Category: Computer technology

RANT! Long statements in instant messages that are broken up

RANT! Long statements in instant messages that are broken up

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A lot of us use instant messaging (IM) in our private and professional lives. It is a convenient and quick way to talk to others without the formality and delay of email. A new jargon has been created to talk in this medium and emoticons are often used to express feelings and emphasis.

You can tell a lot about someone by reading their instant messages. The biggest thing you can tell to see if someone is just plain clueless is if they send you messages like this:

IDontKnowHowToIM: Did you watch the game
IDontKnowHowToIM: this weekend? I thought
IDontKnowHowToIM: it was great and I was
IDontKnowHowToIM: amazed at how well Tom
IDontKnowHowToIM: Brady played he must be
IDontKnowHowToIM: the best player in NFL

What IDontKnowHowToIM meant to type was this:

IDontKnowHowToIM: Did you watch the game this weekend? I thought it was great and I was amazed at how well Tom Brady played he must be the best player in NFL

Having to hit the return key pretty much went away with manual typewriters. In fact, I would venture to say that your keyboard doesn’t have a return key but instead had an enter key in its place. There really isn’t any reason to break up your text manually. Your client surely supports word wrap. You can keep on typing until you get to the end of your logical paragraph!

Most IM clients open up their default window and show only 1 line of text. So fools like IDontKnowHowToIM get to the end of that window and hit return. Then they keep on typing. However, an amazing thing was popularized about 20 years ago – the mouse. Use your mouse to drag that typing window up and before you know it you can see 2, 3, 10, even 100 lines of text. No more one line IM messages!

Here are some examples from Trillian and Yahoo:

Before Trillian:

before t

After dragging in Trillian:

after t

Before in Yahoo Messenger:

before y

After dragging in Yahoo Messenger:

after y

INSTANT MESSENGER USERS – LEARN HOW TO USE YOUR CLIENT AND STOP SENDING BROKEN MESSAGES!

I am done with this topic for now but I reserve the right to rant more on it someday.

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RANT! Internet browsers need to handle favicons better

RANT! Internet browsers need to handle favicons better

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Do you even know what a favicon is? It is the little image that sits just to the left of the URL in your address bar. For this site the favicon looks like this: Angry_1185 If you can’t see it then that pretty much proves my point!

When you surf to a page that you have previously visited, the browser checks to see if anything has changed since the last time that you visited. It then downloads the new text and graphics and combines this with data in your cache and displays this to you. This technique can greatly reduce your surf time.

Unfortunately, most modern browsers (Firefox and Internet Explorer) do a pretty lousy job of checking and updating if the favicon for a site has changed. In fact, if you using an older version of IE, it may not even display a favicon. Even Firefox will occasionally display the wrong favicon for a site.

This is poor software design. Favicons are very small and would not detract from the user experience if it was checked every time.

HEY SOFTWARE DESIGNERS, FIX YOUR FAVICON IMPLEMENTATION!

I am done with this topic for now but I reserve the right to rant more on it someday.

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RANT! PC’s and the Disabled: 20 Molehills that Become Mountains

RANT! PC’s and the Disabled: 20 Molehills that Become Mountains

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I recently came across a post on a different kind of top 20 (or worse 20) list. This list is of bad software (or at least poorly behaving software). The focus of the article was on web applications but, too be honest, I think there are still some ‘regular’ applications that make these same mistakes as well.

I don’t want to reproduce the entire 20 items, you can go to the original article here and read those. I would like to point out that that author forgot some of my personal least favorites:

I did like some of the items on the original list. Especially

4. Amnesia

5. No Undo/Redo

6. No Cut/Copy/Paste

13. Tiny Fonts

19. Not Eating Their Own Dog Food (although I prefer the statement “Not drinking their own champagne”

20. Bugs – what is up with “beta” releases of software that go for months, if not years!

SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS – YOU NEED TO THINK ABOUT USABILITY WHEN YOU WRITE YOUR SOFTWARE (and yes, I did intend to have my caps lock on when I was shouting despite number 7).

I am done with this topic for now but I reserve the right to rant more on it someday.

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RANT! Desktop Index ideas

RANT! Desktop Index ideas

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Like a lot of people, I have become hooked on “desktop search” products. These products index your hard drive’s documents so that you can quickly and easily search for that piece of information you know that you have but are missing. The most popular version of this is Google Desktop but there are others and I particularly like Copernic Desktop Search because I find it more stable than the other utilities on the market and it can read my calendar in Outlook which is a big deal to me.

As much as I like these tools, I find that there is one big thing that they all miss. They don’t rank my favorite sites higher than other sites if I am doing a web search. This simply doesn’t make sense. Obviously, I have been to that site before (or else it wouldn’t be in my Favorites/Bookmarks folder). Therefore, I trust that information more than other information.

So to all of the developers of desktop search: PRIORITIZE MY FAVORITE SITES ABOVE THE REST OF THE WORLD WHEN YOU SHOW ME SEARCH RESULTS!

I am done with this topic for now but I reserve the right to rant more on it someday.

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RANT! emails again – 2 of 2

RANT! emails again – 2 of 2

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Your signature on an email is essential. It should contain the information that allows the reader to contact you without sending you an email. It should not contain images as these will only slow down the transmission of the email and may not be read by the reader’s email program (remember, assume they are reading this on their phone).

Your original email should have quite a bit of contact information. This may include your full name, phone numbers, address, and a link to a website about you or your company. However, don’t be a bandwidth hog and include that same signature on a reply email since it is likely the person already has most of that information. For replies, you should only have the basics e.g. your name and a pertinent phone number.

INCLUDE A SIGNATURE AFTER EVERY EMAIL BUT DON’T OVERLOAD IT WITH WASTED JUNK – EMAIL IS ESSENTIAL SO KEEP IT SIMPLE!

Here is some related reading for you to enjoy:
RANT! Incomplete emails
RANT! emails again – 1 of 2

I am done with this topic for now but I reserve the right to rant more on it someday.

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RANT! emails again – 1 of 2

RANT! emails again – 1 of 2

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It is time to rant about email again. Yes, I know that email is the greatest thing of the Internet. It has become the “killer app” that has truly driven corporate America to provide computers to all of its white collar work force. More than Word or Excel, email has become essential to today’s workforce. For this reason, we need to chastise those that screw it up.

EMAIL IS ESSENTIAL SO DON’T SPEND TIME TRYING TO MAKE IT PRETTY!

Putting tables and graphs in an email is bad. You should use the rule of thumb that the reader is going to look at it in a pure text view (like on a phone). Don’t use bullets – use dashes instead or an asterisk (*) instead.

If you must have a highly formatted document, put it into an attachment also so that it can be viewed with another program with the formatting. I suggest you simply save the email as HTML to your desktop before you send it and that attach that resulting file. This allows the reader to open the document in a browser to see the formatting.

Here is some related reading for you to enjoy:
RANT! Incomplete emails
Become a Master of E-Mail Etiquette
Email Etiquettes to use

More on this topic later!

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