Buying a new kind of product sight unseen is foolish. Especially given how mysterious Apple has been on what the iPad can do and what restrictions on capabilities and media access it will place on users and content providers.

Really?  Has Apple been mysterious?  I was pretty clear on what the iPad can do and what it can’t do based on the presentation from Steve Jobs when he introduced the device.   It’s based on iPhone OS  and has, currently, the same limitations as iPhone OS.   There are changes to account for the new screen and there are new applications but it’s a Wifi and/or 3G larger iPod Touch.   What is so mysterious about it?   And what restrictions and media access is Galen Gruman referring to that we don’t already know about?

I really wish people would just get over the fact that Apple makes good products.   If you don’t like them don’t buy them but stop faulting others for buying them.

a MONSTROSITY!

Why would they make a user interface this awful?  They even point out “Keep in mind that Pimlical is highly configurable, so things like fonts, colors and the screen configurations can be changed by preference settings and appear quite different from these samples.”

You can’t polish a turd guys.  This is an awful design.  I’m not even sure where to start with this one so I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to take a look.

Wow…nothing generates conversation in the tech industry like Adobe Flash. In just the past couple of days I’ve read articles about how HTML5 might be a ‘Flash killer’ along with articles on the release of Flash on the major mobile platforms, aside from iPhone. Along with those articles comes a lot commentary ranging from the people complaining about the lack of Flash on the iPhone to those with a strangely visceral hate for Flash who think that the lack of Flash on the iPhone is a bonus of the platform.

HTML 5 as Flash Killer

With all due respect to John Gruber over at Daring Fireball Adobe doesn’t view HTML 5 as a threat to Flash not because of anything to do with Internet Explorer but because of the history of HTML and CSS themselves. HTML 5 has a lot of great features and sounds like a real winner paired with CSS3 but modern browsers still can’t get the older standards right. There are still many workarounds required to get things rendering the same way on different browsers. Granted the situation is better than it used to be but these things simply aren’t an issue on a Flash-based user interface. While the browsers continue to play catch-up in the compatibility space Adobe will keep adding compelling features to Flash. I just don’t see HTML 5 being a serious challenger to Flash anytime soon.

Flash on Mobile Devices

I’d love Flash to be available on the iPhone. I really don’t get the reaction people have to Flash in general but when people go as far as saying that no Flash on the iPhone is a feature….please. Get a grip already. The iPhone experience would be that much richer with Flash available on the phone. HTML 5/CSS3 support on mobile Safari could be 100% compliant but until people start adopting those features on a mass scale it won’t be an alternative to having Flash available on the phone (see above).

I’m just not getting the dust-up over this stuff. Flash is a tool like anything else. Wider support of both HTML 5/CSS3 and Flash makes the web better, not worse. To those who would rather not have Flash exist at all: I think the web is a richer place with You Tube, Pandora, etc. than without them and they exist because of the ubiquitous nature of Flash. You seriously don’t? Because they wouldn’t exist right now if it weren’t for Flash.

At the same time the Mac client is really awful.   The latest update has some new icons, etc. but they haven’t improved the editor functionality.  There is no ability to create lists as in the Windows client.  Given that the Mac development environment, which comes with the OS, has the source code to the TextEdit application I’m not sure why the Evernote folks can’t duplicate that functionality in their client.

To make things worse the Web client now has more editor functionality than the Mac client.   Guys, if you’re not going to at least have parity between the clients why are you bothering with the Mac client at all?

Update:  OK.  So apparently the Mac client does support lists….just not directly.  I found out that creating a note with a list in the web client results in the list being maintained in the Mac client.  When you add more items to the list numbers/bullets (I assume…I didn’t try bullets but numbers do work) increment automatically (and decrement if you remove items).   There just is no way to create these directly in the Mac client as of yet.  Very weird.

Update 2:  Ok.  According to this forum posting the Evernote folks are going to address this in the next Mac client release.  Great to read this as it might mean not having to run Windows in VMWare Fusion to get the better desktop client.

Almost everyone has used one of these systems by now. Many companies are using them these days and the trend seems to be moving away from number-based (“please hit 1 if you require immediate medical attention”) to voice-recognition-based (“please say yes if you require immediate medical attention”) phone menu navigation systems. The question is why?

There is nothing inherently better about these systems and I’d argue that in fact they are worse. In most cases hitting a number on the keypad would be quicker. In all cases it is certainly not as disruptive as navigating a voice-based menu system. I suppose there is one situation in which a voice-based system could be better and that would be a menu that gets very deep with options.

With a voice-based system it would probably be easier to skip levels of the menu depending on what the person is saying. Something like “pay my bill” could certainly save time if the keypad-based option required inputting more than 2 numbers to navigate down in to the menu system. In my experience with these systems though I am not seeing this savings.

Most of the systems have voice input that is closely tied to menus that would be equivalent to the keypad-based systems. I just don’t see the savings in time and see a lot more aggravation. I have had, on more than one occassion, had to repeat myself multiple times to be understood. Higher levels of background noise really mess with the voice recognition. In some instances I have even been transferred to a human because the voice recognition can’t understand what I’m saying.

Keep the keypad-based systems guys. They are the less annoying option.

First of all, I selected 1pm to 3pm on a Thursday and entered the term “Kayak Thursday” (no quotes). The calendar application then entered an event for me for the Thursday after the Thursday I had selected.

Then I tried entering “Kayak-Thursday” (again no quotes) and it then scheduled the event for the Thursday prior to the Thursday I had selected.

Putting the title in quotes makes it work the way I want.

I’m not sure this is a feature I really like. When I select a specific day put the event on that day. Don’t try to guess what I want. The behavior with the “-Thursday” was even more odd even though it sort of makes sense. Well, it makes sense now. It certainly didn’t make sense then.

I can understand these things for the quick event feature but not given the context I was in while entering events.

It appears that I have to create an object that holds the list (or maybe a list of objects with fields that are the items I need displayed in the select dropdown). It’s too bad that I can’t do it the way I want with that tag library Since this is a throw away screen though (I suppose the controller is as well) I’m not going to worry too much about it

I’ll keep updating this page as I find more tools since this seems to be one of the more popular pages on this blog.

Thanks,

Jason

One thing programmers don’t generally know is good design techniques. You can usually tell when a programmer has created a UI because they’re ugly and difficult to use. There are exceptions to be sure (Romain Guy for one). For those of us that aren’t as blessed I present here a list of color pickers that allow you to pick harmonious color combinations for web sites, etc.

• Added 03/06/2007:
  Kuler
  From Adobe and pronounced “cooler” this is a fantastic color chooser. Not only can you create your own color scheme using a very intuitive color wheel but you can also search on the hundreds of color schemes people have already generated to find something quickly. This is a fantastic resource.
• ColorJack Sphere or more generally ColorJack.
  This is another fantastic color resource. Sphere is another easy to use color wheel with options for both the traditional RYB color wheel as well as the standard RGB model. There are many algorithms to choose from (triad, complementary, etc) but the really unique thing about this tool is the ability to see how color blind people interpret colors. Very cool stuff. ColorJack also offers a service similar to Kuler where you can see color schemes others have created using the Studio tool on the website.
• Colors on the Web
  This site is more than a color chooser (one is available from the Color Wheel menu option) as it also gives user-created color schemes, forums, writing on color theory, etc. It’s a fantastic resource for those who want to learn more about color.
• Color SynthAxis
  OK. This is a real designers tool and complicated but damn is it cool. I believe it is best explained by the tutorial.
• Added 11/25/2007:The Color Wizard

The interesting thing is that tools such as these are coming out of the woodwork these days. At one time Harmony, a Photoshop plugin for the Mac from Hot Door, was the only thing available. They now recommend Kuler and their own application hasn’t been updated in years. My how things change.

The only thing I can say is damn. How much more obvious do they have to make it that they’ve totally poached the UI from yahoo.com. NOT only that website but AOL’s webmail client is almost a direct rip of the new Yahoo Mail UI, but it’s uglier.

At least AOL didn’t copy Yahoo Calendar (which is awful these days) for their own web calendar. They poached the UI from Google Calendar for that

I have to say that they have done a wonderful job in the shopping experience. The site is quite easy to navigate and finding the color, size, etc. you need is really easy. They have also done a fantastic job in the support of the buying process when you need help on such things as what the definition of Tall means, etc.

Great. But they have totally failed after the sale is over (an area I believe that Amazon.com has done wonderfully). Where do I see my orders? Where are the easy to click links for tracking those orders? Come on guys. This stuff really is not that hard.

Listing my orders

If I sign in to the My Account section of the Lands End site nowhere to be found is a listing of my orders currently in process. In fact nowhere on the site can you find such a listing. Again this stuff is not hard. Have a page that shows my in-process orders, the stage at which they are in whole process, etc. When the order has shipped have a link to the proper shipping site that already has the information embedded so that I don’t have to input it. Lots of other sites that are a lot smaller than Lands End/Sears are doing this.

They are relying on my to use the email that is sent when the order is placed. Really poor design guys.

Tracking my orders

OK so I still have the email with my order number. Wonderful. I can track it that way. Oops. Not so fast. The link provided takes me to the right page on their website for order tracking but it doesn’t have the number populated in the text input. I have to copy and paste it in. Clicking the button then forwards me to the UPS tracking page with my information already input so that the tracking information comes right up.

Yeah. Rewind just a bit. They know how to do this on the order tracking page but they haven’t figured out that a clickable list available right my from account page would be good too. Odd.

The other thing I don’t get is why not just have a clickable link in the email that goes directly to the UPS site with the relevant tracking number already set up?

Wrap Up

So kudos to Lands End for most of the experience because the shopping experience itself is fantastic. They really need to work on the follow-up though. They have great customer service but it isn’t showing there.