Untropy

http://shop.cafepress.com/jobama

Awesome.

When you are writing things that no one will see (backend stuff, daemons, etc.), the focus goes to providing the proper functionality and safeguards. Care is also given to reporting status and error messages. These do not require much interaction with users, so the focus should understandably go to other areas of operation. And, more importantly, its behavior is well-defined.

When working on a project that many users will see, there is a different focus. People make mistakes, so the application should work in a sensible way for the users, and handle informing them of its operation as it progresses. Also, it has to be palatable to the users. While the actual functionality is able to be defined fairly clearly, the interface is mostly subjective.

Occasionally, I receive an email from someone that they didn't intend to send to me. Seems like a rather innocuous thing, but when it happens so often, one would wonder why?

In my office, it is an almost weekly occurrence that someone will accidentally reply to everyone some email they only meant to send to one or a few people. This happens because of a subtle difference in how Notes implements replying feature.

Anyone who has had the rather unpleasant opportunity to work with Lotus Notes before will be pleased to hear that IBM is releasing an optimized version of their Lotus Notes web access technology for the iPhone.

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/domino-web-access/ultralite/

I am a big fan of John. DaringFireball has some great articles on Usability, and I read one of the better ones there today. So, I thought I would share.

• http://daringfireball.net/2004/04/spray_on_usability - Ronco Spray On Usability

Here, he talks about some of the problems with the Open Source community and usability. Yea yea, this article is a bit old (April, 2004), but It's still good. Give it a read.

http://www.youtube.com/user/booc0mtaco

I managed to clean up the structure of the site some, but there is still a lot more work to do .

The next steps for the site include:
- working on theme for site
- expanding text of my detail sections ('More About Me' stuff)
- adding and completing features for my experiments (image presentation tool, meme maker, and phrase book translation tool)
- adding designed themes to some section of the site (this module could be able to switch themes like the zen garden website, perhaps?)

I can't figure out why CTA doesn't mark where the doors will open on the platforms! They already have signs to tell the drivers where to place the cars (you ever see those signs with 2,4,6,8?). In theory, the drivers should be able to stop the trains based on those signs. With that, they could mark the ground where passengers can expect the doors to open. People could form orderly lines, and let people off. And, people do not have to run around like chickens, trying to be first to the door.

If you are a web designer, or would like to be, take this survey.

http://alistapart.com/articles/survey2008

More boring stuff. I just write to say I have begun more work on the site, to get things better organized. Nothing too substantial here, except for some shifting of links and similar things.

Once I get all of these little trivial things sorted out, then I can get to the more interesting stuff.