Apple

The swedish usability consulting firm inUse did a usability review of four mobile phones including Apple’s iPhone, the HTC TyTN, Sony Ericsson W910i, and Nokia N95. Users performed common tasks such as making a call by dialing a number manually and then by calling a person from the address book, change volume during a call add a new contact to the address book, create a new calendar event and more. The result should be useful for those who are trying to convince their IT department: ...

You disable firewalls, forward ports in the router and put your laptop in the DMZ but iChat AV still fails to make a simple video call. My son does video chat with grandma over Skype and it “just works”. What the hell were Apple thinking with iChat AV? Do they really expect people to follow instructions like these to get a simple video call going? Seems like I’m not alone.

I often install apps to try if they work the way I like. Some stay, some I delete almost immediately. Some of them have built in functionality that alerts you when there is an update available. I find that very annoying. If you have many apps these little reminders tend to pop up all the time. So, I was looking for something to keep tiny apps up to date and found AppFresh. AppFresh will scan your programs folder when you want it to and alert you of any updates it can find. Downloading and installation is automated for most apps as well. ...

Mark Pilgrim writes about the benefits of the easy-to-use package manager in Ubuntu and then feels sorry for his Mac OS-using friends. “But Jesus H. Christ, it must suck giant wet donkey balls to be stuck on an archaic OS where you need to be dropping into the terminal and tweaking configuration files and compiling shit all the time. I hope the translucent menu bar is worth it. " I agree wholeheartedly that a good package manager really makes life a lot easier. At work the other day I was about to begin installing TWiki by following the rather lengthy installation guidelines. As I was on a clean install of Ubuntu 7.10 I fired off a apt-get install twiki and lo and behold, two minutes later the whole thing was there including mysql and a large part of the CPAN library. ...

Update: As many readers now noticed, as of 10.5.2 there is now a preferences setting for the menubar transparency. For some reason Apple decided to make the menu bar in Leopard transparent. With my background image this means that the menu bar will be in a shade of blue. It doesn’t look good and makes my computing environment less comfortable (I’m picky, I know…). Someone created a software hack to remove the transparency. There is also a system setting (thank you Johan) to trick the window manager into thinking it is in older hardware. I am not sure of the side effects so I’m not that keen on installing that. Here is the pragmatic fix: take your background image and paint a white stripe, 21 pixels high, at the top. Problem solved. My menu bar is now easy to read with black text on white background (see picture above). ...

So the iPhone is out and the Apple cult followers are going crazy all over the place. Unpacking porn and disassemblies are being posted. When the iPhone was announced I had my doubts about the touch screen keyboard. I had been using a HTC phone for a while and did not really see how they would be able to make a decent touch keyboard. Especially not for us in the norhern hemisphere that use gloves during winter. TUAW is reviewing the touch keyboard and concurs that there is “nothing wrong with the keyboard”. The error seems to be the “meat mittens” of the user. How is that for self criticism? The user is to blame instead of the phone…

(Please note that this post is from 2007 and things have become much better). When you are on parental leave you have to register which days you are away fro work with the Swedish Social Insurance Agency. To access the online services of an agency you have to have an electronic ID. In Sweden this is a locally installed certificate issued by your bank or large telecom provider. In my case my identity is checked by my bank and then I am forwarded to Telia, which handles the process of generating the ceritificate and installing the appropriate software on my computer. What could have been a simple well guided procedure is instead an exercise in ambiguity and a complete lack of usability: ...