Posts Tagged ‘ software ’

I have a lot of PCs in my house. No, I mean a LOT. As a result of building software, testing, working with PC manufacturing partners, and owning personal computers, I have no fewer than 19 laptops, desktops, and netbooks in my home. Which prompts a number of problems … not least of which...
Read more »

Usability is like cooking: everybody needs the results, anybody can do it reasonably well with a bit of training, and yet it takes a master to produce a gourmet outcome. One of the discount usability movement’s basic tenets is that we need a drastic expansion in the amount of usability work done in the...
Read more »

Hmmm … some bugs to work out yet? That’s why they call it beta, I guess.
Read more »

Chinook school district in southern Saskatchewan just doled out $200K worth of payola to the Business Software Alliance. The problem? Some drafting software that was accidentally copied on to all computers in a lab during an upgrade. The BSA came calling – rather like the RIAA – and demanded more than twice the MSRP...
Read more »

Update: see comments. Zinio is actually being pretty good about this. I’m trying out Zinio, the digital magazine reader. When you download their software for the first time, get a free issue of a magazine. I happened to choose BusinessWeek. But the edition is not this week’s …. it’s June 2008′s. Gee, thanks.
Read more »

It’s hard to imagine, but WordPress is now over 5 years old. A French blogger, Ozh, posted images of WordPress’s admin interface on his blog in December. I just saw it now, but wanted to see the images in a single presentation deck so that you can flip through them and see the differences...
Read more »

A few weeks ago I went searching for a simple, quick image annotation utility. I annotate images and PDFs every day, multiple times a day. And most tools currently in use for it are expensive or user UNfriendly, or both. So I couldn’t have been happier when I found Skitch. Skitch is a dead-simple...
Read more »

Usability is the new motherhood and apple pie: unquestionably good … and almost as hard to find. Everyone agrees that software should be user-friendly. But what does that actually mean? I’ve been architecting a LOT of desktop software in the past few months, and I’ve been revisiting some of my ideas about usability. While...
Read more »

You gotta love this: software for the hotel industry to remotely train workers so they don’t incur travel expenses for off-site training: “The Virtual Classroom gives hotels a low-cost tool (travel expenses are eliminated), for providing advanced or customized training,” said Kelly Gray, Newmarket’s Director of Educational Services. “Web delivery also affords hotels enhanced...
Read more »

I’m working on a usability project for desktop software right now, focusing on “UI strings.” UI strings are the messages that you see in an application … what it tells you. Obviously, the better these are written, structured, and presented, the easier the application, and the better your experience with it. Four things are...
Read more »

So SAP’s in some trouble … Adding fuel to the raging fire on which stock valuations are now burning, SAP (SAP) Co-CEO Henning Kagermann this morning warned in a statement that market developments of the last few weeks have been “dramatic and worrying to many businesses,” which has triggered a “very sudden and unexpected...
Read more »

Have you ever seen DearAdobe.com? It’s a site created by a designer who knows and loves Adobe products … and hates their many flaws. Visitors can add new gripes and vote up existing ones – just for fun, check out the top gripes. Most gripes are about Adobe’s installers (horribly awful), prices (sell-your-organs high),...
Read more »

I just bought the G4010 and am having the exact same problems as this poster on Apple’s support forums … which leads me to believe that the G4010 is not actually Mac compatible, as HP claims it is. 1. If I power-up the scanner while the iMac is running, the mouse pointer freezes, and...
Read more »