Silberbauer Says:

Picasa 3 is out (has been for a couple of weeks, I know. I’m a so late-follower).

Anyway: It’s splendid. It’s even smoother and faster than v. 2. Especially the new image preview, that if you want it to replaces Windows’ horrifically slow built-in image previewer is very, very cool. Almost Mac-like – which is, of course, good.

But, but, but… I so hoped that Google had fixed the network support so that scanning folders on servers (like my beloved Cubestation where my photos live) would work. But alas – Picasa still gets the hickups badly when trying to access a mounted drive letter.

It’s a shame. Picasa is an immensely good piece of software, but with the whole world going submicro-nano-laptop more and more people will have a NAS at home for important stuff that need a lot of space and that you don’t use everyday – and that you thus don’t want to lug around on your astronomic-cost-pr-MB solid state memory in your cool, new subnote.

Photos are exactly such stuff.

A couple of scenarios where this software from Aimersoft might be useful:

1. You are the (un)lucky owner of an Ipod and at the same time you have more than one computer and you really want to upload and download music to your Ipod from both computers.

2. Your harddisk sudddenly breaks down and leaves you with a lot of music on your Ipod – but no way to get it back onto your new harddrive and with no possibility to upload new music to your Ipod without deleting all of the music.

3. Your best friend has got a lot of cool music that you want to ‘backup’ from his Ipod onto your harddrive (remember to ask your friend if he holds all copyrights to the music before you start to download… ).

If you recognize one or more of these scenarios? Then Aimersoft Ipod Backup Software will definitely be useful.

What does it do?
Well, then name says it all – it simply just copies all you music from the Ipod onto a specified folder on your harddrive.

What does it cost?
This is the best part… IT IS FREE!!

Does Aimersoft Ipod Copy Manager have a lot of hidden spyware and keyloggers?
This is the worst part… I DON’T KNOW!!! (but for what it is worth – I don’t think so

Anyway, it works great and you will enjoy the feeling of once againg taking control of your music and bringing it back from the greedy hands of Apple and Steve Jobs who still is using the positiv ‘Apple Brand’ and great design to harrass their customers with stupid limitations to their product.

One might wonder why Apple has gone through so much trouble to limit their Ipods in this way. It keeps reminding me of Microsoft in the old days and their connection with some kind of bad empire or something… it seems to me like… well, I can’t quite remember…

The problem that Apple never saw fit to comment on – the terrible playback stutter has now disappeared. Whether it’s due to my total removal of iTunes 7.6 (in anger!) and thus a clean install of 7.7, or if Apple has in fact fixed something, I don’t know. Maybe it’s simply because I removed DRM from all my AAC files to play them through Winamp?

Nevertheless, it means that I’m back to iTunes for now. I used Winamp for a while, but sadly Winamp has become pretty bloated and its interface is… well it’s not iTunes’. Besides, Winamps built in iPod-support didn’t do it for me.

Most recent version of iTunes stutters like a madman. What’s happening? Apple just rendered their player absolutely useless.

The rumors says it’s Quicktime that’s the problem. Way to go Apple – you just surpassed Microsoft in crappy software.

I’m not the only one having this problem – and it’s an issue on Macs too.

[UPDATE]

Ok, to get a bit more contructive now: http://technovia.typepad.com/technovia/2004/06/itunes_for_wind.html

This might do it.

A while ago, Jeff Han demonstrated the multitouch screen at TED. Now it’s ready for the consumer in a less impressive, but more usable trackpad version. It’s definitely the way to go! It seems to be very intuitive and suddenly the trackpad becomes more than just a ‘mouse-wannabee’. Now we just need a bigger trackpad and more actions than just manipulating the size of a picture
And we need some really clever people to create generic trackpad-language so Mac and Microsoft and other will use the same ‘language’.

Jeff Han’s presentation at TED

Just before Christmas I got to test a HTC Touch Dual with Windows Mobile 6 at work. It was partly my own idea to introduce HTC Touch or Touch Dual as a possible alternative to our mainstream Nokias. That’s why I chose to ignore my mobile-savvy colleague as he offered his condolences when he saw the black HTC box on my desk. He was right, though. Windows Mobile and mobile phones don’t mix.

This was my first hands-on experience with a Windows Mobile phone as I’ve always used Nokia. I have used Windows Mobile devices before, though, as I’ve owned several WM based PDAs. They weren’t perfect but I could live with them. But, as I was to find out, the usage of a PDA differs a lot from that of a phone.

I was looking forward to the WM6 Exchange server integration (“push mail”) and to have an always updated calendar with me. And these features did work fine-ish. Except for the crummy calendar design that forces you to use the stylus constantly, that is. But even so: After five days I gave up the fight with Windows Mobile 6: What a genuinely stupid OS for a phone. Bad, bad UI design.

I think Microsoft has made a huge mistake to try to move an OS from a pc to a phone. Already after a few hours I got very tired indeed from having to get out the stylus just to close a window or to cancel an error message on the ridiculously tiny close-box in the corner of the dialogs. I don’t care if it looks like the GUI on my Windows pc – it just doesn’t work on that little screen. On a device that tiny you do one thing at the time – you don’t need the windows metaphore to allow for multitasking (it hardly works on the pc anyhow).

Also, several times when I was trying to phone someone, WM6 – being absolutely clueless about my priorities – would pop up with some reminder or other alert that really shouldn’t popup at all while I’m dialing. Just like Windows XP does, WM6 made me feel that the system comes first and the user second.

I soon started feeling that I was spending time fighting the system instead of using it. Exactly as I feel when trying to get Outlook 2007 to start in less than 15 minutes or that thrre to four hours every month I spend massaging my Windows XP into working without too many alerts or errors. Yep, Microsoft surely has succeeded moving the Windows experience to a handset. And that’s a pitty.

Three times a call simply didn’t come through (it’s a phone for crying out loud!) and four times I dialed my fathers number by mistake because of a design flaw in HTC’s TouchFLO interface (which has been added to patch some of the even bigger flaws in WM). The device insisted on merging all my Live! Messenger contacts with my professional contacts making tons of duplicates and adding a lot of contacts without phone numbers to my phone book, making finding the right version of the contact  (the one with the phone number) annoyingly difficult.

I have the feeling that Microsoft’s brand managers have had too much influence on the design. A lot of stupid compromises have been made to make the phone interface look like Windows, instead of genuinely making the OS work on a tiny screen and in a mobile user context. The design flaws combined with the Touch’ sluggish response and not always too precise touch screen makes this gadget a big no-go to me. WM6 doesn’t seem mature and personally I think it’s fundamentally flawed. I think it’ll need a complete rewrite.

One thing is spending time in front of the pc tweaking and tuning. But to have to combat your mobile phone just to get it to work the right way – that’s not OK.

I felt that I could not trust this piece of hardware to work when I needed it to – and as I rely heavily on my mobile phone I’m now back on my trusty old Nokia 6230i. No push mail – but no wasted time, missed calls or hypertension either.

IE Tab. Brilliant! It runs IE inside a tab in Firefox. Excellent if your internet bank (and too much other stuff) only works for real in IE. Simply compile a list over alle the sites that you want to run in an IE context, and you never have to start IE again – manually that is. IE Tab will embed IE into Firefox when needed.

One of those tools that just makes your life that little bit easier.

Microsoft has launched their Project ‘Milan’, which is basically a large touchscreen with a new multitouch manipulation software.

I tried a similar product in New York last year (based a projector instead of a touch screen) and based om my experience it makes a big difference when you’re using a multitouch display instead of a keyboard.

If you’re using a multitouch display on a horizontal surface it’s often becomming a social experience in contrast to using a keyboard where you’re mostly interacting in a individual manipulation and interaction mode. So give me a couple of those, thanks … but could someone at Microsoft please make sure that the blue screen of death is not all over my coffee table?
It would ruin my creative mood, I’m sure.

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Axure RP Pro 4.4 is out and features a few long awaited improvements: Now you can

• use “onchange” in dropdowns
• communicate with dynamic layers across masters
• use a placeholder widget instead of the ugly image widget

And is it me – or has the app become a bit faster?

Anyway: Axure stays in the lead as the best tool for rapid web prototyping.

Designing rich newsletters for Notes has always been a pain. The Notes html rendering engine pretty much sucks. But as not many consumers use Notes it didn’t really matter. Also, webmail services like Hotmail and Gmail has been difficult to negotiate CSS wise. But you could always trust the good old Outlook to render your html e-mail in the right way.

Until now, that is.

February Microsoft launches Outlook 2007 featuring that old buggy Word rendering engine with extremely limited support for CSS. Yes: The one you know from MS Word that has the same html rendering power as did Netscape 2 – that is: Very limited indeed.

It’s nothing short of a disaster. Html formatted e-mail newsletters drive a lot of our clients’ online business, and we know for a fact that rich formatted newsletters work well: Nice design makes people buy stuff. Now some of our clients must either redesign their newsletters or fall back to text e-mail to be sure their customers can read their messages in Outlook (which most people use).

Why Microsoft has chosen to use the crippled Word rendering engine for displaying the html formatting of the brand new Outlook 2007 is a mystery.

My best guess, though, is that some fool in Microsoft has decided that to “integrate” e-mail more into the Office suite the stupid Word engine must be used all over the place. And it’s probably the same lame guy that years ago decided that Word should be the default e-mail editor for Outlook.

Source: Campaign Monitor

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.

Over the last two weeks me and a colleague have executed four workshops with a client who is building a complex B2B portal. The client has for some time been working on the concept and business model but as the process needed to move forward into design we were called in to take the process to the next level – and to do this quickly as deadline was approaching mightily fast.

As the concept was not entirely documented but mostly existed inside the project team members’ minds, our design process had to be very flexible to allow for sudden changes in scope and strategy.

We soon realized that we needed to get very visual indeed to shift the team members from strategic thinking into design mode (from the “what and why”-mode to the “how”-mode), and that we also needed a lot of face time with the client to understand the complex organisational needs without doing a some thorough analysis first. So we simply brought a laptop with Axure RP 4.2, a projector and a Wacom digitizer and did 4 x 5 hours of intense rapid prototyping with the client.

We were 2 of us, 3 of them and, very importantly, the head of the company that eventually will implement the system: A skilled system architect with a great understanding of the need for IA and interaction design. We’ve worked with him before and it’s always a pleasure (I can’t mention names here, but he’ll know who he is

He and I lead the discussion while my colleague prototyped like mad in Axure, constantly reflecting the team’s decisions on the screen (he’ pretty fast in Axure – and one needs to be to keep up with 5 team members constantly changing their minds).

The first couple of hours of workshop one went by without much progress but suddenly the site started to emerge on the screen. Today we concluded the fourth and final workshop and I must say that this approach really has moved the project forward.

Live prototyping with a team of 6 is not the cheapest way to do it, but there no question that both the project and the quality of the IA and the design have benefitted from this approach.

Anyway: Tomorrow I leave for Berlin to attend the second European Information Architecture Summit. Two days of fun and educating stuff, I hope. And the IA happy hour friday evening. What’s a summit without hang overs?

I’ll blog about this event when I’ll get back, but please be patient – the next week is screwed up schedule-wise so we might reach the weekend before any posts appear.

If you’re still on iTunes 6, stick with it for the time being. V7 skips like crazy when you are moving windows around or opening documents. And sometimes it skips just for the fun of it.

It’s incredible that Apple cannot produce a player that’ll play a standard 196Kbps MP3 without errors on a fast 2006 pc. I mean – Winamp 2 decoded MP3s with the cpu usage of a standard household toaster and never skipped – no matter what you did to your machine.

Some iTunes 7 victims have found that this helps: http://www.geekzone.co.nz/juha/1308 – but only if your music is extremely distorted. The random skips don’t go away.

Maybe it’s time to check out Anapod instead of Apple’s cpu-hogging beast.

[UPDATE]
7.0.1 is out. Faster but still skips on my machine, though.

Our sys adm. just decided that our workstations are to download updates automatically every day 12 o’clock. Great news for IT security – bad news for my blood pressure.

Sometimes I have a pretty stressed up day, and now Windows keep nagging me with this every 10 minutes:

No! I don’t wanna save everything, shut down Photoshop, Word, Axure and Dreamweaver and reboot my workstation. I’m busy, you see? I’ve got work to do!

If it was only the Windows Update nag screen, but it’s this one too:

And this one:

And iTunes, and the Adobe CS suite, and Windows Mediaplayer, and several other apps which designers think that they’ve made the one and only single most important piece of software on my workstation. Guess what, guys: I’m an adulterer. I have others apps too.

In fact I’ve got at least 8 different apps that craves my attention every now and then. That means at least 1 update every day – and that’s both on my desktop workstation and my laptop (and then again on my desktop at home). My life is one big update.

Sometimes when I’m doing a presentation for a client, Acrobat pops up “demanding my attention” as it so nicely puts it. If I try to show a piece of video Windows Mediaplayer may start the show by asking for a license update, “uhm sorry guys, I just have to …. click click… there”.

It’s as if the software is more important than the work I do. Remember that Microsoft commercial? “We see Susan dreaming of… blah blah blah”. Well, all I see is a bloody MS nag screen wanting me to reboot, even taking focus. Aaargh – there it goes again! Piss off!

Adobe has released Flex 2, the app that’ll make doing rich internet applications a breeze.

It lets enterprises create personalized, multimedia-rich, Ajax-style applications that can reach virtually anyone on any platform.

…as Adobe says. Not Ajax-applications but Ajax-style applications. Because there certainly is a catch.

I was eager to see a demo on this revolution so I went to the Flex Store demo that is supposed to show how cool a web shop can be when made with Flex.

I was not impressed: In fact the shop (after loading for hours!) didn’t initialize. Just a empty window – both in IE and FF…

Oh my: I need Flash 9 to use an RIA produced in Flex 2. That kind of makes Flex a big no-no in my book. I could never recommend a client to build anything that requires his customers to install a proprietary plugin.

Seems to me that Flex 2 is Adobes way to try to take over the web by requiring everybody to install Flash 9.

Building your website in a tool that requires the user to install plugins at all is absolutely sheer madness. Just don’t do it.

I’m featured

The last few months I’ve been working on a wireframe prototype on a pretty complex webshop for a large international corporation. It’s about 200 or so screens. The first 2 major iterations were done in various versions 3.something of AxureRP Pro. As the prototype grew large, AxureRP 3 wasn’t up for it.

We’ve reached 3rd iteration and now I’m doing all 200 screens all over again in v 4.0.3, and I’ts a thrill.

These are some of the major improvements in v4.:

1. You can now duplicate pages or entire branches. And If you duplicate a branch all internal links in that branch are updated to match the new branch. Great for doing different versions of the same flow.
2. Organize your templates and references. Template and references (which are now the same thing and called Masters) can be organized in folders.
3. Masters can be nested and layered. Yes! Nesting in nesting in nesting And you can apply several masters to the same page. You can now do a master with your basic grid, sub masters with left or right nav, with or without top nav etc.
4. DHTML emulation. It’s not AJAX, but you can do some AJAX-like stuff if you’re creative.
5. Much Better HTML rendering

…and so on. AxureRP is the best software thing that’s happened to the interaction designer in a very long time.

I’d love to see some of this in V.5:

• List-view. To quickly add some page items before starting to design.
• Site mapping and flow charting.
  
• Multiple versions of the same page. Some way to do several versions of one page.
• Global Variables. Some way to send values between pages to emulate “logged in” and “non logged in scenarios”.
• Placeholders in masters. A way to do placeholders in masters so that when I moved a placeholder in the master, the element placed in the placeholder on the pages that were generated from that master would move to. A bit like Dreamweavers editable fields.
• More generators. E.g. a generator that lets me do a Word doc with all specifications overlayed on the screen shot instead of placed in a table below the screenshot. Or HTML-version with alpha-blended spcifications. You know: Make it look good
• MouseOver and MouseOut on all types of widgets
• Automation of the navigation. Emulating a functioning navigational system is still hard work. Some sort of navigation generator would be nice.
• If / Then / Else-scripting of some sort. “IF this radiobutton is selected THEN this button should send the user to Page A ELSE send him to Page B.

If you are an IA or ID and using Visio or (God help you) Powerpoint for prototyping, try the 30 days trial of AxureRP Pro.