This Is Why I Use FlashBlock

I wrote in detail about the sins of Flash in a previous post.

You can learn more about the FlashBlock extension here.

Today, I chanced upon the website for The Inn at False Creek hotel in Vancouver, BC.  Check out the three pics below.

The first is how the website appears with FlashBlock on, with seven instances of Flash (or other blocked items) showing.  Wow, that's a lot.  What sorts of nifty stuff could they be putting on this page?

The second is how it looks with the Flash items loaded.  Wow, that is nifty! Text! They are using it to load up styled text, with an overhead for loading and launching whatever technology seven times on the page.  They could have embedded graphics with alt text, or other mechanisms, but they chose this.

And for comparison the third image is how the page looks on an iPad.  Wow is that bad.  The only thing I really regret about Apple’s refusal to deal with Flash on the iPad is things like this which show lousy programming practices in action.

 

…And RealPlayer Loses a User

I got a notification about an update to RealPlayer today, so I accepted it and waited for the install to occur.

And 10 minutes later, I uninstalled the application and started this blog post.

• In order to install, it insisted I quit my browser.  That’s so 2005, that I have to quit one app to install another.
   
• After installing, it asked for my password.  No idea why it didn’t have my previous one saved, but this happens.  Maybe a wipe of saved browser passwords at some point wiped this, too.  (Most likely, when they mirrored my content over from the previous laptop, info like that wasn't preserved, and I just haven't used RealPlayer since then.)
   
• This is a work system, so my password has to change every few months.  After trying a couple that I could remember, I gave up and used the “Forgot your password?” link.  The page that came up asked for my email address… twice.  Twice on the same page.  These double-ask fields are done during sign-up scenarios to ensure that people have entered the right email address (no typos) or have typed their password (in blind text) correctly.  That use case doesn’t apply here.
   
• After getting the email to reset the password and clicking on the stupidly long URL, the resulting web page asked for the last four digits of my credit card.  I don’t recall having a credit card attached to that account — why would I have, since I’m not going to buy anything through them? — and why would you need me to click a link, enter an email address twice, check my email, click on another link, and then provide even more info?  Seems like overkill, when other applications can do the reset in fewer steps.
   
• But okay, which credit card?  I’ve used several over the nearly five years this account has been around, and I have since closed most of those accounts.  I tried the one I think I recall from my checking account; that’s the one I have on file at various retailers and such.  But no, that’s not the one they were looking for, and there was no means for entering other info, etc.  (Actually, that was the one from a checking account I recently had to close due to a fraud claim, but I’ve been using it for a few years.  Although as I think of it, I got that one after the RealPlayer account was created, so it would have likely been wrong regardless.)

(Note the big sin they have committed here: credit card usage changes over time.  The card I prefer to use now may not be the same one I used last year, and that account may be closed and the info not accessible to me any more.  Values which change over time should never be used as a security measure because they are neither memorizable nor retrievable.)

So I need to sign in to complete the install, but I can’t remember my password, and they won’t reset my password without me entering digits from a credit card for an account I no longer have?  Plonk!

Control Panels > Add & Remove Programs > Uninstall

[Note: I used to work for RealNetworks.  Does that make me more forgiving of them or more critical?  I’m not sure.]
 

Further Thoughts on the iPad

By now, everyone and his brother has weighed in on the iPad.  Having been abvle to see and use one for a couple minutes, a few observations of my own come to mind:

It’s Apple, Stupid!

For all those people who complain about what the iPad doesn’t have:

• Multi-tasking: the iPhone doesn’t have it yet, why would you expect the iPad to?
• A memory card slot: the iPhone doesn’t have one, why would you expect the iPad to?
• A removable battery: the iPhone doesn’t have one, why would you expect the iPad to?
• A standard USB port: the iPhone doesn’t have one, why would you expect the iPad to?
• Get the picture?

Do you get the picture?  No one who thought about the iPad in context of other Apple mobile offerings for more than 10 seconds would expect any of this hardware stuff, nor would they expect any of the software pieces to appear on the iPad without it appearing on the iPhone at the same time.

Apple works hard to try and maintain the illusion of consistency in their hardware offerings.  No matter how much you might wish for these things on a general purpose tablet device, they aren’t the Apple way.  Bitching that they are missing from the iPad means you’re either an idiot, or you don’t do anything but complain, or you have a beef with Apple itself and couldn’t say something good about the product anyway.

Think About the Market for a Moment

When he introduced the iPad, Steve Jobs positioned it in between the iPhone (very small, very mobile device) and the MacBook (device with some mobility but intended for keyboard and mouse-intensive operations).

Which means that when a reviewer complains that he wouldn’t replace his laptop with an iPad, he is missing the point.  The iPad is not intended as a laptop replacement (although with the keyboard dock and iWork software, it can do some laptop activities acceptably).  If it was intended to replace a laptop, it would not have been described as sitting “between” the smart phone and the laptop.

So instead of bitching about how it doesn’t do what you want from a laptop — and I agree, it might be okay for text editing, but not for coding and not for editing Photoshop documents — how about thinking about what (and whom) it would be good for?

While those of us who make our livings from computers usually need the horsepower and keyboard and mouse, a whole lot of people (the majority of computer users, frankly!) don’t.  They need (want) Facebook.  They need a music and video player.  They need a web browser.  They need e-mail.  For these people, the keyboard and mouse are things they tolerate, pieces of the computer system that they use because that’s what computers have for inputting information and navgiating.  But no one needs a mouse to click (touch) a play button.  No one needs a hardware keyboard to enter a URL that they already have a bookmark for, nor to enter their credit card number for an online purchase.  And so on.

These are the people — and more, the uses — that the iPad is intended for.  Not you (most likely).  Them.  Think about them, and what they need, and how they might use the device.

Welcome to the Future

Who came up with the concept for the iPad?  Well, it wasn’t Apple!

Many geeks will claim it was Star Trek.  After all, the flip-top cell phone is pretty much directly from their Communicator,  and they have also had the PADD (Personal Access Display Device; never actually referred to that in the show) going all the way back to the original show.  I would submit, though, that those were PalmPilot and stylus-based tablet computer inspirations, typically vertical business/military applications rather than general purpose consumer/media devices (although such would surely have existed as well).

In terms of something that we recognize completely as an iPad-class device, though, consider these panels from the Legion of Super-Heroes showing consumer devices intended for reading, writing, and media consumption, dating back to 1984:

Rokk Krinn using a device as a story book, with pre-loaded content.  From Legends of the DC Universe 80-Page Giant #2 (2000).	A space shuttle passenger reading from a device, almost exactly iPad size and shape.  Possible pre-loaded content, possibly dynamic.  From Legion of Super-Heroes v4 #0 (1994).	R.J. Brande using a device as a sketchpad, with a stylus for pen-like actions.  From Legion of Super-Heroes v4 #0 (1994).
Colossal Boy with a newspaper-reading device.  The new content is loaded dynamically.  From Legion of Super-Heroes v3 #1 (1984).

Missing from these images, unfortunately (because I didn’t have an appropriate issue handy to scan from; I’ll get one eventually), is a version from the late-80s/early-90s version of the Legion.  In these stories, the McCauley Omnicom was ubiquitous: everyone had one, and everyone used them, for everything from portable computing to PDA tasks to online diaries to media consumption, pretty much exactly what the iPad is destined to be used for (especially a couple generations down the lilne).  In particular, this Legion series often featured diary pages and the like as background material, presented as displayed on an Omnicom.  And thus not just did Legion reader see the character interacting with the devices, they were directly shown an example of the device in actual use.  Needless to say, Legion readers from that era see an iPad and know exactly what the expected uses of it should be.

Did the Legion actually create the concept?  Oh, gods no.  You can be sure that diligent research would probably turn up science fiction stories dating back to the 1930s which reference hand-held newspaper readers and the like.  But what the Legion (and Star Trek) did do was to clearly visualize both the form factor and the uses of both stylus-based PDAs and multi-touch tablets well in advance of actual devices being viable.

Will I Buy an iPad?

Almost certainly.  I’m planning to for my birthday in late August, which will give time for a software update or two to come out, new app concepts to some out, and hardware add-ons to be released (such as the mysteriously absent video conferencing webcam).

You see, I travel quite a bit for pleasure or what I call “professional obligation” — not career-related trips, but ones where I have duties such a teaching dance workshops or being an organizational delegate.  On these trips, I want to stay connected to my e-mail and the web and social networking sites, and I want to consume media like music and video.  If I had the capability available, I would edit web pages and do graphic design work, but those are a tiny fraction of what I use a computer for while travelling.  (I did once create an event poster wholesale on a plane trip, but that was an exception.)

I used to have a Mac laptop I could use for this, both one from work (in a past job) and one of my own.  The latter one, I gave to my ex when we split, so that he would have a computer.  Lugging the laptop around was significant added weight on trips: laptop, charger, mouse (because I despise use trackpads for more than a couple minutes), and assorted cables.

After that, looking for other, lighter/better solutions, I bought a Nokia N800.  It was a nifty little device, but I found that I needed an external keyboard to use it efficiently, and the screen was just too small for most of my needs.  I could use it, but it wasn’t especially great.

I then bought an Asus Aspire One netbook.  Now I was back in laptop domain, with a large enough screen and a keyboard and such to run a browser and an e-mail program.  On the other hand, it is a Linux box, and you have to use arcane UNIX-style terminal commands to install any software at all.  I found some sites with step-by-step details to get me running Firefox and Thunderbird instead of the default apps, but I haven’t taken the time to relearn UNIX commands enough to generalize those steps to add other apps.  And I have had to completely reinstall the OS at least twice, meaning I’ve had to go back (find online again) through all those steps again and again.  It has all the joys of a hacker device, which is to say all sorts of pain for someone who just wants to be online and consuming media!

I’ve also got an iPhone.  This has the advantages of being an Apple device and thus both synching very well with my main system and having software which is familiar in how it works.  Make no mistake: these are massive plusses.  My e-mails, my calendars, my contacts: they are just there on both systems.  The screen isn’t very large, of course, and there’s no opportunity to do web page editing, document editing, or graphic design, and of course the lack of multi-tasking restricts some switching between mail and web, but the convenience of being able to do things like check my e-mail when in line at the grocery store are major things that just weren’t possible before with other devices.

So where will the iPad be viable for me?  Why, just where Steve Jobs said it would be.  I probably won’t use it waiting in line at the store, or to “Bump” my contacts to someone at the bar.  And I won’t use it to design an event poster.  But when I’m in a static location — the couch, the kitchen table, the hotel room or airplane seat — I’ll now be able to read mail and browse the web and watch video without needing to deal with a keyboard or needing to sit at my work desk, and without needing to squint at a tiny screen.  Basically, all the things that I can sort of do on the iPhone (or the N800), I can now do more effectively, and with a system I can manipulate in a familiar, comfortable, and easy manner (without the hardware getting in the way).  For 95% of what I need to do when I’m not at my work desk, the iPad will be a superb option.

(And you know, I probably won’t ever we able to do native Photoshop file edits like I can on a desktop keyboard/mouse system, but I’ll bet we’ll see WYSIWYG web page editing system that I can use for some of those tasks in a matter of months.)
 

What Were They Thinking? — “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

On my last trip to Washington DC, the hotel I stayed featured this “Green Natura” product, which referred to itself as “Waste Reducing Exfoliating Body Cleanser” — which is to say, soap with some gritty stuff in it.  Nothing special there.

What was interesting, though, was the text on the back of the box:

This innovative ergonomically shaped “waste reducing” soap has been designed to eliminate the unused center of traditional soap bars.  This soap is cruelty free and contains no animal fat or byproducts.  This carton is made from natural recycled packaging printed with soy based inks.

Yes, that’s exactly what it sounds like: a bar of soap with the center removed!

The theory is that as we use the bar of soap, the size dwindles until we get to an small hard-to-use center, which we throw away.  (Well, some people do that.  I usually use the soap all the way down to the chips.)

In practical terms, though, what you get with Green Natura is this second image.  You start with a thin ring of soap and you use it for a couple days, and then the (inherently fragile) ring breaks, leaving you with two or more pieces shaped very inconvenient for use.  Which you… throw away.

In other words, by removing the 25% of the soap that many people throw away after a couple weeks of use (but which makes the bar able to be used in the first place), this “waste reducing soap” encourages you to throw away as much as 75% of the soap they do give you after just a couple days!

I’m not the only person to make this observation, though: here and here and here.

Taking this one level further, though, want to bet that in removing that center 25% of the soap, they don’t remove 25% of the cost, and actually charge you more for the privilege of wasting more?  Looks like you buy this as National Park gift shops at $5 for a 5-pack, but I cannot find it for sale in other places, including on Amazon.  It’s hard to evaluate the relative costs as a result.

So far as I’ve been able to find, there is no website for the company and its soaps.

(Now, I’ll grant that hotels have a special problem here, where guests often only use a bar of soap once, especially if they are only staying one night, which does result in significant waste.  Those little butter pats like Cashmere Bouquet aren’t suitable for an upscale property, so I can see that there would be an attraction to something like this which has inherently less waste.  But for the guest who is at all conscious of what he or she is using, it still ends up looking royally stupid.)
 

Flash! Aaahh! Destroyer of the Universe!

I’m a big fan of tabbed browsing when using a web browser.  I tend to launch tabs for a dozen or more webpages at once — for a weekly calendar I do, currently more than 50 tabs at a shot.  This allows me to go through several pages in a row (I just close one tab and the next shows) without having to constantly pull up a new bookmark.

For a couple years, I used Firefox on Windows, but I increasingly had problems where my entire computer would grind almost to a halt.  Task Manager would show Firefox eating up 99% of the CPU, which would force me to kill it and relaunch.

I eventually switched to Safari on Windows, because I found that it would load a set of tabs sometimes as much as 25% faster.  But I ended up with the same CPU spiking problem.  Sometimes I could painstakingly go through each tab and close it until I cleared whatever the problem process was, but this could take a few minutes and only worked some of the time.

I then switched to Chrome on Windows.  It puts each of its tabs into its own process.  In theory, this allows one process to stall or crash without bringing down the entire browser.  (In practice, though, when Shockwave crashes, it crashes across the browser, on all tabs.  But on the up side, I can reload each of those tabs and it will relaunch.)  I still had the CPU spiking, and while I could then narrow it to a single tab’s process, I still couldn’t identify which tab that was or kill just the one tab; killing the tab from the task manager would kill the entire browser.  But on the plus side, Chrome will remember what tabs were open when you quit (or crashed) and will generally reopen them on next launch, so recovery was that much easier.

I’ve also had some of the same problems on my Macintosh, with Safari.  Not as bad and not as often, but still now and then.

By now, I knew what the problem child was: Adobe Flash.  For whatever reason, seemingly at random, a Flash process will go bonkers and eat up all my CPU.  I don’t know if it’s truly random or something I could predict if I knew more about Flash, but it doesn’t really matter.  The take-away is “Flash has problems.”

This is the core of why Flash is not enabled/permitted on the iPhone and the iPad.  It is simply known to cause problems.  Some reports say Flash issues cause like 75% of browser crashes.  I note that even without it, Mobile Safari on my iPhone crashes now and then (as often as a couple times a day, depending on usage), usually when I’m trying to close a page.  I can certainly picture adding Flash into that would increase the likelihood of those issues.

Fortunately, there is a solution!  Block Flash!

Well, no, preventing all Flash on your computer is a stupid solution, a scorched Earth method.  So much of the web has components in Flash that there are things you simply miss out on, as any iPhone user can tell you.  (But on the other hand, much of it is stuff you don’t really need.  One social networking site I’m on uses Flash to make a bit of text pulse when you’ve got a new message.  Talk about something that doesn’t need Flash!  Not to mention all those website intro pages!  And the flashing noisy ads!)

So instead of outright blocking Flash, we can put up a gate.  This prevents Flash from loading when you open a page, but it also gives you the opportunity to load selected Flash elements, such as to view an embedded video or to show the site’s navigation bar (grrrr).  You end up with a far less cluttered page view as a side effect.

On Chrome for Windows, I use FlashBlock.  Firefox users also have Flashblock.

On Safari for Mac, I use ClickToFlash.

My browser CPU spikes have all but gone away (and when they happen, it’s because I’ve disabled the extension!), and my browser crashes and needs to kill/relaunch the browser have dropped by 90%.  (I now have to relaunch a couple times a week, rather than several time a day.) That’s a massive improvement.

Highly, highly recommended!  Use Flash at your leisure, not at theirs.

FlashBlock is not a perfect solution, though.  I’ve found that some of the Apple movie trailer pages use an embedded Flash player (rather than QuickTime, why?) which won’t play when I click it, so I have to disable the extension, reload the page, and then re-enable the extension.  Similarly, YouTube recently made a change which presents a message falsely telling you to upgrade your version of Flash, but again, what you need to do is disable/reload/enable.  I’m hoping that either these sites or the FlashBlock extension maker will be able to repair these issues.  (I haven’t hit them with ClickToFlash, so maybe there’s hope.)

(With apologies to Queen.)

(Kudos to Daring Fireball for a lot of useful thought on this subject.)

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Updated on March 22, 2010

Check out this Foxtrot strip.  Great gag!

What’s Up with Charge Cards at Lowe’s?

Every time I use my Lowe’s card, I swipe it through their little card scanner, and then I have to hand it to the clerk, who hand-enters the last four digits of the card into the system.

No other store I frequent seems to do this.  Some request my ID when I use a credit or debit card, but tha’s not what’s going on here.  Damned if I can figure out what is going on, though.

Sometimes they ask for my zip code, although that’s seemingly not related to the card usage but rather to track buying patterns and the like.  I’ll sometimes make up a zip code on the spot (like “49322”, which I see is in Mississippi), just to fuck with their data rather than feed them valid info.  (With something like 30,000 people in my zip code, that’s about the least interesting piece of “personal information” that they could ask for, so I give them fake ones just because I can, not to hide from them.)

I asked the clerk the last time I was there and he made some noise about the process being to verify that it was the right card.  Which would lead to the conclusion that the Lowe’s card scanning system so easy to spoof or so insecure that the store doesn’t trust it.

Another possibility is that the store serves a generally lower income (and more heavily black, although I don’t think racism is really a factor here) set of neighborhoods.  Some of the gas pumps in the area require entering the card holder’s zip code, presumably as a form of protection against stolen cards (if you don’t know the billing zip, it’s probably not your card), while the same company in more affluent or less urban areas (ones with perceived less incidence of crime) don’t require that.  So maybe this is a version of the same thing: they are checking that the card is actually intact, and maybe the clerk is even reading the name on the card while entering the digits, to do some base verification of card holder gender (when you can tell that from the name, of course).  Because any other fragment of needed info should be pulled off via the scanner.
 

Apple Tablet Predictions: After the Announcement

Okay, the Apple iPad has been announced. How did my predictions fare?

• Screen of 10–11" — big enough for reading or viewing video, but not any bigger than a regular sized magazine.
  — I hoped for a larger screen, more toward 10.5"
• Very minimal hardware interface, just an on button and a headphone jack.  No power jack, no USB ports, nothing much to mar the feel of it being an encapsulated item.  Definitely no battery access.
  — Nailed this, but it’s easy to nail: look at the iPhone and extrapolate.  I failed to note the volume buttons from the iPhone, but they were obvious as items to include.
• Bluetooth and WiFi.  Duh.
  — Duh, but correct.  3G is also an option, for extra cost and extra monthly fee.  Hmm, I wonder if the reason AT&T hasn’t yet turned on tethering is that it was aimed at this device, so you can create a mini-WiFi zone with your iPhone and use its 3G.  That would be cool.
• Runs a variant of iPhone OS that is geared for the larger screen but still works with the same UI mechanisms familiar to iPhone users.
  — Yup.
• Apps for the tablet can be obtained from a version of the AppStore.
  — Remains to be seen just how this will work.  I expect the iPad and the iPhone will each connect top the AppStore, and will only see content appropriate to their hardware.
• Existing iPhone apps will work on the tablet, in iPhone sized windows.
  — Yup.
• Has all the features of an iPhone: multi-touch, accelerometer, etc.
  — Yup.

And then some more interesting predictions:

• Induction charging and synching.  As I said, no power jack.
  — Darn.  But understandable: if the existing power/synch attachment hardware is working fine, no need to reinvent the wheel.
• A netbook-type base which provides the induction charger base and a MacBook keyboard, a la the Lenovo IdeaPad U1 Hybrid.  Tablet body can be inserted into the docking base in each of the four directions (but not backwards!).
  — Sort of yup, although I was expecting something quite a bit more like a laptop base than the keyboard dock they have announced.  But I note that the third-party company could provide exactly what I was anticipating, which would also serve as a protective cover.
• When docked, can switch from the iPhone-style UI to a Mac OS X-style UI.
  — Darn.  Partially defused due to the creation of iWork for the iPad, but there are certainly major things you won’t be able to do without a full OS.  In particular, no mouse (which is better than finger pointing for some things).
• The docking base has additional solid-state memory, plus the various ports and such.  Comes with iWork and iLife software pre-installed, and other apps are available via the cloud.
  — Nope for the additional memory, but that was tied into the OS X item above.  Yup on iWork, nope on iLife (although it will be interesting to see if a Brushes app makes its way into the next desktop version of either suite, targeting Adobe apps as well as Microsoft).
• Has two cameras: decent quality video/still camera on the back (a la iPhone 3GS) and webcam on the front.
  — Darn, and a major puzzling lapse.  Presumably some third-party will make a rotating camera that plugs in to the headphone jack to fill this niche.

Again, this, I would so buy.  Will buy.  It will make a nice birthday present to myself in seven months, don’t you think?  Especially after reviews are in and maybe some OS patches are done to correct early problems.

I’m pleasantly surprised by the pricing structure.  Some will still complain that it’s too expensive, but they are mostly serial complainers ("free" would probably still be too expensive) or Apple haters (anything Apple producers is over-priced because Steve Jobs is a money-grubbing bastard).
 

Apple Tablet Predictions

Assuming that an tablet-like thing is actually announced on January 27, of course.  (And what would the reaction be if one were not?  Apple would need to be announcing some other fantabulous game-changing device instead, just to distract people from what they didn’t announce.)

So given the idea of something tablet-y being announced, what will it be like?

I think people are putting a lot more stock in the idea of it being a Kindle competitor than it’s worth.  I think that eBooks will be a secondary focus, but not a top tier one.  (Think of the iPhone announcement, where they touted Phone, Web, and iPod as the top items.  Stuff like texting and calendar and e-mail were second tier, important and even the things that really interested some people, but not the primary focus.

I think a lot of people are fascinated by the form factor idea of the walk-around tablet without much consideration of how that will actually be used.  If you’ve got an iPhone and you’ve got a desktop or laptop system, do you need a tablet?  The answer is “No… except when you do need one.”  This is what people are missing, in my opinion: when do you need a tablet (vs. those other devices) and what do you do with it when you don’t need it.

So here are some predictions, none of them surprising:

• Screen of 10–11" — big enough for reading or viewing video, but not any bigger than a regular sized magazine.
• Very minimal hardware interface, just an on button and a headphone jack.  No power jack, no USB ports, nothing much to mar the feel of it being an encapsulated item.  Definitely no battery access.
• Bluetooth and WiFi.  Duh
• Runs a variant of iPhone OS that is geared for the larger screen but still works with the same UI mechanisms familiar to iPhone users.
• Apps for the tablet can be obtained from a version of the AppStore.
• Existing iPhone apps will work on the tablet, in iPhone sized windows.
• Has all the features of an iPhone: multi-touch, accelerometer, etc.
• OLED screen

And then some more interesting predictions:

• Induction charging and synching.  As I said, no power jack.
• A netbook-type base which provides the induction charger base and a MacBook keyboard, a la the Lenovo IdeaPad U1 Hybrid.  Tablet body can be inserted into the docking base in each of the four directions (but not backwards!).
• When docked, can switch from the iPhone-style UI to a Mac OS X-style UI.
• The docking base has additional solid-state memory, plus the various ports and such.  Comes with iWork and iLife software pre-installed, and other apps are available via the cloud.
• Has two cameras: decent quality video/still camera on the back (a la iPhone 3GS) and webcam on the front.

In other words, two questions answered:

• When do you need it?  When the walk-around nature of the iPhone isn’t enough.  For reading, for browsing the web better, for watching video larger, for apps that haven’t been invented yet which take advantage of the tablet nature.
• What do you do with it when you you don’t need a tablet?  You turn it into something you do need (if you need one), a netbook/laptop.  Something that you can write on, edit photos with, do web designs with, etc. — all the things that the iPhone isn’t really geared for.

This, I would so buy.

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Updated on January 19, 2010

Updated on March 1, 2010
 

Phone Call of the Day

A few minutes ago, I was in the middle of a 2-person meeting at work, when the office phone rang, with no caller ID identified (which just means it came from an external location, I think).  Excusing myself, I answered the phone, to hear an automated voice.  (“Oy,” I thought.  “The telemarketers have tracked me to work!”)

No, it was a collect call from King County Jail!  They had a recording of the person’s name (someone male), garbled and unintelligible so I had no idea what the name actually was (although maybe if I knew the guy’s voice and name, I could have understood what was said), and then a request for me to accept the phone charges or not.

Two user experience issues with this:

• No idea what the cost of accepting the call was
  
• No way to replay the person’s name if I didn't catch it the first time around (and since I was a bit shocked to get a call from the Jail, I wasn’t listening all that closely)

So I looked at the phone for a few seconds, and hung up.   Then quickly called about the only person I could think of outside of work who would have and would call my work number, just to be sure he wasn’t in jail for some reason.   (He wasn’t.)

Hope it was (a) a wrong number rather than someone I know who was depending on me, and (b) the inmate isn’t limited to the stereotype single attempt to call someone and I blew it for him.   There hasn’t been a second call, so who knows?

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Updated on January 21, 2010
 

Stupid, Stupid Ads! — When is Christmas?

“Stupid, Stupid Ads!” dissects ads that try to do something underhanded or just plain stupid.

On the way home from work tonight, I heard an ad for the latest promotion from Sleep Country USA, a Pacific Northwest mattress store.  The ad proclaimed how the savings were almost like Christmas… in July.  And the savings only last until Monday!

Um, okay, but it’s not July.  It’s August.  Shouldn't the promotion have ended last weekend, when the ads wouldn’t sound, um, stupid?

To add to the poor implementation on their part, when I accessed the website, I found the attached image.  And clicked on the arrow… which did nothing.  Only clicking on the linked text actually went to the promotion page.  (You may also note that the box below the ad is a few pixels narrower than the ad.  Again: poor implementation.)

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Updated on December 18, 2009

Okay, admittedly the web ad does show an August ending date, but the radio ad didn’t.  And that still doesn't excuse an ad that stresses July running in August.

What Were They Thinking? — Which Way is Up? Which Way is On?

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

In March, I stayed at a Days Inn in Nashville.  The light switches in the room were all of a design like the above diagram: about the same size as a standard light switch, but horizontal, with no projecting toggle, just a divot divider down the center, and very pale text on the switch itself.  (Which is technically just like on a normal toggle switch: indecipherable unless you looked closely at it to read the labels.)

These switches caused me no end of frustration.  After about 24 hours, I finally realized that they were at least all consistent: when you can into a room or were facing the bathroom mirror, “On” was away from you, in the “going in” direction.  If you pressed the away side, the light turned on (or stayed on), and if you pushed the toward side, the light turned or stayed off.

Of course, we’ve all encountered rooms with two light switches — or just ones installed upside down — so that such consistency is pretty meaningless.  The apparent state cannot be trusted because it may be “wrong”; the only true way to tell the state of the switch is by the state of the light.  To turn on or off a light, you put your hand on the switch, feel for the current state, and flip the switch in the opposite direction.  (If the bulb is burned out, tough luck!)

With these switches, while there is a mapping to the real world, there is no indication of current state from the switch at all (whether or not that matches the state of the light).  (Since the state is binary — on or off — we don’t need consistency of indication, just indication at all.)  And thus the typical behavior with these switches is not to change the direction based on the light’s state, but to fumble and push several times until the desired state is achieved; inefficient.  This problem is abetted by the inobviousness of the switch: you can’t just put your hand in the area and find it with tactile ease, but instead you have to sense where the slight indentation of the horizontal switch is and then identify how to fit your finger onto the switch before you can move to the on/off part of the task.

Undoubtedly, this was a case of someone wanting to get a patent of their own, which they hug and squeeze and call George.  It’s not of much value beyond that.

To make matters worse, this room was fitted with a panel next to the bed, with five of these switches on it (in vertical mode rather than horizontal), rigged to control the various lights in the room. Presumably, this was intended so that the person in bed could turn on lights before getting up.  But none of the switches were labeled, and they were arranged in a grid, so the only way to tell what went with which light was to try them all out and memorize.  (Like that’s going to happen when staying in the room for one or two nights?)  But wait, that’s not all: one of the switches was apparently not hooked up to anything!

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Updated on July 9, 2004

Updated on January 7, 2010
 

What Were They Thinking? — That’s Why They Offer Wake-Up Calls

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

In February, I went to Houston for the LUEY event weekend.  The hotel I stayed in (Holiday Inn Select / Greenway Plaza — now the Crowne Plaza / Houston River Oaks) had this alarm clock.  The manufacturer was something like Empire or Elite; wish I could remember just what so I could avoid them forever more.

The blurry picture here doesn’t do this device justice.  We’ve probably all seen clocks which have minor control quirks, especially never knowing which dial is volume and which sets the station until you move one (since no one ever checks the hard-to-read label beforehand), or the way you have to closely read the labels next to the dots to be sure which indicates the alarm is on and which indicates AM/PM.

No, this clock goes beyond the pale in three ways:

1. The tiny snooze button.  Think about it: if you are going to use the clock as an alarm clock, what is the most important thing next to the time display?  The snooze button.  This should be big and centrally placed, ensuring (a) that you hit it easily in your jarred-awake, groggy, no-glasses-on state and (b) that you don’t accidentally hit buttons which turn the alarm off or change the time while you flail around for the snooze button.  Which are exactly (a) what I didn’t do and (b) what I did do.
    
2. The button for setting the alarm.  This clock, like many, requires you to push an extra button when setting the alarm, which prevents you from accidentally hitting a button and changing your alarm and thus causing you to be late for a meeting.  (This one didn’t, however, require pushing a second button to set the regular time, so you could easily bump things and change the current time, making you wake up an hour or two too early!)  Since most people are right handed, they will hold the alarm set button with their left hand, and use their right hand to do the major manipulation of the hour and minute buttons.  But here, the hour and minute buttons are to the left of the alarm set button, which means that most people have to cross their right hand over their left to do the setting.  But wait, that’s not all!  With the alarm set button in the middle, the hands crossed, and the buttons above the time display, your hands are right in front of the time display, so you can’t see the alarm time as you try to set it!
    
3. The radio dial.  Lest you think that the design stupidity ends with the above minor things, it’s really too bad you can’t clearly see the radio dial in the photo above… because it is backwards!  No, really: while every other dial in the (Western) world has the smaller station numbers on the the left on of the dial, here the smaller station numbers are on the right end, and the larger ones are on the left, so the interaction is the reverse of what any user (in Houston) will want.  Whose idiot idea was that?

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Updated on July 12, 2004

Updated on January 10, 2010

Boy did I have typos in the original post!

What Were They Thinking? — Pick a Card, Any Card

I used a Bank of America ATM machine today and was struck by how bad the user interface was.

First Question: What is the most common thing you do at the ATM?  That’s right: you get money.  You make a withdrawal.  So after you insert your card and enter your PIN, you are presented with a list of 8 or 10 different activities you can do, and where is the “Withdraw Cash” item?  In the upper left, as the first item in the list, so it’s very easy to find?  Hell no!  Bank of America sticks it in the middle of the right hand column, the hardest place for you to find it!

Second Question: What do you want to do after you get your money?  That’s right: you want to leave.  You want to grab the money and go to the bar, go meet your date, go do Christmas shopping.  What you don’t want to do is answer more questions.  No, I don’t want another transaction, just give me the damn card back!

So Bank of America designed their ATMs to make it hard for you to find the action you want, frustrating to conclude your action, and prone to leaving your card in the machine and your account wide open.  (After all, they gave you the money, so you may take it and leave, not realizing that you haven’t got your card back yet.)  Sure, use their ATM enough times and you will learn where everything is, but hey, rearrange the furniture at random enough times and you’ll learn not to walk around with the lights off, too.

Compare to the Wells Fargo ATMs.  They put the withdrawal item in the upper left, the first item that you read.  And when you make the withdrawal, they first pop your card out, forcing you to take it (and hopefully put it in your wallet) before they give you your money.  The downside to this is that it forces you into a particular workflow — always do any cash withdrawal last — but this isn’t an especially painful one (since you’ll typically be checking balances and transferring money and making deposits before taking money out anyway), and for the most common use of the system, it is very efficient.

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Updated on July 9, 2004

Remixed into Weblog

Updated on September 9, 2010

Some ATMs have improved over the years.  Most of the Chase ATMs don’t hold onto your card at all; you insert it and then remove it, so it never leaves your hand.  They don’t limit you to doing a cash withdrawal only at the end of the process, but require a new entry of the PIN to go and do another action; while this can be annoying at times, the trade off is worth it, since you can do other activities after, or you can just leave without leaving your account open for the next person in line to loot.

However, the Withdrawal button is buried in the right-hand column of actions.  (I think; must verify.)