Dotmad.net

I went to a lecture by David Platt on the subject of “Why software sucks”, which discusses what is wrong with software today (hint: it’s mostly designed by programmers) and how we can improve it.
From listening to a previous ARcast with him I already knew he is a very entertaining speaker, and he proved me right (in fact, I kept thinking I could bring my wife to one of his lectures and she would have enjoyed it as well).

David began his presentation with a screenshot from the Better Business Bureau in the US, listing complaints by industry, and the amazing thing about it - people dislike software more than they dislike used-cars salesmen!

The main idea of the presentation (backup up with all sorts of amusing anecdotes):

• People don’t buy software for the sake of the software itself - they buy software to get something done. They are not interested in using the software, they want to have used it.
• Programmers tend to design software for people like them, while most users are very different.

Platt’s solution resolved around 5 key points:

1. Add a virgin to the team - add someone to the team with zero knowledge about the inner workings of your software.
2. Break convention if needed - don’t behave in a certain way just because all every application behaves the same way.
3. Do not let edge cases complicate the main stream - extra features aimed at edge cases complicate your software and make it counter productive.
4. Instrument (Carefully) - Try to gather information about the way users use your software without harassing them.
5. Question each decision - ask if each decision is taking your project closer to the result or further away from it.

The lecture itself was followed with a Q&A session, in which I asked him a question (which landed me a signed copy of his book - thank again, David!):
If programmers are so bad at designing UI, why not bring in a specialist to do it?
His response (after correcting me for saying “Graphics designer” instead of “User interface designer”) was it’s actually a good idea, since most of the industry is already headed for specialization in various subjects.

I found another podcast on ITConversions network, and here are two short videos from the presentation:

This is what you need to watch a recording of a webcast in MSDN:

1) Webcast page - press the “Register Online” button
2) Login to MS passport
3) Event registration - enter attendee name
4) “Thank You For Registering” page - press the download button
5) View recording page - enter email & company name
6) View recording info page - save recording - the default filename is always the same, so you also need to remember the name of the webcast (it’s not shown at this point)

Too many steps to watch a simple webcast.

I have been having a problem with LinkedIn for the past weeks, causing every attempt to do something (change account settings, contact someone) with my account to end with a login screen which led right back to the home page (negating the action I was trying to do).
Several mails to their customer support department resulted in “we are working on the problem” replies.
So I gave up, and installed Firefox browser.
And behold - everything is working as it should be.

• The “Description” text box in the A-to-z Guarantee claim form keeps on asking you to write “plain text, under 1000 characters long”, but doesn’t bother telling you double quotes are illegal.
  As a developer I suspected they blocked it after someone read on SQL injection. I doubt any normal user would have solved this “riddle”.

• Did someone forget the “sigh out”/”log out”/”get me the hell out of here” link for a signed-in user, or do I need to start wearing glasses? The only thing I found was “I’m not [username]“, which is a very bad naming for a very common link.

I’m maintaining a simple site for my father, used to showcase his work on antique clocks.
He wants to update a gallery of his latest achievements, and I need to find a way for him to update this gallery himself.
As is the case with most parents, he uses the web extensively for his own needs, but teaching him site design is out of the question.
As an amateur photographer he has already mastered Google’s Picasa as a way of storing, manipulating and arranging his digital photos. Therefor, I looked for a way to turn Picasa into his tool for the web site gallery update.

The solution I came up with was using Picasa’s new “web albums” feature, and displaying the web album inside a frame in his site, letting him update the photos as he chooses, and having the changes reflected in his site without any further work from me.
The problem is the actual pictures take about 30% of the page, with the rest of the space being used for various tool bars and links, and the worst of all, a huge space reserved to display the “album”, meaning a single picture from the album serving as it’s “title”. Of course this won’t look good inside a frame in his site, and you can’t edit the album’s layout.

At first I tried using RSS feeds from the album (something I needed to find myself in the page’s code, since the RSS link is only displayed for my gallery, containing all albums together), using sites such as RSS2HTML, but for some reason the resulting page only displayed links to the photos, and not the photos themselves.
Next I turned to displaying the photos in Blogger, thinking of integrating the photos into a post or another part of the layout, and then editing the layout, removing all other elements until only the photos are displayed.
I found a Widget creator for this purpose, and proceeded to editing the new blog’s layout using the tips from the excellent “Dummies guide to Blogger“. This approach requires a lot of hacking into the blog’s layout (since basically you strip away everything that makes it a blog) and the widget displays the pictures as relatively small (160px) thumbnails and in a vertical line.

Seeing this, I abandoned this path, and went back to the web album page, looking for another way to hack it, and as it turned out, I looked too far - there is a “Slideshow” button, providing a static link for displaying all photos in the site as a (surprise!) slide show.
This may not be the best solution (I’d rather display all photos as a gallery), but my dad likes it, and it’s a nice KISS solution.
Now I only need to find a way to remove the “close” button, leading back to the album’s ugly layout….

Update: You still need to embed the slideshow in your site somehow. The site I worked with used frames, so it was a simple matter, but what do you do if you want to embed the slideshow in an existing page?
You generate a widget code here and use it to embed the album in your site.

I tried watching two movies at 5min.com. Although I could watch the small movie at the top of a studio (personal page of a member), while trying to watch a specific guidance movie I got this error: “This content requires Adobe Flash Player 9. Would you like to install it now?“
With all of the Youtube clones out there I fail to see the reasoning behind forcing me to install flash player to watch a movie.
The flash craze has reached a point in which almost every single site I visit requires a lengthy download, and using normal link features (such as “open in a new window”) is impossible.