Archive for July, 2007

This is the year of Linux! Not.

Jul 07
22

Every year there’s yet another story about how this is really the year of Linux. Well it’s still not here. I’ll tell you why.

  • The marketplace is confusing for customers (both corporate and consumer) there are too many choices. Many people are waiting by the sidelines for the competition to sort itself out. VHS vs. Betamax, HD-DVD vs. Blueray… try Ubuntu vs. Redhat, vs. Suse, etc. etc. It’s so confusing many customers prefer to just pick Vista Windos XP.
  • Hardware doesn’t always work. The fact that Dell is now shipping Ubuntu on some boxes is huge but it’s the beginning and it can’t be an isolated event. HP, Toshiba, Sony, Acer, Gateway where are you guys? Until most hardware is shipped with working drivers it’s not going to be ready for prime time. Many companies give Linux good lip service but a much smaller number are willing to open their wallets and bet the business on it.
  • Low level problems still dominate the bulk of the work being done. Driver and the open souce politics of drivers (NVidia and ATI). Many people equate Linux with open source and this doesn’t match up with many companies existing politics. In many ways Linux is not just an operating system but a philosophy. It’s one thing to convince a company of the fiscal benefits of Linux but it’s a much longer process to get them to change thier approach to developing software (open source). Without the ability to split these things Linux feels like it’s really close but since the politics don’t change it’s never quite close enough.
  • Teams are working harder but not always smarter. Many bugs are duplicated across distributions and there is no good way to track and monitor the work and progress that is being made across distribution teams. There’s still a ton of duplicated effort.
  • Scheduling releases continues to be problematic. Major & Minor releases from the Kernel and from various distributions don’t line up making it difficult to schedule, drive and push release dates.
  • Lastly saying ‘year of Linux’ just doesn’t make sense. Linux devices are all over the place already from cell phones, routers, medical devices, embedded computers and more. Mission accomplished, right? Saying ‘Year of Desktop Linux’ doesn’t make much sense.  To get mass adoption you need support from the hardware makers and so far it seems that hardware manufacturers are being dragged to Linux kicking and screaming.

Don’t get me wrong. I do believe that in my lifetime an open source OS will have a non-minority market share but keep your champagne bottles corked. There are still many mountains to climb.

Posted in Linux | 1 Comment »

It’s the User Experience Stupid

Jul 07
17

People want quality experiences, they don’t want features.  Sure they’ll tell you they want features. They’ll compare features, they’ll make feature charts and checklists but when it comes right down to it it’s about the product experience. I’ll get to the iPhone in a minute but let’s first start with the iPod.

Apple certainly wasn’t the first to create a music player, or a portable digital music player but they did nail the experience. From getting the music from your CD to your computer to the device the process was fairly smooth and low friction. The mobile experience focused on listening to the music, not making playlists, not tagging, or sharing, or anything else. The killer app was having all your music with you.

The ability to focus on the core experience and remove all the junk is incredibly hard. It’s so tempting to get feature centric. It’s so tempting to itemize all the things that it could do and then go build all of those features. The ability to focus on the experience is what can set you apart.

I was in home depot looking for appliances a few weeks back and it seems that appliances are less and less about cooking. Each appliance has been consumed with buttons, dials, settings, preferences and options. It’s so easy and so cheap to add a feature like a timer and a clock that every device is doing it. The experience of using each of these devices gets incrementally more and more difficult. The stove, microwave, refrigorator all had clocks and timers.

People are looking for the revolutionary feature, and in many cases the revolution is to remove features not add them.

The iPhone is a great example of designing for the experience and not the feature list. Many technology critics will complain about the features (EDGE, no GPS, no keyboard, no MMS, etc.) But what they forget is that the experience on most cell phones, even the ones that have all these features, is just making phone calls and perhaps sending a few text messages. Having lots of features is great but having those features work well takes a lot more time.  Many companies short-cut and compromise the overall experience to get more features into the product.

Creating a user experience vision allowed Apple to focus on three core iPhone features. Music, Internet, Phone. The fact that the device doesn’t do many other things is seen as a flaw by some but the fact that it does those three things  well will help it outsell many other more feature rich devices.

As technology invades our lives products will hit a feature limit. This limit is the point where each added feature provides little to no end-customer benefit. As this limit is approached companies will need to focus on creating experience, not just lots of features.  If they don’t someone else will.

This is great news for those of us who spend a lot of time thinking about User Experience and Usability because more and more products will be built with the person in mind instead of the feature chart.

Posted in Apple, Design, Usability, User Interface | 3 Comments »

Apple Remembers the Colorblind

Jul 07
12

I noticed a tiny change on the iPhone availability website. At first I was puzzled and then I remembered. Yesterday Apple had a red circle and a green circle to show availability. Today they updated the site with a tiny change:

Red Green Example

The red circle was replaced with a red square. Users with color blindness have trouble seeing the differences between these colors so the shape helps. This reminded me of a couple places in my own designs where I wasn’t considering colorblindness. There are many different types of color blindness. One quick check is to print your designs in black and white and make sure they still make sense.

Posted in Apple, Design | 3 Comments »

Gmail Applications for Domains Review

Jul 07
10

About two months ago our exchange server died for the last time and we decided to move our email & calendar solution to Google applications for domains.

The reasons were easy.

  1. We don’t like running and maintaining servers. Like most small businesses we have better things to do.
  2. Certain collaboration features of Exchange just don’t work as we need. Sharing a calendar doesn’t work well. Stopping spam doesn’t work well. Public folders or public calendars don’t work well.
  3. Our requirements for email/calendar are pretty basic so a web solution that does the basics really well can be better then a feature rich solution.
  4. One of the key features of Exchange is being able to take your email with you. The problem is you’re always syncing or repairing PST files. If you’re usually online the syncing pain isn’t worth it.
  5. We now have Mac’s and PC’s, using Parallels to load Outlook isn’t that much fun and having a consistent experience as I move between computers is very desirable.
  6. Cost wasn’t a major consideration. That said the Google solution is much cheaper (free). Even if we paid the $50/user for expanded storage it’s still under $500/year for our small business. Microsoft Small business server is around $450 for 5 users. The TCO for the Microsoft solution is higher because of the admin requirements to backup, patch & repair issues. For a small business this is huge. (Hosted excahnge solutions tend to be more expensive as well)

Ok, it’s been four weeks what works, what doesn’t?

  • Gmail – The overall Gmail interface is good. Having access to email/calendar from any computer with a web-browser is more powerfull then I expected.
  • The core interactions work well and it does a supurb job with spam filtering.
  • Some of the core interactions such as keyboard shortcuts, right click just don’t exist or don’t map to what I’m used to in a desktop application.
  • Load time is slow for a web-page but reasonable in relation to Outlook.
  • Gmail uses tags instead of folders. Tags are similar to what Outlook calls ‘categories’. Overall I don’t think tags are as useful as folders. With folders you store things once. With tags you can store things multiple times. This makes tags heavy weight for basic organization tasks. Tags are certainly more powerful but the coganizational boost is not apparent. Google docs recently added folders to their interface so I suspect a similar addition may be in the works for Gmail.
  • Email in a browser is good but not great. You can’t paste an image from the clipboard into a message. You can’t attach a file by dropping it on the message. Outlook does give you more formating flexibility. 90% of the time you don’t care but when you do care, you tend to care a lot.
  • Support for multiple email addresses under one account is limited. You can do it but you can’t have multiple email signatures for each account (nor can you switch quickly).
  • The calendar application does a poor job at reminding you of events from the browser. It partly makes up for this by having the ability to send reminders to your phone and allowing you to subscribe to your calendar from other tools and applications that fill this gap.
  • Searching on gmail is great. It’s relatively fast and it’s built in. Office only added full text search in it’s 2007 version.
  • Tasks/ToDo are painfully missing in the Google solution. There are a number of Firefox plug-ins and greasmonkey scripts that do a poor job of fixing this deficiency. I suspect that Task lists will get added in the coming years. Till then I’ve been using TaDaList from 37 Signals.
  • The Outlook solution is well coupled and tightly integrated. Switching from email to calendar and back is instant. With the Google solution it’s slow to move from one app to another and back. Google provides some basic shortcuts but overall it’s a sore spot. Applications open in a separate tab/window and it’s not easy to move things back and forth. I’m used to taking an email and dragging it to the calendar to create an appointment on the spot. With the Gmail solution it’s not quite as elegant. One thing that google does well with Calendar is the ability to type a line like “Dinner on Thursday at 7 with Kathy” and it’ll create the event automatically.
  • Give me a preview pane. Gmail is missing the preview pane for messages. This forces a navigation and a context switch for each email. The application does some clever AJAX to keep this transition very fast but the context switch forces you to refocus each time you go back and forth. This also makes keyboarding through messages much slower…
  • Speaking of keyboards, accessibility with the Google solution seems lacking. Google has done a good job of adding some keyboard shortcuts but I haven’t been able to quickly arrow through messages. With a Windows or Mac applications you can learn the keyboard shortcut by looking at the menu. With Google applications it’s burried in the help documentation.

Overall

Solid B+ Some things are better some things are worse. The transition pain was minimal and overall I do like it. The ease of administration is absolutely wonderful. If you’re a small business (under 25 people) it’s a great move. The spam filtering has saved me hours. If you’re in a larger organization you’ll need to consider those missing features further. If you’re a small business this is the best choice for a hosted email/calendar solution I’ve seen.

Posted in Email, Google, Review | No Comments »

Say Hi to PicMe Photo Sharing

Jul 07
6

PicME Photo Sharing ServiceBROOKLINE, MA, JULY 6, 2007: Raizlabs Corporation today announced the availability of PicMe Photo Sharing, their new digital photo sharing service. The free software is available now for download at http://picme.raizlabs.com.

The software is the first of its kind to integrate photo sharing with a rich and interactive 3-D desktop experience.
“We wanted to remove the barriers to sharing photos. Unlike many of the existing web sharing tools we focused on the desktop experience, because that’s where your photos live.” said Gregory Raiz founder of Raizlabs.

Over a year of development has gone into this new application which allows users to easily share thousands of photos with their friends and family, while also offering a unique 3-D perspective of all the photos in their digital collections. “Although we use a lot of innovative technology our focus has been on making the product easy enough for novice users.” said Craig Spitzkoff, VP of development.

PicMe takes the pain and need for technical expertise out of sharing photos by providing an intuitive way to interact with your photos and contacts. PicMe also integrates with other popular photo sharing services such as Flickr.

The PicMe service is free to use and allows for sharing of hundreds of photos. Premium accounts are available starting at $9.95/year allowing users to share thousands of photos.

Additional information is available at:
http://picme.raizlabs.com

About Raizlabs Corporation
Raizlabs Corporation is a software development and user interface design firm based in Brookline, MA. Raizlabs is headed by Greg Raiz, a former program manager at Microsoft.
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Posted in Design, Photos, User Interface | 1 Comment »

iPhone Telephone Hyperlinks

Jul 07
2

Enough with the iPhone news. Let’s talk about a little detail that no one else is talking about. The interesting thing for me is how the web is joining our good friend the telephone. A while back I talked about Callto links and how these could be tied into Vonage using a little tool I wrote. So I was pretty interested to see how the iPhone would allow a web-page to connect to a telephone number.

i was expecting either callto: links or perhaps a telephone microformat or perhaps a proprietary solution.

Surprisingly it turns out that it’s none of the above. The iPhone is using a not so well known RFC to create telephone hyperlinks. This is done through a tel: link format that I’d never heard of called RFC 3966.

The format allows you to create an anchor link and use a tel: URI to point to a telephone number. For example if you wanted to contact Apple customer support you would use a link like this:
Call Apple Customer Support at 1-800-275-2273
Go ahead and give it a try, I don’t yet have an iPhone to test this out.

The link format is fairly straight forward:
<a href="tel:+1-800-275-2273">
Call Apple Customer Support at 1-800-275-2273
</a>.

If more sites start using this for their contact information other providers for the tel: URI may begin supporting the format (Vonage, Verizon, Skype, etc.) This makes it easy to transition from a web interface to a voice interface. The format also theoretically suppors alternative SIP providers and extensions making it possible to put a corporate directory online in the form of an iPhone application.

Happy telephone linking.

Posted in Apple, Television | 13 Comments »