The other day I was un-installing a software package from Telerik and the process was quite long. So I was reading along a few blog posts when I suddenly got a modal dialog in my face, actually it was a monolog as I was not able to act on it. It was just a message to me that the uninstall process felt that It really had to force me to read. So it kicked up the following message on top of everything:

No matter what i did, the windows 7 show desktop (right bottom corner), WIN-D or whatever. The application really felt that this message was so important it had to sit on top of everything for a couple of minutes.

Its almost like the old: Are you sure you want to exit? question. And actually I thought we got rid of that a couple of years ago. But whaddayaknow, it’s still out there in the various shapes and as you can see it has moved to the web… And I got one just the other day but I have already erased and forgotten that application.

Anyways, it really is simple, as the process of installing and uninstalling is something that takes a little time, just make sure it will be executed in the background. I have better things to do than look at a message that  is completely rubbish. Actually it’s not just this little dialog, when installing the toolkit, it places a full screen window on top of everything. This windows have all the controls for maximize, minimize and close but it will not react to them… At least I was able to minimize with the WIN-D keys…

//Håkan Reis

Microsoft just released it’s ASP.NET MVC 1.0 framework source code the other day, and it’s under Microsoft public license, an open source approved license. Just for fun I went to the Open Source Initiatives license pages and read it. And to my surprise it was short, to the point, no nonsense information on what you could and could not do with the software. For once I didn’t feel I had to go through five years of law school just to understand the basics. So ho short is it? It’s 408 word in plain understandable English.

But how well does this compare to other licenses? Well a comparison between some other popular licenses gave some interesting facts:

• GNU General Public License (GPL) 2979 words
• GNU General Public License version 3.0 (GPLv3) 5729!! words
• Apache License, 2.0 1598 words
• Mozilla Public License 1.1 (MPL) 3689 words

The only popular license that is simpler is the New and Simplified BSD licenses that lands on 443 words but actually the license part is only 222 words in plain English.

And for a fun comparison: the legal designers at Apple came up with a 3155 words, hard-to-read license called Apple Public Source License.

Beside MS-PL and Simplified BSD there are only one more readable license I found and that’s the Simple Public License 2.0 with 447 words.

So, do people really understand what the license they are using are telling them or are they using GPL or Apache licenses just because everyone else are using it?

// Håkan Reis

Do you think that wasting $150 000 000 of your clients money is ok or have you heard of any companies that does that and get away with it (that are not lawyers)?

Chances are that you are doing business with one of them. But lets start from the beginning here and I’ll get to the $150 million in a while.

This year we got a new time report system at work, and as usual it’s a mess. There is a user experience here but only of confusion and annoyance.  A couple of hideous  problems I spotted in just a few minutes of use were:

• In this system we are forced to use an arcane time code for each report period. The crypto looks like 208522. If you decipher it you get 2008, 52 and the last is 1 or 2 depending on if it it's the first or second month in that week (when the month is shifting). This is just ridicules, we have been using the roman calendar for a couple of thousands years. The porting period calendar code is not logical for any user (not even the developer).
• For each cell we have to use codes, and to find out what codes to use a modal JavaScript dialog is presented where you can do a search that lists a few projects and their code. Each time it takes 3-4 clicks to enter the correct codes. But in this system you have project codes, activities codes, customers codes, account codes, etc.

So how about the numbers then? Well, just the two problems on top here will keep on eating up a couple of minutes each day. Our company size is around 150 people so this mean about 600 hours lost each year. I have no idea how many users the system has, but they claim that 2 600 companies are using their system. Taking our company as an average company is at least a start so lets use that figure. This adds up to 1.5 million hours. With an hourly rate around $100 you get $150 000 000 every single year down the drain.

So what gives them the right to cost their client so much? Is it that they have especially lazy developers or did they really think they could come up with a better calendar. Actually, the truth is that there are many more time report systems out there and I haven’t came across a single one that’s much better and a few that are even worse. This micros study of mine revealed a few common facts on time reports:

• All the reporting systems spring from the economic context. In that context we are often thrown back to entering long rows of numerical data. Codes may make sense in this context as they speed up the entry on a numeric key-pad.
• The next problem is that they try to solve time reporting for everyone. The average user will not need to list 300 clients to find the right one even if the company might have all those clients. You don’t have a gigantic hierarchy of projects, tasks and activities. Actually, if you have demand that fine grained control of every hour you are probably wasting your clients and employees time and money.
• The users of the system do not share the context of time reporting. A small group of users are using as one of their main tool, they might want codes and shortcuts as it can speed up their work. But the biggest user group are probably the ones that report into the system. They might use it one time a day on that occasion they don’t want to waste time on searching for codes.

Actually the solution to some of these issues are quite simple but that doesn’t mean it’s simple to implement. But to start with they could at least get to know their users, and by users I don’t mean customers.

The system will have to be created with a dual view, of course it has to support the the ones that are using the reported time for calculation, planning and business. But there is not a contradiction in supporting the other bigger user group here, the ones that has to enter data. If the overhead for entering my time were just a minute or two a day instead of 10-15, I might not be that annoyed. I could use their system instead of the simple app in my iPhone that keeps track of my projects and how much time I spend on each.

And for the two problems found in our current system there are two super simple solutions that I give away for free.

• Let me use the calendar i know and use (you know the one that starts with January and ends with December)
• Provide me with incrementally searchable dropdowns with real projects and activities names – not the damn codes.

Ah well, I should probably report that time from last week instead of writing up this rant. And I really hope my company will not just lose money on the system, but save a dime or two on the reports and invoices that it produces.

// Håkan Reis

This is a rant. As much as apple has had its focus mainly on the user they are now heading in a new direction. The new iTunes addiction is sales, the new incarnation of iTunes is only about how to get the next fix, closing the next deal.

The sad thing is that as with many other companies that has reach world domination - it cripples innovation. There hasn’t been much innovation in the user interface since it was introduced years ago. The few is focused on one thing, selling stuff.

To start with, what is iTunes?

Well this is one problem, it has become a beast, to the user it is foremost a media player, or at least tries to be. It’s not among the better media players but it gets the job done. As a media player there has been added a few extra features like burning CDs, music sync to iPod and oh, it let’s you buy new music.

But later on they have added more and more bloat; iPhone calendar and contact sync, application sales, pushing media and stuff you already own, podcast, video downloads. Oh, and the updater doubles as a portal for pushing safari as well.

The iTunes beast of today

iPhone sync - Why on earth do I want my iPhone to start up a (now) bloated media player just to sync contacts, calendar details and some music? Why not a blazing fast slimmed down sync application that use the database from iTunes to get the playlists, media track and application that are stored there?

The pusher – For a long time now iTunes ha added a little arrow to each and every track in the library, clicking it took me to iTunes music store, so that I could easily - buy the track I already own. Not a big problem as you could just remove it with a little setting. But not anymore, you can solve it with a hack but how many user are able to do that? We are going to sell more whether you like it or not! And it gets worse.

The genius - Masquerading as smart playlist manager genius gives Apple a way to display even more buttons with the word BUY in them. Now they have taken up 10% more of my screen real-estate with lists of music to buy. The playlists are not that bad, but I guess using genres, artists and some randomness would create about the same result. 

Grid view – The latest “innovation” is the ability to show albums in a grid…wow. And the cover flow before that, that turns out to be, not that useful. I love Eye candy and think it can serves a purpose but adding a black blob with a reflection in the middle of the database grid that represent all your tracks doesn’t help much.

What they could have added

Folder watching – I tend to move my music around, as there are not enough space on my laptop to have all my music and there are no easy way to have a central place for all tracks I have a subset on my machine, about 10GiB of music. So why not just add some smart folder watching? Thankfully there are people out there that get it.

Re-sync of statistics – If I play my music on my iPhone it would be so easy to count and then sync that back, as well as what tunes I skip etc. that would be excellent statistics for that genius playlists…

Native OS support – I’m a windows vista user, I actually like vista, and applications should behave. This is not a new problem with iTunes. But when are you going to address it? Not in one single place have they added right click support. You know, we use it a lot in windows. Or even looked at the Visa UX guidelines. But then again, why would they add functionality to us windows user that would be missing for the Mac OS crowd?

There; now I can get back to syncing photos, buying ringtones clips of music I already own and let iTunes steal GDI and memory resources from my system.

// Haqwin