OS X Aqua apps - update?

I've just skimmed through the Apple Human Interface Guidelines, but I can't spot where the 'Check for Updates' option is supposed to go in a desktop app under Aqua. I really like this feature, esp. when the app goes off, downloads the update, and unpackages and deals with any migration of existing versions/data etc without having to mess about with it. But it's never in the same place in every app!

Sometimes it's under the Application menu, sometimes under the Help menu, and sometimes hiding in a preferences panel for the app somewhere. Personally, it logically should be under the Application menu, as it's an application action (not a 'help' action really).

Weird that it's not documented in the guidelines. Hint, hint Apple!

living with the iPhone

It's been almost six months since my inital post on buying an iPhone, and it's about time I had a bit of a rant about it.

Things that are great:

The touch interface. Lovin it!

Google maps with the 'locate me' functionality. Very cool, tho I hear in the US they are adding Wifi connections to the 'locate me' functionality to get the location even more precise. Can be a bit random in the City sometimes, showing me anywhere within a 1km radius, which in the City of London can mean the difference between getting a cold beer, and a warm flat beer!

Data on the run - 24/7 email and internet is great. A bit slow at times when stuck on a GPRS connection. And not worrying about the bill is great too!

Things that are annoying:

Safari getting a bit grumpy occasionally and not loading pages or responding to 'clicks'. Sometimes sorted by resetting Safari (holding the 'home' button down for 5 secs until Safari closes), but sometimes I have to resort to a hard reset (power down). Not a biggie, but annoying (will have to check the crash reports when I get home and see if I can spot what's causing it)

HTML emails which are designed for 'wider' screens (yup, some people hard code the width of html elements in emails grrrr) - should be able to flip the screen sideways for these

Some text areas are a bit hard to type in as they don't fit on the screen, so it's often a case of type and hope for the best! Not too sure how that could be solved, perhaps limiting the width of text area fields, or scrolling horizontally as you type?

The endless demos to friends/co-workers/random joes on the street :) (actually, I don't mind too much!)

Things that need improving:

Text messaging! It's pretty basic at the moment - no forwarding of texts, no picture messaging. This really needs looking at, and could be done by software updates.

The camera needs some work. Really bad in low light (gets the shakes), and is slow to take a pic

The included headset/earphones are a bit rubbish. People I'm calling can barely hear me when I talk on them - I might just have a bad copy

Slightly missing the point?

I've just got annoyed about a rss feed I read regularly via google reader.

The rss feed link goes off to an ad page, before redirecting to the actual permalink. As much as this annoys me at home, I just put up with it. However, when reading from work, the ad page is blocked by the internet filter, so I can't get to the permalink via the rss reader, and have to go to the site directly.

There are two WTF's with this:
One, the feed is for articles posted by one of the most prominet user interface usability 'experts' in the field. Two, the rss feeds from his site never contain ANY content, just the title, so we're forced to go to his site to read the article... which rather defeats the purpose of using a rss feed!

My suggestions:
- Remove the ad redirect page. Put the ads in your feed, or on the site, so those of us stuck behind a firewall with content blocking can still get there from the feed.
- Put some content in the feed. IE in Blogger (and probably most rss engines/blogging engines) there is the option to show only a short synopis version of the post, or cut off at 200 characters etc. Enough content to get people interested, but still get them to go to the permalink.

dConstruct

d.Construct is another user experience conference i'm considering attending...
7th September 2007 in Brighton

Some of the same presenters i've seen at the fowd conference earlier this year - hopefully it's not too hung up on web design, as that's such a small part of user experience/interface design.

I like the idea of their web design -- if I'm looking correctly, as time goes on they'll update the site to follow the standard progress of a site design - starting at hand sketched wireframes, and moving through the design process to being a *finished* product in August.
Tho if it was me doing this, the text on the page needs to be more hand written (or at least look like it's been cut out and stuck down), lots of red scribble and arrows and unreadable notes, and the logos etc 'taped' on for that really authentic sketched interface look :)

great filler text

so many apps leave blank spaces or boring messages when fields/text areas have nothing to display. kudos to google calendar for making their 'comments' area a bit more interesting :)

Sorry, nothing to read here. Try Google News if you are bored.

good error pages

The technorati 500 server error page is a good example of what to do when your site blows up - a bit of fun and no confusing stack traces :) I like the bloglines plumber too, but don't have a screenshot of that right now.

(Edit: yeah I am bored at work today!)

flickr forcing users to switch to a yahoo id

flickr is one of my favourite web apps in the world, but they've totally p***ed me off today by sending an email saying I HAVE to switch to a yahoo id signin by 15th March.

This is really annoying - I've always used my email address as my flickr login - dead easy to remember! Because I've never had a yahoo account, all the id's that are good for my name are gone, and I can't use my email address either. So I'll have to get some random thing that I'll never remember. As an old skool user of flikr that's had a pro account for ages, I'm grumpy. Hope you're listening flickr/yahoo!

So now I have google logins, yahoo logins, microsoft logins, all my logins at work and home, webmail logins, yadda yadda yadda. The list is getting REALLY long. Doesn't really matter on my personal laptop, where I don't mind firefox storing my logins, but anytime I'm away from that I have to try remember my logon. And if my laptop dies I'm stuffed again... have to go around every site and get my logins sent/reset. Huge usability issue!

If only everyone would implement an open identity type of solution, where I can log in with my one open identity username/password, and logging into the seperate sites is taken care of in the background.

Grrrr.. I can only see this getting worse and worse in the future as more and more stuff goes online. And I can't see my memory getting much better in the future!

stuck in the middle with you...

I keep coming across this one really annoying *bug* (?feature?) in lotus notes, and it annoys me so much I thought I'ld have a little rant about it :)

In a meeting scheduled by someone else, if you accidently hit 'Request Information' button, you get a new memo open up addressed to the scheduler that you can't cancel... The options all either send the message, or send you back to the message (see the attached screenshot). What is needed is the 'No' button to trash the draft memo, rather than send without comments or something.

The only way I've found to trash the memo without looking like a total retard and sending out emails is to kill the lotus notes process. Pretty drastic! If I'm missing something, let me know. Otherwise IBM, PLEASE PLEASE fix this issue...!

[Lotus Notes v 6.5.4]

Edit: Note, I'm not picking on Lotus Notes for any reason than it's the piece of software I use the most every day, and it's really frustrating me --> email/calendaring/groupware software should be quick, easy and intuitive to use. Otherwise it's just reducing my productivity and increasing my stress levels }:[

Lotus notes should be mothballed

I've forgotten about the joys of Lotus Notes until starting my latest contract. It's an absolute nightmare!

Here's a few of my favs:
- Shortcut for refresh view is F9 (the 'standard' refresh key of F5 is reserved to lock the lotus notes screen grrr)
- Printing support for meetings is horrendus - doesnt 'grow' any text areas that have scroll bars (ie more than 5 people at the meeting and it won't print them all out...)
- The calendar software is pretty ugly - never know what's gonna happen if you edit a meeting - might email everyone, might not email anyone of meeting changes. And occassionally drops one person and refuses to let me add them again...
- looks and feels like software from 1991.

I can't believe anyone is actually migrating TO notes rather than away anymore! As much as I hate outlook/exchange, it's a million times more user friendly than this.

Radio buttons vs Combo/Dropdown boxes

Something that really annoys me is the mis-use of radio buttons vs dropdown/combo/option boxes in user interfaces.

A lot of the time, people think putting a dropdown in place instead of a radio button is more 'usable' because it takes up less space. I disagree in some situations....

In my opinion, dropdowns should be used when the options in the dropdown follows a sequental pattern of some kind - ie dates, months, placenames, counters, booleans, phone number type (mobile/home/work) etc.

Where they shouldnt be used is when each option doesnt nicely fit a sequence, or the user can't 'guess' straight away what option to select - ie when selecting different 'states' (I can't come up with a really good example right now!) which will ususally require the user having to select the dropdown and reading through each option before they can determine what to put in.

I guess my reasoning here is if the dropdown contains options that aren't obvious what they will be, everytime someone hits that page, they may have to select the dropdown anyway to be able to scan the available options, and make sure they HAVE got the right one.

I must see if anyone has some data on this already...

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