The more I play with OpenOffice.org’s Writer, the more confused I am by some of the odd UI/UX warts in it. Here are the ones that are on my mind this morning: When I press F11 to bring up the Style Picker list, why does typing letters not navigate me through that list? Why do […]
Tag Archives: hall of shame
A webOS 1.2 Upgrade Experience That Couldn’t Be Much Worse
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 – 11:42 am
The following is a copy of what I just posted on the Palm Prē forums: I woke up this morning to find that the webOS 1.2 upgrade had been pushed to my Prē automatically. I was happy, until the reboot finished and I saw: Signed Out You are no longer signed in to your Palm […]
Palm Is Lying, Not Just Spying
Friday, August 14th, 2009 – 12:48 pm
So, Palm was recently caught spying on its users. Major kudos, by the way, to Joey Hess, who initially broke this story. For those who haven’t kept up, various other news outlets and blogs have also been reporting on it. Palm’s response to this problem is a single paragraph of corporate PR-speak: Palm takes privacy […]
Thoughts on the Palm Prē: Category Catastrophe
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 – 3:14 pm
Note, Added A Few Days Later: This post does not tell the whole story. This is a wail of anguish, and is not intended to be balanced. For a more balanced look at the Palm Prē, read my later, and broader, evaluation of it as well as this post. There are a lot of good […]
Cruel Rollover Trickery
Thursday, June 11th, 2009 – 1:58 pm
I found an interesting UI problem today, on a site that I will be kind enough not to actually link to. Instead, I’ll just reproduce the general concept and problem here: alpha beta gamma delta The links all just link straight to the nav bar itself, so if you scroll your browser view so that […]
Don’t Waste My Time With Email Confirmation Fields
Sunday, June 7th, 2009 – 5:58 pm
I just ran into yet another form on a web page that looked like this: First Name Last Name Email Address Confirm Email Address Address Line 1 … and so on These things drive me nuts. Once I’ve typed my email address in the first time, I just type Shift-Home to highlight the entire field, […]
McAfee: Failing at Security Since 2005
Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 – 10:37 am
Back in 2005, I was a “geek for hire” and did a lot of general troubleshooting for end-users. Including malware removal and general PC tune-ups. One client wanted me to install some software, including McAfee’s main end-user product at the time — I don’t recall the name. I do recall, however, that my head nearly exploded […]
Bad UI Discourages Cops in Queensland
Monday, January 19th, 2009 – 4:21 pm
How important can good (or bad) user interface design be? If the system you’re building is the Queensland Police’s record-management system, the interface can apparently be so bad that police would rather let petty criminals go free than try to enter an arrest report on the thing. In one case, the police found data-entry so […]