Ghosts of Passwords Past

I had to log into my Gmail account from a sketchy Internet cafe computer in Buenos Aires a few weeks ago to check on a reservation.  Since I generally don't like doing that I made it a point to change my password when I got to the hotel.

Tonight I went on autopilot and tried logging in with the old password, and was pleasantly surprised to see this custom error message:

Very cool attention to detail that both subtly reminds you of the change and/or alerts you to a possible issue.

Gmail is Like Cilantro

This one's for BoRyan:

Google's Wiltse Carpenter compared the frustration with threaded Gmail to the backlash over cilantro. "And just as an outspoken minority has banded together in unison to declare their distaste of one of nature's most delicious herbs, some of you have been very vocal about your dislike of conversation threading," he wrote in a blog post.

(via cnet)

Dogs and Apples

http://cameron.io/apples-buttons/

Excerpt:

There’s an odd sentiment among nerds that Steve Jobs (and the fine people at Apple) hate buttons. I have a different theory: they absolutely love buttons.

Would you say to someone, 'Wow, you must hate dogs. You only have one. You enjoy his company and playing with him, but seriously, only one? What do you have against dogs?'.

Perhaps a towform design checkpoint should be asking the question, "How would Arlo feel if he had xx more dogs sleeping in his favorite spot?"

Creativity and Generosity in the Internet Age

"Clay Shirky's second book, The Cognitive Surplus, picks up where his stellar debut, Here Comes Everybody left off: explaining how the net's lowered costs for group activity allow us to be creative and even generous in ways that we never anticipated and haven't yet fully taken account of.

Shirky's hypothesis is that a lot of the 20th century stuff we used to take for granted -- most people didn't want to create media, people didn't value homemade and amateur productions, no one would pitch in to create something for others to enjoy unless they were being paid -- weren't immutable laws of nature, but accidents of history. The Internet has undone those accidents, by making it possible for more people to make and do cool stuff, especially together."

Towform, of course, an example of the scope of this insight. :) More, here.

Flash

(Visiting The Oatmeal for the first time in awhile always has me getting caught up and following the occasional real world links he includes. I wasn't going to do two posts in one day, but this is the funniest thing I've read in forever -- and it's from 2003!)

Uproar over Anti-Flash Intro Survey Results

Quote from Macromedia employee (pre-Adobe buyout) on website Flash intros:

"When we have clients who are thinking about Flash splash pages, we tell them to go to their local supermarket and bring a mime with them. Have the mime stand in front of the supermarket, and, as each customer tries to enter, do a little show that lasts two minutes, welcoming them to the supermarket and trying to explain the bread is on aisle six and milk is on sale today.

"Then stand back and count how many people watch the mime, how many people get past the mime as quickly as possible, and how many people punch the mime out.

"That should give you a good idea as to how well their splash page will be received. That's the crux of it."

Evil and Marketing, Friends or Foes

Writing from a coffee shop in Santa Monica, as I wait a few days for the movers to bring our stuff.

A fellow in our business sent this article out.

I got a kick out of the examples, as they definitely illustrate the challenges in marketing, making money and being transparent with your users.

http://searchengineland.com/evil-conversion-when-optimization-goes-too-far-42838

(bonus: the site itself disclosed informative information on why I received the popup overlay when I first visited the site)

So, what are your thoughts on what is evil and what is not in the world of online e-commerce?

Fools Rush In

Verizon and RIM "rushed" buggy Storm to market

Insiders claim the Storm—slammed by reviewers and users alike for its sluggish, glitchy performance—barely made it to stores in time for Black Friday last year, and as a consequence, it wasn't quite ready for prime time.

To its credit, Verizon released a software update in December that smoothed out some of the Storm's kinks. However, while the firmware fix was certainly welcome, the whole "release it now, patch it later" thing is an insidious habit: It encourages sloppiness in the race to hit a looming release date, and it's seriously disrespectful of customers.

Drooling...

Home computer setup of ChaCha's CEO:


8 monitors!!!

(via TechCrunch)

Max Barry on Piracy

Nice "open letter" to Warner Bros. regarding their misguided DVD piracy strategy.

Max Barry - Dear Warner Bros.

I’m writing because yesterday I rented The Dark Knight, and I couldn’t watch it. I tried. But when I popped that DVD into my home theater PC and snuggled up on the sofa with my wife, it wouldn’t play.

At first I thought the disc must be damaged. I tried it in my laptop: no dice there, either. So I took it back to the video store and swapped it for a new one. They were very apologetic, by the way, Warners. I guess they understand that physically traveling to a bricks-and-mortar store is kind of a pain, and when you’re in business against digital downloads, you don’t want to make your transactions more difficult than they already are.

Home with my fresh DVD, I tried again. But still: didn’t work. A little Googling later, I discovered the disc was indeed damaged, and by who: you. You’ve installed some new anti-piracy protection onto The Dark Knight DVDs, which prevents the disc from playing in my PC.

Z2K

Seems that all 30 GB Microsoft Zune players bricked themselves at midnight this morning (as 12/30 became the 31st).

30GB Zunes mysteriously begin to fail at 12AM, December 31st

The failures are coming 24-hours ahead of the big '09 changeover, but that hasn't stopped Zune aficionados from dubbing this unfortunate flaw "Z2K."

In other news, my iPod is still working fine :)

Back-Button To The Future

Back-Button to the Future

They had me at "manipulating the temporal web." Essentially the next evolution of the Wayback Machine, and if it works as advertised I'm blown away...

Check out the video demo.

Mouse @ 40

40 years of pointing and clicking

The original mouse was quite large, barely fitting in the user's hand, but Engelbart envisioned that you would keep one hand on the mouse at all times and the other on a special one-handed keyboard instead of a standard QWERTY-styled model.

Check out the photo with the article...that thing is a brick!

Why Apple Is Great at Interfaces

Why Apple is great at interfaces when others are not

Did anyone at Microsoft think of pleasure when designing Vista's awful UAC? Did anyone at anywhere think about pleasure when designing old mobile phone interfaces, a kludge of menus, scrolling, button pressing and nested icons?

Owners' Manual

The funniest thing I've read in years, via the Southwest Airlines "Spirit" Magazine.

Owners' Manuals: The Owners' Manual

[I was going to post an excerpt here, but I couldn't decide which part to use. So instead I'll say the least funny part is the missing manual for the Internet, and the rest of the article (including the sidebar on manual cautions) had my sides hurting from laughter.]

The Flow of Innovation

Interesting post on how a lot of innovation now integrates usability:

Why The Flow of Innovation is Reversed

My favorite quote:

The folks that built enterprise software were vaguely aware that their systems had to be accessible to the humans that used them but they had a huge advantage. The people who used them did so as part of their job, they were trained to use them and fired if they could not figure them out.

Today, no one tells you to use Facebook. There are no employer sponsored training sessions on the use of del.icio.us. The burden is on the designer of the system to meet a need, entertain, or inform their users. They also have to seduce those users, hiding complexity, revealing one layer at time, always enticing, never intimidating, until the user one day finds they are intimately familiar with power and the pleasures of the service.

The benefits are brilliant albeit somewhat obvious. Why spend time and money training and re-training every employee you'll ever have on how to use a software system when you can build one that a reasonably savvy person off the street can teach themselves? As the enterprise starts to wake-up to the new efficiencies the web has taught us, tedious "legacy" systems will be replaced with more usable versions and everyone will win.

It's The Software, Not You

Great, classic David Pogue...

It’s the Software, Not You

It reminded me suddenly of the touchscreen kiosks at Delta. Now, I actually like Delta quite a lot, and think they’re doing a lot of things right lately. But the kiosks–oh, man.

You come up, you swipe your credit card. That alone ought to tell the kiosk who you are, and it should therefore know what flight you’re checking in for.

But no, it plays dumb. It asks you to key in your destination. So you type in “SAN” for San Francisco. And it asks you: San Francisco, San Diego, or San Juan? Oh, I don’t know–how about THE ONE YOU HAVE A RESERVATION ON!?

(Yes, yes, I know–you might have more than one reservation on Delta. But come on. Let’s say you have flights today at 3 pm, tomorrow at 5 pm, and next Friday at 8 pm. As you swipe your credit card, today, at 1:30 pm, does it really think you’re checking in for anything but the first one?)

But O.K. You tap San Francisco. And now–I kid you not–it wants to know what time of day the flight departs!

Are you kidding me? It doesn’t know the airline’s own flight time? Come on–it already knows what flight I’m on, so what’s the point of this exercise? For God’s sake, just check me in!

Whenever I encounter badly designed software like this, I stand there, slack-jawed, mind boggling, and wonder what on earth the designers were *thinking.*

Chrome

Google is releasing their own browser tomorrow, called "Chrome." And the announcement initially leaked out as a 38 page comic book.

Pretty cool, and very exciting that this could signal the return of the browser wars...

Official announcement on the Google Blog.

Forgot Your Password?

‘FORGOT YOUR PASSWORD?’ MAY BE WEAKEST LINK

Almost everyone forgets a Web site password once in a while. When you do, you click on the familiar "Forgot your password?" link and, after entering your pet's name, identifying your high school mascot or answering some other seemingly obscure questions, you can get back into your account.

But there's a problem: A criminal can do that, too. With the help of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, personal trivia is getting less obscure all the time. You’d be surprised how easily someone can uncover Fido's name or your alma mater with a little creative searching.

Should I Stay or Should I Tow?

I'll refrain from getting into the whole story for the moment and put out another opinion poll:

Car partially obstructing a narrow driveway. Need to leave for work and can't get out without jumping the curb (if at all).


Let it stay or have it towed? Vote in the comments.

(UPDATE 7/22 -- see comments)

Walk This Way

The holy grail of mapping is about to get holier:

Google Maps takes steps toward walking directions