Here are a few things that I consider to be basic requirements for functionality in a smartphone, along with notes on how my Palm Prē fails to deliver: When I press the power switch, the phone should turn on. (Assuming the battery is charged, of course. And I’m willing to accept that a modern smartphone […]
Tag Archives: usability
What Would an Ideal Portable-Computing UI Look Like?
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 – 10:51 am
Right now, the question of what you need in a mobile computing platform is most often phrased in terms of “Do you need a netbook or a full laptop? Or perhaps one of the new high-end smartphones will manage?” I think the question isn’t one of capabilities as much as it is a question about […]
How Many Ways Can You Exit an App?
Thursday, January 28th, 2010 – 9:22 pm
Different people use applications in different ways. Sounds simple and obvious, but how often do you look at the real implications of it? Just to take a simple example, let’s suppose you’re using Windows (pretty much any recent version), and you want to perform a simple task: Exit the active application. How many different ways […]
How Many Ways Is Your Imitation Scrollbar Broken?
Sunday, December 13th, 2009 – 1:25 pm
If you’re going to reinvent the wheel, you should at least make sure your new version is somehow better than the previous kind. Reimplementing standard UI and OS widgets is one of the most common ways developers reinvent the wheel these days — it started with Flash developers building their own controls, and has now spread […]
The Evolution of WordPress
Friday, November 6th, 2009 – 4:54 pm
For backward-compatibility testing, I’ve just installed a few versions of WordPress ranging back to version 2.0. It’s kind of fascinating to see a sort of fast-rewind retrospective of the software. Even just looking at the installation experience, it’s like watching HAL 9000 descend into childish incoherence as Dave Bowman yanks his memory chips. By the time you […]
OpenOffice Writer UX Warts
Monday, October 19th, 2009 – 10:30 am
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 […]
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 […]
A World Where People Regularly Discard Knowledge After 9 Years
Monday, July 27th, 2009 – 7:55 pm
In his latest entry on Coding Horror, “Windows 7: The Best Vista Service Pack Ever”, Jeff Atwood says: I want the world to get the hell off Windows XP. A world where people regularly use 9 year old operating systems is not a healthy computing ecosystem. I find this terribly, painfully wrong. The unintended consequence […]
Palm Prē, Day Three: The Good and the Bad
Thursday, July 9th, 2009 – 11:47 pm
So, I’ve already posted my anguished wail over the completely unusable state of the Prē’s memo pad app. Considering that Palm started off as a company that sold PDAs, whose main apps were contacts, date book, and note pad, the collapse of one of those three items seems pretty embarrassing. But aside from that, how […]
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 […]