you think?

/Lars Silberbauer

“Dansk IT’s” Usability Days 2006 are over. A two day seminar on usability – and not a bad one either. Last year the same event ended up in nothing but sales pitches from different CMS vendors (yawn), but this year focus was in fact on usability/user centered design. The 2005 catastrophe meant that only about 80 people showed up this year and that makes me wonder if there’s going to be Usability Days 2007.

Among the best speakers this year was Klaus Kaasgaard (VP of Yahoo! User Experience Research) who talked about web trends for the years to come (and just in case you’ve been living in a cave the last year: The keywords are social, participation, community, sharing). Quite inspiring.

Also, Eric Reiss gave a good performance on user experience in general.

Several cases on usability and user centric design were presented: TopDanmark (insurance company), VELUX (the ones with the roof windows and one of our clients), and The Ministry of Finance (hey – also one of our clients . All of them very well presented cases.

I and a colleague did a two hour hands-on workshop on personas. Two hours aren’t much for a workshop, but we managed to have people put together their own “tween”-personas for a fictitious e-commerce case. I think it went ok – but who am I to judge. I’m eagerly awaiting the feedback forms.

So, that concludes two weeks of me talking. Last thursday I gave a presentation on tools for user centred design at Creuna’s own usability seminar and friday I did the same presentation for most of my colleagues. This week I did a presentation on Web 2.0-trends as a part of another Creuna event for our clients. These things are fun to do but they sure take up a lot of time, so I’m looking forward to getting some work done the next couple of weeks – the kind of work that out clients pay us to do.

Yet another client wants a splash screen on his new, expensive and very beautiful web shop.

Why, you ask, put up a splash screen in front of a web shop? Why try to block your clients from your shop? Why spoil your conversion rate just to show a picture?

“Branding”, they say. “We want to show our brand before the customer is allowed into the shop”. End of discussion. Gaaah.

But please understand: A beautifully designed shop is GOOD branding. Easy access to buy your goods is GREAT branding. A flawless and nice shopping experience is EXCELLENT branding.

A 760×400 pixels jpg blocking the entrance to your shop is NOT great branding. It’s just plain stupid.

NO MORE SPLASH SCREENS! Have a nice weekend.