October 2008 Archives

One of the nice new features in Skype 4 is being able to edit contact phone numbers. In previous versions, you were at the mercy of whatever someone had chosen to publish about themselves. If you had their number but it was not in their profile, you had to create a new SkypeOut contact. While you can still do that in Skype 4 (and get the benefit of this contact also working on other platforms), in Skype 4 you can also add a phone number to an existing profile.

It’s straightforward: just click the big button that is aptly labeled “Add a telephone number”. (For some reason, echo123 gets special treatment, I can’t add any numbers to her. What if I really DO know her number? But I can at least add a number to echo-chinese, her Chinese stepsister, which is what I am using here as an example.)

Deleting a number is trickier, I could not initially figure out how to do it. Turns out that once you add a number to someone, there will be two buttons to the right of it. The left one is “edit” (bug: it appears to be missing a tooltip) and the right is “add another”. When you click “edit”, you get another dialog which has more buttons in it. The rightmost of those looks like a trashcan and is “delete”.

I have finally now fixed the commenting system here (and in my other blogs too).

Well, it was sort of working before, but in a retarded way. You had to log in or register. And sometimes it looked like you were logged in, but you actually weren’t.

It’s friendlier now. You can enter as much or as little detail as you want when commenting. You can be anonymous for all I care. The only thing you need to do is to solve a reCaptcha challenge when commenting. reCaptcha is an antispam system from none other than Carnegie Mellon, where you help digitize old books by solving the challenges. And it keeps spam out of here too.

For someone like me claiming to know a little something about usability, it was ironic that I had such a bad comment system. I guess it’s another instance of “shoemaker’s shoes” situation. But it didn’t bother me that much and no one really complained. Until today, that is, where Z pointed it out.

Here is the conversation window in Skype 4. I think I was in compact mode when I took this shot, but the discussion below applies regardless of the mode that you are in.

I have a question about this window. And specifically, the message entry box, the one that says “Type a message to Skype Test Call here”:

Why on earth does the message entry box, the main control for carrying out text conversations, look like it is disabled?

The other posts in this series will be about features and concepts that are more ambiguous. I can find arguments to both sides of the discussion for them. But this disabled message entry box, the main place where you carry out conversations, looking disabled… I am simply dumbstruck. This is a mystery. I don’t see any reason why anyone would so grossly violate platform conventions.

As far as I know, it is a Windows convention (and also a Mac, Web and generally every other UI I have seen) that active text boxes have a white background, and disabled textboxes have a gray background. And yes, you can violate all conventions if you have a good enough reason that justifies the cost. But even the most horrendous, crappiest UI-s that are in all other aspects unusable tend to follow this active/disabled textbox convention. Until Skype 4.

So now, when I want to enter a text message, I have already had instances of this most torturing cognitive dissonance. When I start to move my cursor towards the text box, my reflexes say “Dude, there’s no point to go to that textbox, it’s disabled and won’t work”. And then I have this other voice that says “No no, go ahead, it’s OK because this is Skype 4 where this convention does not apply”. But I had to retrain myself.

So, something that is supposed to make conversations really fun and easy, forces you to retrain yourself about one of the most basic platform conventions in order to contribute to a text conversation… not a very bright idea. Like I said, I tried hard to think of ANY reason why one would do this… but I couldn’t.

I am so confused by this that I don’t have anything more to say. Except how I would fix it: simply make the textbox look like a normal active textbox (like it does in previous versions and other platforms) and all this confusion would go away with a snap.

I wanted to get this out of my system because it’s the most confusing aspect of Skype 4 for me to date. The next things will be on the lighter side.

I had steered clear of Skype 4 until now. I wanted them to get through a first few betas first before I would give it a run myself. I generally have a personal policy of not running anything beta on my desktop these days, but I thought I’ll make an exception for Skype 4 on Windows, especially given that it is not my primary Skype. I mostly live on Mac these days, with Windows running in Parallels.

As Skype 4 is marketed as a big change, the urge finally overwhelmed me this weekend to go and give it a run myself to see what the changes are about. And I thought I’ll capture the feedback in posts like this. Now, usually when I have reviewed software, I have written one long mega-post that takes ages to write, and that is boring and hard to read and many people stop before they got to the end.

So, instead of doing that, I thought I’ll do a series over, let’s say, this week, where I cover exactly one thing per post. Be it a feature or a more conceptual question.

Now, as you’ll go through this series, two important things about my perspective are…

• This is the first major version of Skype where I was not involved in making it. So I don’t have a lot of insider info, just the public download and public websites. This also lets me approach the UI with a fresh mind, which is very different from an insider perspective. Often when you are involved in making something, you become so immersed that you can’t see it from outside. Being immersed is good, but seeing it from outside simply has another perspective.
• I’ll be making references to Skype for Mac because that is what I mostly use these days. I mostly use voice calling (free and SkypeOut) and chats, with the very occasional video call. So I’m somewhat Mac-biased and maybe my perspective would be different if I actually used Skype on Windows daily. But I have had Skype 3 for Windows running all the time and have occasionally done things with it so it’s not like I don’t know what’s going on in Windows.

I haven’t posted yet about how I did the implementation of my final Master’s HCI project in Adobe Flex. In short, I had not worked with it before but I found it an incredible environment, very easy to pick up and do lots of fun stuff. I can also recommend this book that was a great learning resource, especially for someone like me who has the very basics nailed down but needed guidance with a bit more advanced stuff, e.g using custom components as ItemRenderers and what not.

Anyway, the DMD project posting will possibly be for another day. Today I wanted to post about something that I ran into, that apparently forces me to make an either-or decision about the features I want to use. The main point, as far as I can see is this:

When using -use-network=false to gain access to local content, you cannot use BrowserManager to provide browser history management and back/forward button navigation.

I am now using Bank of America and their Internet banking. It has many aspects and bugs that I don’t like, but there is one little feature that is really smartly done.

Here is an excerpt of my statement.

You can see three transactions here. So, by default all transactions have the machine-generated long ugly description, but what is unique here (and what I havent seen in any Internet bank) is that they only show a part of it by default so that it gets cut off, and then they let you edit it. You can see one transaction with the default long ugly description, and one where I have edited it, and one where the editing box is visible (clicking on the triangle on the left opens it).

I find this to be really smart design (even if somewhat sneaky). I don’t know their original motivations of doing it, but it is a great example of a feature that is directed purely towards affect, i.e how people emotionally connect themselves with the product. It has zero functional value, as all your banking keeps working 100% the same, whether you do these edits or not. But there is me and many other people who simply like looking at a more neatly formatted statement and making the descriptions more personal, so I have found myself editing all these descriptions now. And this keeps me on the site longer, which is good for the business.

Oh, and dear Skype, if you are reading this, then please stop annoying me and millions of other people living in America with your merchant fees. Every time I buy something from Skype, I get slapped with this extra fee because I am using my card to buy something from a non-US company. Just get a US entity to process your payments and you will make US paying users a lot happier.

I was really anxious to actually go and play with the new MacBook Pro, so I went and messed around with it at the Apple Store for a few minutes. Here are some initial ideas.

I will, of course, get it soon especially because recently I have been working with (previous-generation) MacBook Pro + Apple Cinema Display, and it is really great. New versions of both will just make it better, so I will get them together when the new Cinema Display comes out.

The only worry I have about it is the glossy screen. I never liked glossy. I played with a colleague’s Air a bit and the reflection is there, but it’s probably something I can get used to. Subjectively for the time being, I like matte more though.

One thing I haven’t seen mentioned (well I haven’t gone through all the pundit blogs and things yet) that was a problem in the MBP for me and is fixed in the new one, is the angle of how much the display opens up. The new MBP went a little bit beyond 90 degrees, but much less than I would have liked, as I sometimes work with my laptop in a weird position where I would like to really open up the screen. The new MBP of course still does not go to full 180, but it opens much wider.

The new trackpad+button is a good idea. This apparently eliminates the “soft tapping” motion which I have always hated and turned off. One surprising thing for me was how much force the trackpad takes to push down. I really had to push hard to get the click. Ideally this would be automatically self-adjusting (a la screen brightness), but maybe this is something that will ease up over time as the hardware gets “worked in”.

As said above, the Cinema Display is already doing a great job for me, and the new one will only be better.

I’m sad there are no longer USB connectors on the right side. That’s where I used to plug my mouse. Now I have to route the cable all around the laptop (if not using cinema display + keyboard). But I can also see the merits of the new “unibody” case production.

All in all, events like this just make me happier and happier that I switched two years ago. It’s impressive to see the unit market share up to 18% (watch the presentation on Apple site).

I’ve started at my new gig now. It is super hard and super awesome. It’s a very unconventional startup, in a good sense. It’s a big leap forward for me.

I can’t talk about what we do publicly yet since we are in stealth mode for the time being, but I can say this: I’m looking for a Creative Director to work with me fulltime in NYC, with keywords being “brand”, “online”, “interactive”. It is a really truly great super wonderful opportunity, especially at this day and age of markets and economy not doing so great. But you need to be really good.

If you are interested, or know someone who is, please (have them) e-mail me at jaanus ‘at’ jaanuskase.com ASAP, and I’ll tell you more.

I watched the Palin-Biden vice presidential debate this Thursday. The big question, of course, was if Palin would break down and run off the stage crying or something. Well, she didn’t. She performed just fine. Not great, but fine. Biden was, of course, somewhat better but not as much as I imagined he would be. He didn’t devastate Palin. So, Biden won, but by a much smaller margin than I anticipated.

Some other bits and pieces…

When they shook hands in the beginning, Palin asked Biden “Can I call you Joe?” This was a nice touch, but she never did call him Joe. So why ask in the first place.

Initially, you couldn’t see Biden’s eyes on the camera, he was squinting really badly. That’s always a bad sign about people when you don’t see their open eyes. But he opened up later so you could see his eyes better.

Palin was sometimes sort of talking/hissing through her teeth and winking strangely. I don’t know how appropriate it is for a vice president, but it lightened up the atmosphere, exactly because it was unconventional, which is great from a simple TV watching perspective.

There were great entertaining moments where the candidates made fun of each other (mostly Biden of Palin, but also the other way) in the best sense possible — sarcastic, ironic, yet still respectful. The audience, who was silent, couldn’t help but burst out laughing, because some things said were really smart and funny. So in a sense, the atmosphere was somewhat lighter than in case of Obama-McCain where it was really a war zone.

Oh, and it was annoying when Biden talked about what Obama would do and ditto for Palin and McCain. Guys, if I want to hear about Obama and McCain, I’ll just watch themselves, OK? This debate was supposed to be about you, not the guys you will work for.