September 27, 2002
Installing Jaguar
by Brian L. Dear
I finally broke down about 10 days ago and placed an order on Apple's online store page for Jaguar, the new MacOS X 10.2 release. The user experience on Apple's online store, by the way, is awful. At least, it always is for me. Why? Because the site is slower than snails. And most of the Apple branding and site navigation -- the stuff that lets you know "you're still with us" and lets you know where you are, is gone. Now, I can understand why you'd want to do that -- when the customer is at the point of purchase, reduce the OFD (opportunity for distraction) as much as possible and get them to focus and commit to submitting the order, credit card number and all. Fine. But when the customer is past that point, uh, get them back into reality, huh? For instance, go check on a pending order in the Apple store. Can you say, "hastily thrown together pages"? I knew you could.
After a few days I was curious about what the status of my Jaguar order was. So I went into the Apple site, checked on the order status, and one of those hastily thrown together pages said my order was "being reviewed". By whom? For what? And why? Who knows. "Being reviewed." Okay. Well, hurry up and review my order.
Next day, I check. Status is still: "being reviewed."
Another day passes. Then another. I check again. "Being reviewed." I sense a pattern. I call 1-800-MY-APPLE. "Why does my order say "being reviewed?"
The perky Apple rep says, "Hmm, it looks like your order is held up by FedEx because they can't ship to a P.O. Box."
"I had no idea you were shipping FedEx. The site could have told me that. Instead of saying, 'being reviewed'." It was a Sunday. I wanted to install Jaguar that weekend, so I would have time to mess around with it. I told the Apple rep, look, cancel the order, I'll go to the local Apple store and buy it. So he cancelled it.
I went to the Apple store (note to Fashion Valley San Diego Apple Store manager: tell your employees that customers come first, not trainee cashiers at the point of purchase --- you don't make customers stand around and wait while you chat with each other about how take orders) and bought Jaguar.
I came home. I installed it. It took a long time to install, however it did boot up.
First thing I notice, Steve Jobs has installed apps in my Dock. I did not choose to put them there. Jobs did. This is not the way to get me to notice new cutesy apps like iCal and iChat. So I removed them. It's not "personal computing" when the vendor depersonalizes/decustomizes your setup. Jobs, you know this. Cmon.
Second thing I notice, the fonts and window size of my Terminal app are different. They're worse. Why'd it change!? So I had to figure out how to reset it back the way I had it set before, Jobs: the word's called "preferences," as in mine, not yours. Deal with it.
Third thing I notice, my PATH has been changed, and the ~/bin path is GONE from my PATH environment variable, so none of my scripts "just worked" anymore.
Fourth thing I noticed, Calculator's changed -- for the better it appears. "Paper tape" -- heh.
Fifth -- my "computer" icon in Finder now looks like an iMac "lamp". I liked the old one. These changes remind me so much of the NeXTSTEP 3.0 to 3.1 to 3.2 to 3.3 saga from ages past.
I wasn't aware the DevKit was included. That was a nice surprise.
A Momentary Scare
Another observation having been using 10.2 then 10.2.1 for a few days:
I was shocked, really shocked, when I went to print a document, and a dialog box came up and said something along the lines of, "Duh, printer? You don't have a printer. I can't find a printer. Guess ya haven't set one up."
Of course I have one set up. Works fine. Why do I have to set it up again!?
The printing stuff in MacOS X is embarassingly bad. Overly techie, user-hostile, and antithetical to everything Apple stands for, esp. in light of the "Switch" campaign. After a moment of panic (does 10.2 even "know" what a printer is? does it have drivers? am I screwed?) I clicked on some buttons, scanned through the options, and *guessed* that "IP Printing" (how jargony and user-unfriendly can you get!? "IP printing!?") meant printers connected via a network. Luckily, I was able to figure out how to restore my HP Laserjet 4000N and everything's fine. But less-experienced users? I can only imagine their frustration.
I'm envisioning Steve Jobs running around saying "Printers are so 90s! Hell, they're so 1984! We did laser printers already! Get over it! Think digital! Your Mac is your digital hub, dude! There's no place for PAPER in your digital life! Need to send someone a document! E it, don't print it! Save a tree! Printers? Schminters!"
Jobs: you gotta remember there's a Hierarchy of Needs with users. And PRINTING comes before ICAL and other cutesy toys for most people, I bet. Grumble.
September 23, 2002
The Ultimate Shopping Cart?
by Brian L. Dear
I came across this image the other day and it brought back some memories of online shopping carts and real shopping carts.
When I joined MP3.com in early 1999, the site had no shopping cart, even though it did e-commerce and even though it made perfect sense for there to be a shopping cart. Nobody had had time yet to build one! So users who wished to order custom-burned CDs by MP3.com artists could go ahead and order them, but they had to place separate orders for each CD! That meant separate name, address, city, state, zip, credit card info, the works, for each item! Suffice to say, this was not user-friendly (nor the best way to make money).
So we needed to build a shopping cart pronto. Only one gotcha -- there was no customer database. Minor detail, right? Not if you expect millions of users to be visiting and registering your site. You kinda want to build the database right, and build it so it can scale well, and be adaptible to future enhancements. So we had to build that and a complete e-commerce system including credit-card authorization. And the goal was to launch it all in 60 days.
In a fit of madness, I decided to drive over to the nearby Ralph's grocery store, and went in and found the store manager.
"Hi, I'm a manager over at an Internet startup in town, you may have heard of it, MP3.com?"
"Uh, huh." He looked at me like I was some kind of kook. I handed him by business card.
"We're working on a project to build an electronic shopping cart so people can buy CDs online easily and quickly. I would like to know if I could borrow one of your Ralphs shopping carts for a while to take back to work as a daily reminder to everyone what our focus should be right now."
He looked at me funny, smiled, did a one-minute manager decision, and said, "Sure, go ahead. Just take one out of the parking lot."
And that was that. So I went out to the parking lot, and very nonchalantly picked up one of these very heavy steel shopping carts and loaded it into my Izusu and drove back to the office. Got some funny looks from fellow MP3 co-workers when I rolled this squeaky metal thing through the hallways. Why, it even had a bad front wheel that wiggled uselessly as I pushed the thing forward (carefully avoiding the freshly-painted walls as it veered to the left or right --- one thing this cart did not want to do was head straight-ahead).
Once in my office I looked at the cart and realized, hmmm, wouldn't it be interesting if this cart had a flat-panel display on it.... or at least a mockup of one... an hour later, I snapped this picture. The front photo showed the UI for the MP3.com shopping cart web page, and of course, the message on that page said, "You currently have no items in your shopping cart."
Two or three months later, the electronic shopping cart went live, our revenue jumped as people could start buying more than one item at a time (duh), and I brought the cart back to the store. Just dropped it off in the parking lot, leaving the MP3.com "screens" in the cart's advert-frames. I always wondered what the patron thought who subsequently picked that cart...
iTunes
by Brian L. Dear
I've been ripping my CDs lately, using iTunes in MacOS X. iTunes is generally a good and useful program but it has a few correctable annoyances that must be fixed. I really hope the Apple team working on it will address the following issues.
First, reasons to love it. I love software that lets me discover things. In the case of iTunes, it has let me re-discover my music collection, well, at least the CD portion of it (I haven't yet figured out exactly how I'm going to get my 800 LPs digitized... we need smart, net-enabled turntables connected to LPDB(tm)!).
This is only the second (and hopefully THE LAST) time I have fed my CD collection into the CD-drive of my computer. The first time was with My.MP3.com's Beam-it Software back in the wild-west days of early 2000, before the RIAA made me re-discover why I hate record companies. My collection still sits in my My.MP3.com account, and most of it is "locked" -- thanks to lawyers and two hundred million in litigation. So here it is two-and-a-half years later, and I've fed my CD collection back in -- well, I still have a bit to go, but I'm almost done.
iTunes now manages nine thousand (9000) songs from my CD collection -- that's 9000 and counting. Or, 37 gig and counting. I'm sure there are others out there with hundreds of gigs and perhaps some out there with a terabyte or two (we need a better word than tera -- one syllable too long -- my suggestion: "tug", as in "dude, I've got eighty tugs of space, we ought to be able to rip the whole original Star Trek DVD series and have room for the movies as well!"). Anyways, I reached the 37 gig level after learning to modify my behaviors to accomodate a very annoying iTunes. This is not user-friendly software for people building big CD collections. It should be! It can be! I'm sure it will be! But I didn't wanna wait -- so I forged ahead into the world of iTunes 3.0 and found some issues.
Why it's exasperating:
iTunes does several things I find absolutely
exasperating.
- iTunes is "front-happy".
It makes itself the "bring-to-front" application all on its own against my wishes every time I feed a CD into the drive and it starts ripping it. This is bad, bad, bad, in my opinion. When you have 800 CDs in your collection, you quickly make the CD-ripping task a secondary priority -- something you want done in the background. Note that BACKGROUND does not mean HIDE. Does not mean MINIMIZE. To hide or minimize the app because it's jumpy, is making me modify MY behavior instead of having a way (through preferences) to modify ITUNES's behavior. If iTunes' main window is visible on the desktop, but not the front app, trust the user: don't suddenly put the window in front unless the user has specified this is the way it should be, thru Preferences.
I have my iTunes preferences set such that it is supposed to immediately start ripping the second it realizes I've just put an audio CD in the drive. That's great. It does that most of the time (more on that comment in a moment). Problem is, unless I have iTunes minimized in the Dock, it jumps out in front upon commencing a rip session -- and, as Murphy's Law would have it, this always occurs just while I'm typing in a text editor, or in a Terminal ssh session, or doing some other typing work. Suddenly my typed characters are being intercepted by iTunes instead of the app I was working in. And this does bad things to iTunes. It makes its list jump around, mouse icon go busy, and other stuff. Sometimes if you're not careful you can wind up deleting or changing something in iTunes before you've noticed what's just happened. This is an absurdly bad user experience. The user is right. iTunes' behavior is wrong. But wait. It gets worse.
- More on misbehavior while ripping.
If you happen to be listening to something in iTunes (I now have some 9000 songs online from my collection, so it's hard not to want to browse my collection and listen to stuff, or create Smart Playlists which are great), and you insert an audio CD for ripping, you'd think iTunes couldn't misbehave as it's already the front app window on the desktop. But nooooo.... it has to jump out of whatever pane or mode you're in in ITunes and jump to the "look ma, I'm ripping a CD!" page, showing the tracklist of the CD it's starting to rip. AAAAGGHH. Apple: this is very very bad.
[Recommendation] Apple, you need to add a preference setting to [ ] Keep iTunes app in the background when a ripping operation begins. Furthermore, it should not kick you out of the mode you're in if you're actively doing something else in iTunes. This is supremely annoying. Fix it.
- Dialog Box Design Inconsistency
Speaking of Smart Playlists: Apple, you have a design inconsistency that needs addressing on the Smart Playlist dialog box. Create a new Smart Playlist. Go to the Advanced tab. Type something in for the first search criteria. See the screenshot below for what this dialog looks like. (I'll get to that highlighted minus button in a moment.)
Now press the "+" button to create more search criteria. Presto! You get a second line of search criteria to specify. That's great! Now, type in your second criteria and press OK. Right? Well, that's what I did. See the image below for an example of an expanded Advanced dialog:
I can't believe I'm the only user who missed the sneaking insertion of that little pulldown menu at the upper left (see highlight). It took a long while before I found out why my Smart Playlists were never selecting the songs I wanted: I'd created a Smart Playlist where the first criteria was "Artist name matches 'Guided by Voices'" and a second criteria where the "Artist name matches 'Robert Pollard'". I called this Smart Playlist "Guided by Pollard." But I noticed it never showed Robert Pollard's CDs. Only Guided by Voices'. I'd never noticed the change in the upper left part of the dialog until someone pointed it out to me that that new pulldown was there.
I consider this a design inconsistency because the way things are normally done in Aqua dialogs is to disable and gray out those capabilities which are not usable at the time. Notice how in the first image above, the minus-sign button is grayed out -- why? Because you only have one line of criteria, and one is the minimum. Fine. So it's grayed out. As it should be.
The dialog pulls a surprise on the user when you click on the "+" button. It modifies the existing dialog box sentence from "Match the following condition:" to "Match all/any of the following conditions". Yikes! From out of nowhere! Is the user expecting this, when the standard is "enable and un-gray-out those UI controls which now make sense and should be usable by the user?" No, the user's not even looking over at the upper-far-left. Why should a user look up there? Why should the user expect such weird behavior? Apple, what did usability testing reveal? Again, I'd be amazed if it was just me who missed that pulldown switcheroo.
I understand that graying out the "any / all" thing causes grammatical hurdles to be overcome with the "Match..." sentence. So deal with the hurdles and do the right thing for the user. The current way is not the right way, in my humble opinion.
- iTunes forgets your preferences
This one is very strange. Every now and then, about every 10th CD that I rip, I find that after I've inserted the CD, and Finder has recognized it as an Audio CD, and it has shown up in the "Sources" column within iTunes --- all this is expected behavior -- it just sits there and the CD doesn't get ripped. Even though I have Preferences set to start ripping the moment I insert an audio CD. And I have it set up to "use the Internet" when necessary, and use CDDB to get titles. And I have it set to eject the disk when the ripping is done. But about every 10th ripped CD, I find that iTunes "forgets" to do these things. I have to manually click on the "import" icon, to fire up the ripping operation. And then I have to manually eject the disk. The weird thing is, I find iTunes seems to "remember" my preferences next time! And so it goes for about 10 more rips, and then sure enough, it forgets. D'oh!
September 20, 2002
NetNewsWire
If you use MacOSX and read blogs, then run, do not walk to Ranchero Software and download the new, post-beta 1.0 release of NetNewsWire Lite. This is a beautiful application: clean, simple, time-saving, convenient. This is how blogs should be read. Great job, Ranchero!September 06, 2002
Thoughts on The WELL
I've been a member of The WeLL conferencing system for, let's just say, a long, long time. Since 1200-bps modems were expensive. Each year, membership has been dropping. Not surprising: there's no marketing or demand-creation to speak of, and I think many on The WeLL are kind of glad there aren't twice or three times (or one hundred times) the members that there are now.One thing I would love to see The WeLL do is add an XML/RSS feed -- updated daily -- that carries summaries of what's new around the WeLL: what topics are most active, where the flame wars are, what some of the more notable people have said recently on the system,etc. This feed could be presented both as a blog readable in browsers, or as an RSS feed readable by, well, stuff that reads RSS like NetNewsWire for MacOS X (a terrific new freware app, by the way!).
I suspect that having such a blog and RSS feed would generate a steady flow of interested parties finding something worthwhile enough to become a member for.