Handful of Nothing

After attending a course of self organization and all those bla bla blas, I really wanted to place all my time wasting web things in one place (the sidebar).

Instead of looking for mozilla sidebars, I tried the new flock browser and I can say : I’m really impressed. So simple idea, and for me works better than those web desktops.

Let’s see how much time I can use this before hate it (I hope not)

Does anyone knows if I can extend it myself (even if it uses xul) ? If the answer is yes, I will for sure try to improve and fulfill my needs on top of this, instead of creating from scratch.

Congrats flock team! this is far superior than the previous version I’ve tried in the past, and at least for me it seems that you guys are on the right track to “fulfill” a web-app-addicted dude’s dreams.

Well, the store is launched, I hope the windows dudes do some nice reviews about, because for me, not even look at it =)

I know there’s reasons for that (DRM is windows only) etc, but it made me fell like I was back in time. Specially speaking of a huge company.

I would really like to be able to buy Nokia music :/ but until the whole music industry (see that I’m not blaming the seller) realizes that DRM are dumb, We will need to face this DRM world, and mac users will be locked to itunes, while windows user still have more choices, but are locked to windows DRM devices.

Damn you DRM-enabled-music-industry-freaks.

It has been a great conference start. The keynote by Debora Addler was a class on the essence of Design. It was great even to known that she was able as an individual to patent it. Not that I’m in for patents, but when they are used like this, just to protect a single small inventor they are really doing what they were meant for.

After that, a nice storytelling session with Kevin Brooks from Motorola Labs, and I have the pleasure to meet a colleague from Nokia London, who actually designed the camera Ui. That reduced the felling of not knowing anyone around.

Then I attended an Ebay session, that it was not bad, it just didn’t fit for me. A pity but I was trying to find my guide book with my ticket for the tools session in the other room.

In the lunch time, I sat in the “Mobile and devices” table, to discuss about Symbian, Linux, Windows mobile, community innovation, reliability and more. In the table among other great people I met was Barbara Ballard, from little springs design. One of the few companies focused solely on mobile here in the US. If you want to check out her book : here

After lunch I attended the “how to manage Ux teams” and also one of the best sessions of the day about mental models, which in the begging left me a little bit skeptical about, but after a couple of minutes I could start realizing the potentials of using it.

Also a lot of other adaptive path sessions followed, and a loot of good information was gathered. Of course sometimes you get yourself thinking “This doesn’t fit for me” or “this is kind of too simple or too web related” but in the end the great thing is to realize that some of the things you think a pretty common you just forgot or doesn’t use more (Like Alan from Nokia said to me).

So I’m fully satisfied, the only thing that is killing me is that I got pretty ill in the evening and lost the cocktail night at Union state. Tried to sleep but I still felling bad. d***. Hope I’ll better tomorrow morning.

You can follow up the UX Week by twitter, flickr and of course googling for other blogs that are talking about it.

Marco Gomes (boo-box) sent me a message a couple minutes ago about an ingenious time tracking application, that maybe can solve the worst problem about most of the time tracking application : People just forget about using it =)

The concept used by timmyontime is simple and uses something people are always using : their msn or jabber client( google talk).

You add the timmy “user” to your contact list and bam! You can start using it by sending simple controls to it as simple messages ( I can already see a Adium plugin for it):

“create project canola”
“set project canola”
“create task redesign specification” - and you can start your work! When you leave for lunch… just type :
“stop”

Pretty simple huh? Can sound complicated for some, but for most of people I know and work with, not at all =)

So as all the project, it can receive some feedback here goes mine:

1. Privacy / cryptography I know it’s a complicated subject by most of companies need some “privacy” - this should not be a problem for most teams though.
2. If possible, license to run the application on intranet. I know this is kind of stupid, but sometimes we are just not allowed to use great tools because they are services. We would pay a lot of money for some good solutions, but the only “way” they exists are in the services-based world, making impossible for a lot of people to use it.

This are just simple ideas from someone with a couple of projects going on with small team workings that would just love to be able to convince my TI guy to allow this use. But you guys had a great idea and deserve to be able to explore that! Rock on!

Ok, I was not supposed to be reading a globo’s company website but I like to read the biggest Brazilian portal everyday. When I’m reading some of the news have quite nice photographs, or informative graphics etc and there’s a small icon on the corner saying “click to enlarge”. Everyday is the same history : I click on the link and bam! a Javascript start that “fake- fullscreen” dimes my background everything to show me the picture in a bigger size, but I get the SAME picture. Yes the S.A.M.E picture.

Some chief Editor should really bothers some content professional to only put the link with “zoom in” when this is Really going to happen.

:p

Everyone likes to makes critics, but it’s even better to see answers. I was very “sarcastic” because it’s my way of saying things, but now I was really happy to see the Widset guys answer. Saying that of course that site was made for laptops / desktop. So yesterday, a brave user like me I read the site and also found the answer that they sent me : http://get.widsets.com. My tip is just make it clear, or when detecting a mobile browser put a link on top (visit the mobile enhanced experience here)

It’s clear why the site was made for laptops : it has a nice ui for managing the Widgets, but I must be very dumb (or I’m acting as regular user, do not reading the manuals) because I suffered a little bit understanding how to really work smart in that ui. My second tip for the developers is also in the managing part : it would be nice to have a very nice, simple 1 page “how it works”. Because when one thing fails, you can miss yourself in the middle.

So I logged in, in the nice ajax log in box, got to the main page. Clicked on library. Nice, I found some of my favorite web services there and picked up “forum nokia” :

Ok, not a problem. It happens. The thing now is : how to solve this problem. I thought the obvious client = my phone. So let’s try again in the phone first? Unm, not.. maybe I can set up this in the configuration:

Unm no luck. Just my data there. Nothing about my phone. No worries. We are exploring =) Wait here it is :

there’s this “reload” button. I really think that there’s something related to the page that I’m .. but as it said about problems.. phone.. let’s click.

Nice. The sms will solve my problems!

5 minutes : no sms. maybe something went wrong. I decided to check again, maybe my number is wrong, maybe that “country” box near the number is not related to the country code, and I need to enter it manually (there’s no format indication on number box so I used the conventional). Fixed the number. Maybe it really needs the +55 code. Maybe not, but who know? let’s try again. clicked reload :

So, no luck for me right? I don’t give up! I follow the instructions and again use my phone to go to the : get.widsets.com. Tried with my N95 : certificate Expired? Hun? What? Certificate? (kidding.. I know what is this certificate, but come one…) Then I tried again, with all permissions set on the phone. Same problem. Damn. Ok, let’s change sim cards and place it on a E61 to see if happens again.

Nice it detects my phone model, begin installation, regular symbian process… downloading…Yeah, I did it. Something I didn’t understand (related to my phones) why the N95 failed with certificate issues, and the E61 was ok… and it was a java application right?

Well.. Open Applications (small icon, instead of default size) opens the Java application.
Much nicer now!

Using widsets finally! Overall : looks quite nice, very nice deep-field effects with the balls, great tooltips, very nice indeed. Now it’s time to browse the widgets and use good ones for my day to day mobile experiences =)

*this was a description of my usage to give a idea of what kind of problems happens. Of course most of this problems is related to the dumbness of the user (in the case me) but sometimes can also help designers find the problems. I did this not only myself, but then tried with a non-designer person at home. Just saying to her : You know those lovely mac widgets you use? What if you have on the phone? go to widsets.com and try it. And I observed her doing almost the same mistakes. The pain was not helping her in the middle =)

Thanks anyways guys for the fast reply. I’m happy to see that you are listening to users, even dumb ones like me.

UPDATE : I tried 2 widgets (flickr, forum nokia, and other simple rss, like the ones I’m already running) and always get this “it’s not supported by your client.” is there a way to solve? New tip: if a problem appears please place a link for “learn how to solve it” that would help a lot.

- Marcelo

Well, there I was looking at those nice things about the widsets, making fun of people only being able to develop to the iphone with widgets when I decided : Why not use some of my nice Wifi-enabled phones to install this widsets straight with them? I don’t believe Steve jobs was right when he said that until today only the “baby” internet was working on the phones, and the IPhone will bring the real internet to your pocket. I thought with myself : S60 browsers uses webkit, safari uses webkit, so I have already the same browser as the iphone, less the eye candy, but the engines are the same right?

It seems so, so in the end Iphone will meet the same complications as users of S60 have been finding on their phones. So together with proximity sensor, ilumination sensor now we have the “browser” as fake “innovations” on the iphone.

But back to my Nokia phones… problems
Well, I wouldn’t say it’s a phone problem but rather a website problem. Widsets site uses javascript and not regular forms to make a ok button change colors when it’s “ready” to be clicked. (why not use a simple disabled?) and what happens? Well, if you try to register yourself with your NICE, EDGY phone like ne N95 or E61 you just can’t do it.

Why? Because some lovely front end builder decided to use some nice Javascript, and must be that kind of “Treat me as a real developer, look I know how to use the object notations in JS” because he used all “advanced” tricks to play out with the simple button and make it unavailable to … tchananan! NOKIA PHONES! Nice, so I need to come back to my lap top to be able to install widgets on my phone. Thank you mr Javascript. Instead of showing off your skills, you should at least ask someone to tests with the biggest interested on the subject phones.

So please take your time to see the amount of show off you can find here in the JS file that actually breaks on Nokia phones. Such a pity. And Why do that? Just to have “nice” AJAX-trendy effects. Like checking the user name or sliding in a log in box. Remember people.. your target is mobile browsers.

Like we say here in Brazil : House of a blacksmith, wooden stick.

Sarcasm gone, works nicely on the Firefox, but… It takes a little bit to show feedback on the actions, and there’s no clear indication that an rpc call was made. Want to use Ajax or other trend thing? Do so, but do no forget the users.

I was almost forgeting to talk about that :

Iphone maybe open to third party developers (let’s see what kind of sandbox apple will use). I think this shows the power of public opinion, after all the public is the consumer. When Jobs said that the software could be dangerous, and bring networks down (that was kind of overrated) he was just giving a immediate excuse to something that they could not deny: the importance of having software for a device like the Iphone.

My guess here is that they are going for the widget kind of dev. Maybe not like the widget 100% due to memory consumption and possible leaks in javascript engine (not possible, actually real leaks)
http://www.engadget.com/2007/05/30/iphone-to-get-third-party-apps/

Google Gears Released! In order to offer offline web application support, google released google gears, that can make front to something a little bit more complex but trying to achieve the same : Adobe’s apollo. Gears provides ways for the application to save and serve application resources / data locally and also gives the developer a nice relational database to use in ajax applications. Sounds nice and actually a lot simplier than apollo, that rely on flash in order to do it’s magic. I will test this as soon as possible to be able to talk more about it.

http://books.google.com is on and you can try it out but… don’t expect too much from the “full available” thing. I tried some regular searches and nothing worth it came(ok, I confess: I was trying to found technical books, which is completely dumb). When searching for regular books tought, it worked pretty well. Try it out

Check it out on Gtalks official weblog, about google talking to skype to make their networks works together. Great news, and this can be a real take of for this great messenger, cause no one can really really stand using msn everyday(lol).

Well, I’ve just watched and it’s simple, fast and direct to the point : j2ee sucks for web application development. Ok We already knew it but when it comes from j2EE lovers like the folks at NASA… yeah it has some impact. The argument behind it all? Fast turnaroud. I can’t agree more with that.
so, point your browser to : http://oodt.jpl.nasa.gov/better-web-app.mov and take a look at a simple “fight” between the main options for web development available today.

According to BBC uk, Iran policies for censoring blogs doesn’t stop the higher levels to do so, and now the president is online and starting pretty well with also a poll if US and Israel are trying to trigger a new world war. So sad for you, not able to read farsi. Kidding! There’s translation for french, english and arabic :p

This is a great tool for form building. I tried the demo several times and the UI they developed is just great. So well polished that made me fell envy as I never felt before =)

For me, a Brazilian, the business model/pricing is kind of heavy but I really wish this guys a great success.

Try them out

I always liked the smart usage of the Banner media. Even being a banner hater myself this small game made me lost some precious time with a simple idea and for sure reached it’s goal to : took me to the site and made me look for several minutes to the mini brand and actually play with a mini autorama car !