My Menubar

I’ve noticed that my menubar has grown recently to include a host of new tools & apps that I use on a regular basis.

From left to right:

• Dropbox — useful for sharing files fast. Eases VPN pain.
• JungleDisk — online storage using Amazon S3. This isn’t the default icon but a replacement I made some time ago. The default icon is…unfortunate.
• Littlesnapper — I am just getting into this tool but it’s fantastic. It allows you to capture, catalog & tag screenshots and various other pieces of inspiration.
• Cinch — allows simple window resizing & organisation using hot zones. Brilliantly useful, particularly if you regularly switch between a large external monitor and a laptop display.
• Bashflash — glows red when Flash starts chomping all your processing power. It allows you to kill the plugin. Super useful.
• Love Stars — not shown here but it’s a shortcut for setting the star rating of the song currently playing in iTunes. Incredibly useful when Genius Mixes throws up an awesome tune.

I’m quite particular about what lives in my menubar — it needs to be useful and add value to my daily workflows. It helps if the icon fits in design-wise too — if it doesn’t and the tool is indispensable to me then I’ll redesign the icon to be less…fugly (JungleDisk, I’m looking at you).

Microsoft Recovers Sidekick Data

From the BBC:

Microsoft Corporate Vice President Roz Ho says that all data will be restored, beginning with personal contacts.

The biggest casualty in all of this is Microsoft’s credibility as a cloud services provider.

Note to Jakob Neilsen: 1999 Called & It Wants It’s Web Back

I am not a fan of Jakob Neilsen. Whenever I read his work I get the overwhelming sense that he feels that change is always bad. I think a lot of what he writes needs to be taken in context with wider trends, learning behaviours and user tolerance levels.

Take his latest piece, Fresh vs. Familiar: How Aggressively to Redesign, for example. Right from the first paragraph he makes a huge sweeping statement to setup the rest of the article:

You often hear design team members (or their management) say, “We need a fresh design.” This usually gets redesign projects off on a wrong footing, with the wrong goals and strategy.

I have never heard a designer, manager or other team member say “we need a fresh design” for the sake of it, which is what this statement implies. I think it’s the word ‘fresh’ that’s grating — ‘new’ would be much more accurate. ‘Fresh’ brings connotations of aligning a site to recent trends or buzzes; implementing a poorly thought through idea simply because it’s popular.

New sites arise as a result of businesses evolving and maturing their online strategies to meet their ever changing business requirements as well as their continual drive to meet the needs of their users. If the current design isn’t meeting the objectives of the business (or the user) then it obviously needs changing. Such changes are often so involved that you’re unlikely to hear such an utterance from any semi-savvy client.

His next paragraph sums up Neilsen for me:

Typically, a fresh design will be a worse design simply because it’s new and thus breaks user expectations. A better strategy is to play up familiarity and build on users’ existing knowledge of how a system works.

If everyone thought like that nothing would ever change — and this is the biggest problem I have with Neilsen. It’s his job to point this sort of thing out but I just don’t buy it — you can take reasonable steps to ensure that the transition from old to new design is smooth and as painless as possible for the user.

I’m reminded of some initial reviews of the Mac back in 1984 when it made it’s debut. John C. Dvorak wrote:

The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a “mouse.” There is no evidence that people want to use these things. I don’t want one of these new fangled devices.

Can you imagine controlling a computer without a mouse? It has been a fundamental conduit between man and computer for 25 years. And yet it was written off by some as ‘new fangled’.

Why users want a familiar design

Neilsen says:

When people are visiting websites or using applications, they don’t spend their time analyzing or admiring the design. They focus their attention on the task, the content, and their own data or documents.

Thus, people love a design when they know the features and can immediately locate the ones they need. That is, they love a familiar design.

It’s true that users are likely to be able to accomplish their tasks more efficiently using a design or layout that’s familiar. However, my view is that it doesn’t matter whether a design is familiar or not, as long as it’s usable.

In fact, anytime you release a redesign, prepare for a flood of angry email from customers. It’s a law of nature that users hate change, and they’ll complain every time you move anything around or otherwise reduce their ability to just do what they’ve always done.

Yes if you reduce their ability to do what they’ve always done you’re going to annoy customers. But that shouldn’t prohibit new designs or ideas from emerging — as long as they’re usable.

Think of the recent changes to Facebook — it polarised people. But that was based on a wholesale reshuffle of the content presented when you logged in. The new design mixed in a whole heap of content types on the main page and this didn’t go down well with users — the site was not meeting their needs as well and they couldn’t figure out how to complete previously easy-to-do tasks.

(Having users complain about a redesign doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s bad; if the new design actually has better usability, people will eventually grow to like it. Customer complaints are thus not a reason to avoid all redesigns; they’re simply a reason to avoid changing the design purely to “stay fresh.”)

Yes! There we go! If you’d put that at the top of the article I wouldn’t have felt compelled to write this one.

Neilsen actually makes some good points in his article — evolve UI changes gently, make sure you get the basics right first — but it doesn’t seem framed in the right way to me.

Change is good. Evolution is necessary. Making sure you go about it the right way is what’s crucial.

A New Design

Yes, it’s a new design. Well, an evolution of the old one. I felt like a change from Helvetica so have opted for some Hoefler Text loveliness!

I have designed (and attempted to code) to a baseline grid — the design was easy enough to do but the coding isn’t quite there yet. What this means from a look & feel perspective is fairly small — but it’ll help me sleep better at night! It’s a zen thing.

UPDATE: Well I think I sorted it. Had a little tweak of the stylesheet this evening to make sure everything lines up to the baseline. Of course you’re not to know this unless I decide to make the baseline grid part of the background — maybe I will one day.

Another thing to note is that if you’re looking at this on a PC you’re not getting any of the Hoefler Text loveliness. You’ll be looking at Georgia and Arial instead of Hoefler Text and Helvetica. Not much I can do about that unfortunately.

Snow Leopard: Installed

I installed Snow Leopard yesterday. Initial impressions:

• It’s definitely faster — pretty much everything feels snappier UPDATE: Although sleeping & waking aren’t noticeably faster, maybe I need to time it!
• The gamma now defaults to 2.2 which gives everything a bit more contrast
• The ‘traffic light’ close/minimise/maximise buttons seem brighter, almost ‘washed out’
• I love the new Dock menus — not sure why this design is restricted to the Dock though
• Dock Expose — I’ve not used this apart from my initial playing (although I could see it coming in very handy)
• 512 icons are great — especially pictures & videos

I’ve not come across any software that’s incompatible yet, although I’m still slowly reinstalling all the usual bits & pieces.

The Strange Case of iTunes Application Updates

iTunes has been behaving strangely lately. It consistently shows that there are 2 updates for my applications yet when I click ’show available updates’ I get the message that there are none. Something is clearly broken.

This is quite a common problem (a Google search will tell you that) and there are a variety of documented ‘fixes’, with some seeming to work for some yet not others. The issue seems to centre around some apps that think they have an update when they don’t (at least that’s my layman understanding — the problem may be with iTunes itself).

I decided to try and hunt out the problem myself. To alleviate this issue previously I would just trash the iTunes preferences which would solve the issue but would then require me to reset all my preferences in iTunes (obviously).

So yesterday I went through a more radical yet methodical approach. It seems a bit laborious but it did flush out those apps that were causing the issue.

1. Quit iTunes
2. Make a copy of the ‘Mobile Applications’ directory within your iTunes music library (backup, backup, backup!)
3. Launch iTunes
4. Delete all apps by selecting all and hitting Apple-delete
5. When asked select ‘Move to trash’ to move all the app files to the trash
6. Quit iTunes
7. Navigate to the apps directory within your music library folder (usually ~/Music/iTunes/Mobile Applications)
8. Ensure that iTunes has indeed removed all the applications (I found that despite selecting ‘Move to trash’ there were still quite a few applications in there, some of them very old that I never used and thought I had deleted months ago)
9. If there are any remaining apps, move them to the trash
10. Breathe a sigh of relief that you followed step 2 and made a copy of your Mobile Applications folder. You did do this, didn’t you?
11. Double click an app in your backed up ‘Mobile Applications’ folder to add it to your iTunes library (this should make a copy in your music library folder)
12. iTunes should launch (if not running already) and the app should appear in the Applications pane
13. Click ‘Check for updates’ at the bottom of the Applications pane
14. If the app is up to date iTunes should tell you that there are no updates for any apps
15. Repeat steps 11-14 for all apps (told you it was laborious!)
16. You should find an app or two that, when you click ‘Check for updates’, tell you that there’s an update available. Remove this app from iTunes (you still have a copy of it on your desktop, right?)
17. Once you’ve gone through all your apps you should identified the wonky apps — they’re the ones that think they have an update
18. Download these apps again from the iTunes Store (if they’re paid apps you won’t get charged again)
19. All should be well within iTunes. You should now have all your applications back in iTunes and behaving properly. You can delete the copy of Mobile Applications you made in step 2. Backup your data.

I don’t know what the reason is but some of my apps thought they had an update when they didn’t and this is what was screwing things up. Going through the steps above identifies these apps and lets you download the most recent version.

(Disclaimer: perform these steps at your own risk. I take no responsibility whatsoever for any situation arising if you decide to follow these steps. Backing up your data regularly is always a good idea.)

Tweeting Shopping

Over the long July 4th weekend Sap & I went shopping. Whilst we trawled Chicago’s finest shops for wares — and wears? — I decided to tweet about the experience. Not only did it give me something to do whilst waiting for Sap to try on all the stuff she liked but it will hopefully serve to remind me of the day in detail in future.

(Oh and the #moonfruit at the end of some of the tweets was referring to a competition. I didn’t win.)

Here then is my day.

Shopping with the wife today. Currently in “Macy’s 2nd floor women’s dress” hell on State St. Heading to Mich Av later & then fireworks.
11:03 AM Jul 3rd from Twitterrific

Currently holding 10 items for wife. Just been told by an obviously gay man to ’stop looking like I’m having so much fun”.
11:15 AM Jul 3rd from Twitterrific

Of the 10 items tried on, 1 was retained. Another batch being tried on now. iPhone should be standard issue for all husbands in shops
11:42 AM Jul 3rd from Twitterrific

Just eaten an awesome burger @ Macy’s. Think we’re ready to leave & go to another shop. The fun continues.
1:01 PM Jul 3rd from Twitterrific

Feel like I’m trawling Chicago’s shops for wifi spots. None in Old Navy, sporadic in Macy’s. 2.30 already!
1:30 PM Jul 3rd from Twitterrific

Dreaming of a new MacBook Pro (http://bit.ly/E9pW5 to help ease the pain of wife spending all my money #moonfruit
1:36 PM Jul 3rd from Twitterrific

Arms getting a good workout from carrying wife’s ‘possibles’. Shopping can be good for you? #moonfruit
1:39 PM Jul 3rd from Twitterrific

Have acquired shorts & shirt. Wife trying on more stuff. Could do with a beer #moonfruit
2:16 PM Jul 3rd from Twitterrific

Old Navy are piping Bananarama into the changing room waiting area. Sadists. #moonfruit
2:20 PM Jul 3rd from Twitterrific

Owen to United: done #moonfruit
2:30 PM Jul 3rd from Twitterrific

In a very crowded H&M. Deep breaths. Beer is promised soon. #moonfruit
2:53 PM Jul 3rd from Twitterrific

Enjoying a mid-shop Blue Moon in the Berghoff. Much needed. Michigan Avenue awaits! #moonfruit
3:31 PM Jul 3rd from Twitterrific

And we’re off again. Urban Outfitters held nothing, currently in Charlotte Russe ‘browsing’. Then off to Michigan Av #moonfruit
4:16 PM Jul 3rd from Twitterrific

@arksandrey gives me something to do whilst she tries stuff on!
4:16 PM Jul 3rd from Twitterrific in reply to arksandrey

Wow, GAP is pricey #moonfruit
4:41 PM Jul 3rd from Twitterrific

Some horrendous teen star doing a book signing @the Disney store on Michigan. Line around the corner, I’ve never heard of him/her #moonfruit
5:06 PM Jul 3rd from Twitterrific

In danger of having a wardrobe full of Abercrombie & Hollister #moonfruit
6:22 PM Jul 3rd from Twitterrific

More tshirts acquired. In the other H&M now then El & Castle for food. Then we’re done, phew #moonfruit
6:51 PM Jul 3rd from Twitterrific

That guy’s got the right idea. Following his wife around wearing HEADPHONES #moonfruit
7:19 PM Jul 3rd from Twitterrific

And we’re done. Enjoying a Merlot & food with wife in Elephant & Castle then home to a hungry cat. Interesting tweet experiment? #moonfruit
9:01 PM Jul 3rd from Twitterrific

How to Create a Ringtone Using iTunes

A very simple tutorial on how to create a ringtone from one of your existing iTunes music tracks. Just tried it and it works great.

Apple, the iPhone & Social Media Integration

Perhaps the most interesting feature of the recently-released iPhone 3GS is the ability to upload photos & video to MobileMe and YouTube.

(Of course, unless you’re a MobileMe subscriber — and I’m struggling to justify spending $99 per year on it, the excellent ‘Find My iPhone’ service notwithstanding — all you’ll be able to do is upload videos to your YouTube account.)

Apple have recently begun integrating social media into their desktop apps — iPhoto ‘09 lets you publish your photos to Flickr, Facebook and MobileMe. In my opinion this is great — Apple wants people to share and store their photos so integrating these popular image-sharing services right into iPhoto makes a lot of sense.

So why not offer the same functionality on the iPhone? Why only offer YouTube uploads?

Less than a week after the iPhone 3GS launched YouTube uploads increased by 400% per day. So it’s obviously something that people are using.

Right now the only way to ’share’ your photos is to either use a third party app (Facebook app, free, or Flickit, free) or email it to somebody using Mail on the iPhone.

Maybe it’s something Apple are working on. Maybe they don’t think people will use it. Maybe they just want more people to use their MobileMe service (perhaps one of the reasons push Gmail isn’t available on the iPhone?). Who knows.

Calaboration Sets Up Your Google Calendars in iCal for You

Google calendars now support the CalDAV protocol (which iCal also does) so you can now view & edit your Google calendars using iCal.

They’ve even created a nifty tool to make it simple called Calaboration.

And there was you thinking it was a typo in the title…

UPDATE: “Calaboration is no longer the recommended method of setting up Google Calendar calendar in iCal. Instead, use these instructions.”