Windows 7 Annoyances: Aero Peek

Are you annoyed by the Windows 7 Alt + Tab hiding your windows and behaving weirdly, want to go back to the old way, go to System Properties -> Advanced -> Performance Options and disable "Aero Peek" option. Downside, this will also disable full window preview from of multiple windows from the taskbar. Make your choice.

Down The Rabbit Hole: Part VI - Free Your Mind

I have been busy, reading quite a lot about Nokia lately, however, in the meantime the world did not stand still. Just recently, right after the dust settled on the Google phone launch, Nokia rolled out its answer to the iPhone, the Nokia 5800.

Coming almost two years later, the 5800 may indeed exceed the iPhone in some qualities and it may be even more attractive in some markets, but this is just beyond the point. Which is that it represents absolutely no innovation whatsoever. Nothing can disguise this simple fact.

I also disagree that we are witnessing a major platform shift. If Apple would call the iPhone operating system OS X Mobile we would all have a flashback moment. While it is true that mobile browsing has been made really possible for the first time with the iPhone, and now with Android, it is far from representing a major change in computing overall. Don't get me wrong, it will become extremely popular but it will not intriduce a significant global change in the existing technological ecosystem.

Many sources refer to Nokia as number one cell phone company in the world, due to its market share. A company with such potential should not waste time lagging behind their new, unlikely, competitor trying to beat him on his own playing field. Not all users want the iPhone, or any smart phone for that matter. They need a phone, and not a multimedia device with phone function.

In next posts I will elaborate on some plans Nokia has for the future, but let me just say, they are indeed pretty futuristic. As if designing a good phone was so desperately boring and unnecessary. I beleive it is not boring, and is definitely very necessary. All you need to do is free your mind, however difficult this could be. This is what I expect from number one.

Down The Rabbit Hole : Part V - We'll need a search running...

So far we have been pointing out some shortcomings of latest Nokia products, and let me assure you we are nowhere near the end of that subject, starting from little annoyances like the inability to distinguish between the the times of several missed calls from the same number to major problems like the performance of the S60 models. It is time, however, to start figuring out where those ideas and decisions come from. Our goal is to get a little insight into the mind of this great company.

It so happens that these days, we have a unique opportunity to do just that. Turns out that Nokia had organized an even called "Nokia Open Lab", which purpose was inviting representatives of social media and bloggers to Helsinki and "provoking global discussion on a mobile future". An event took place between September 11th and 13th, this year, just a few days ago. As far as I understood, it was first even of this kind.

Beside the materials from the event itself which are available online and will undoubtedly allow us to shed some light on the Nokia thinking and ideas, it would also provide an updated list of people who were invited and thus are interested and participating in the process. Those people have blogs which should be nice to explore in order to achieve our goals. The event was also attended by one of the most important people in Nokia, certainly for our cause, Adam Greenfield who, accorging to Wikipedia is, "head of design direction for user interface and services".

A really good place to start searching for answers...

Down The Rabbit Hole : Part IV - Whoa, Deja vu

One of the things that have become painfully clear after the Apple iPhone release, is the absolute state of cluelessness, if there is such a word, in which other handset manufactirers have been blissfully stuck for years. Instead of leveraging vast experience collected from millions of worldwide users into a series of killer models, every other company ran to copy Apple's innovation without even thinking twice. Read here, did they actually say, with pride?

I have a theory on why Nokia got so out of touch with the users and it goes like this. When I have studied history in school, I have learned about the feudal hierarchy in the middle ages. True, it was in a communist country, and now they say it was all lies, but I do remember one lesson, in which they told us that the feudal hierarchy was so strict that the lord could only command his own vassals but not their vassals. They called it "the vassal of my vassal is not my vassal" rule.

Whether this is historically true or not is beyond the point, however, this is exactly what I think has happened here. Operators have become the customers Nokia cares about and it provides the features operators want, without any regard to the real actual end users. We could call it, "the client of my client is not my client" rule. Operators, by the way, are notorious for pushing whatever brings them more money, without any regard for anyone's needs.

How is that for an explanation?
(Hint: use the comments :)

Down The Rabbit Hole: Part III - Perhaps we are asking the wrong questions.

What does everyone want in a cell phone. Forget money, size, tradeoffs and marketing. What are those features that would represent the base of a good phone. Well, I don't know about everyone, but here is my pick.

1. Large buttons - both numeric and functional. Though it is true that we dial less since the invention of a phone book, we still type lots of messages, hence large usable keys are important. I personally prefer two separate buttons, for calling and and for hanging up. There should be no unnecessary buttons on the phone, like connect to the internet button or something like that. Buttons should be strictly rectangular and should fit an average human finger tip. In my opinion, one dimensional navigation is more than enough, but if you really have to use two dimension, the Nokia five way selection button is the best existing solution.

2. Phone book, with synchronization, backup and search. You have a phone right? If it would diasppear today, how many numbers would you loose? If you answer is larger then zero, then your phone is not good enough. We have bluetooth, we have cellular data connection, how hard could it be to create a decent backup with all that stuff. Another question. Do you have to remember whether your friend John Howard appears as John Howard or as Howard John? If you do, then your phone book does not have a decent search and amazingly most Nokia phones do not have this simple feature.

3. SMS, with T9, storage and search. People are real nasty, when it gets to devices. They assume that devices should make their life easier, and they also get used to good things very quickly. Which is why, no one would ever delete an SMS message from his cell phone until the phone explicitly asks the user to do so. All well and good, but the modern phones have lots of memory and they do not complain even when the number of SMS messages on the device gets to thousands. What they start to do instead is misbehave. One of my friends, had a Nokia E65 which would take more than 30 seconds to open an SMS under this scenario.

4. Battery, battery, battery - if I have to charge my phone more then twice a week, you failed. Wait, but what if I am talking all the time? OK, let's not talk about the absolute time, but rather about the features that would help me preserve it. Don't give me a screen saver, just shut the screen at the first hint of idle time and during phone calls. Battery life is so important in a phone that I would choose it over the cameras, music players and fancy 3G features.

5. One normal ringtone, with vibration option and the ability to instantly turn it off - you would be surprised how difficult it is sometimes to pick up a decent ringtone, because as much as I love Beethoven, putting his sonata on my phone is out of question.

6. Good reception and great audio quality - as one would put it, what good is a phone if you are unable to speak?

Don't get me wrong, this is not the complete list, but this is the minmum. Don't sell a phone that does not have even one of these. Please.

Oh, and if you have other minimum requirements, you think everyone should want, well, that's what the comments are for.

Down The Rabbit Hole: Part II - You've been living in a dream world

One of the problems with Nokia is that they look too much into the future. Look here, here and here to see what I am talking about. This is all bloody marvelous. Really. But today I have to stand in the middle of the room, holding a Nokia cellphone in one hand and my land line phone in other hand when I want to call one of my buddies from the landline.

How is that for the future. How come Nokia does not make an adapter allowing to connect the phone to the land line using bluetooth or any other technology. How come, there is absolutely no synchronization between the Nokia cellphones and any cordless land line phones, not even via computer. Land lines are still very popular and usually cheaper than the cell phones, so how come when I get home I have to put down one phone and pick up another one. Not so futuristic at all.

Down The Rabbit Hole: Part I - I want my phone call

At some point in the middle of 2000, I had to switch an operator, and at that point, unfortunately, I could not stay with my beloved 6110, as it was operator locked, so I had to change. Having decided to go for a cost effective solution, I picked the 3210, a nice, solid phone which was quite affordable at the time. Immediately, I have noticed that the phone was much slower to respond than the old 6110, making the phone book more annoying to use. It also included animations, for example, after sending a message, or adding a contact, that were slow and could not have been disabled from the phone settings. However, the phone was small and had no bulging antenna, had a T9, and was generally nice, once you got accustomed to the different location of the alarm clock menu.

After a year and a half with the 3210, I was yearning for an upgrade and I have decided not to compromise and got myself, or more precisely convinced my mom to get me, a 6310i which was rather expensive for the plan we had.

Now, 6310i is an epic phone. Epic. No other word would describe it better. It had enormous battery life, was blazing fast, had great interface and large buttons. It was slightly better than its older brother the 6210 which was also a great phone. It came in two color schemes, the awesome gray and the awful black and gold. You would pick the awesome gray and live happily ever after. End of story.

After few happy years with the 6310i I have been given a phone by the company I worked for, it was the 6630. If you would put those two phones side by side and wipe the logos, you never believe that it was made by the same company. Weird shape, smaller and weirdly positioned buttons, a camera sticking from the back of the phone, as if it was added at the last minute. Very inconvenient to use. It was 3G, but as it lacked the front camera it was completely useless for video calls (I will get to those later), unless you used a contraption called 'Nokia video call stand'. Whatever.

If you read a review of this phone on the net you would think you are buying a camera, or some kind of smart organizer or a media player, anything but the phone. It was wide and not convenient to hold or to type, it had bad audio, and in most cases required a headset for convenient operation. Since the headphones that came with the kit were a bad joke, you were tempted to buy a blue tooth set that would kill the already weak battery. It was a disaster. Rumor had it that our company was given those phones by the operator who could not move them otherwise and at a great discount.

Now here comes the question, why would the company that is capable of creating an engineering marvel of 6310i would ever release a product like the 6630. What went wrong in those few years between them. So many things have changed, the technology, the UI, the operating system, which of the factors contributed to this fall. I will try to talk about some of this, so stay tuned.

Down the Rabbit Hole - What Happened to Nokia?

When 'The Matrix' hit the screens in the summer of 1999, it had one of the greatest product placements ever - the very sleek and sexy Nokia phone. The phone was featured in the key moments of the movie and had a cool, spring loaded sliding cover, which made answering a call look like lots of fun. On the surface, it appeared to be the Nokia 8110, a top range model of that time.

By then I have already been a devoted Nokia user for a couple of years. I have owned the old 6110, which I liked very much. It was an executive class model at the time, very convenient and with great battery life. But the 'Matrix Phone' was so cool that I have decided to look it up. After a while I found it in one of the local operators offering and few hours later I was holding one in my hand. To my big surprise, the spring was nowhere to be found, the sliding cover was to be moved manually. I was very disappointed. Needless to say I did not buy the phone. Later I heard from my friend who had connections in the operator that those phones had bad audio problems. The model flopped, at least in our local market.

Later I have learned that Nokia did release a spring loaded model, a 7110, but it was not till the end of that year and I have never seen it anywhere, surely none of my friends, all big Matrix fans, owned one.

It was the first, but surely not the last time, I have raised an eyebrow, about the ways of Nokia, however they have continued to make good, solid models, until some point in time, few years ago, when something changed, and Nokia lost their way completely and entirely. This series of posts will try to investigate what happened to this great company and why.

Dial one for usability

The telephone is one of the greatest and most straightforward inventions in human history. A human, who wishes to talk to another human but unable to do so in person due a great distance between them, be that his mother, his friend or a representative of his insurance company, picks up the phone, dials a number, waits till the other person answers and talks. As simple as that, end of story.

During the years the telephone has somehow become a device most people really hate. I mostly blame operators, handset manufacturers and providers of added services, namely the industry people who only care for their own pockets way before the well being of their customers.

Let me give you an example of what I am talking about. Suppose you want to call a customer service of whatever company you need to receive service from. Here is how this should happen.

You pick up the phone and dial the number, after exactly one ring, the system answers and informs you of the average waiting time for this service. If you dial from the recognized phone the system addresses you by name, otherwise it just politely calls you "Dear customer" and asks you to enter the number you wish to be reached at. After that you are free to hang up. This is it.

After the time stated by the system is up, your phone rings. The human representative of the company is on the line, with all your information right in front of him, ready to be at your service without any additional delay.

Attention, you did not wait on the line listening to a bunch of crap all the time, they had enough time to pull your data, if for some reason you can not take the call at that time, you can just hang up and try the same later. If for whatever reason, the call is disconnected, the system knows who was the last person you were talking to and it will call you back. Everyone is happy, and you know what, if that company is so cheap that it does not want to pay for the call, I am sure you could work out some arrangement so that you will be charged with the operator fees, you would pay them anyway.

Even if for some reason, you do not agree with me that this is the best possible solution, and indeed I did not provide answers to all questions in this short post, you should at least acknowledge that this is a possible one. How many systems you know that work like that? None. If you do please tell me about them.

Now it's time to wake up, the dream is over, back to endless cyclic menus, annoying commercials, battery life screwed by endless waiting online for the people that are kind enough to give you the service you have already payed for. Good morning everyone.

Dear computer, please tell me why...

It might sound like a regular customer service rant.

Yesterday my wife and I went to a large supermarket near the house. Among other things we have bought three bottles of juice that had a special price, something like "take three and get 40% discount". I am not a great believer in discounts so naturally, when we approached the cashier, the only thing that really interested me was to make sure we get it.


As expected, once the purchase was complete, we found out that the computer did not give us the discount on the juice. I would be actually surprised if it did since the complexity of these, so called, discounts is just too large to be practical. It would take a supercomputer to track them all. Without going into technicalities let’s just say that Jurassic Park failed for the same reason.

Of course, we asked: “Why?”

Now, cashiers in those kind of places are caught in constant crossfire between bosses and customers. They have to enforce the random policies invented by the store managers and at the same time patiently explain them to the angry customers that argue with it. Of course the woman at the register did not know why the computer missed the discount in this particular case. She did not invent it and she did not program it into the system. What could she do?

It was at this point that the giant usability problem in this whole system became painfully obvious to me and the poor people stuck behind me in the line for whole ten minutes. This system was not designed to answer the question why? The cashier had nothing she could do with all this complex, full-of-colorful-buttons, vertical-shaky-touch-screen piece of junk. It was of no help at all. In fact, she had only two good old fashioned choices. She could either call the manager or get up and go across the floor to the shelf to see with her own eyes what was written on that bloody label.

Well, since it was never about the money, we closed the account as it is, right before the raging mob behind us managed to get hold of their lawyers. Later, I went to the store management and got my couple of dollars worth of discount back by proving them I was right and they were wrong and we went home happy, to sleep off the heavy headache.

Now we get to the point.

The point is that we were wrong. The very small letters on the discount label stated that it was for “some blah blah card holder only” and we didn’t have that specific blah blah card in the first place. So we were not actually supposed to get this discount and the computer was right after all. It just could not explain it to us, the cashier or the store manager. As a result we all have wasted lots of time and nerves because the computer could not answer the question why?

Deeper analysis of the situation shows that it is as simple as one, two, and three.

One. All these discounts, sales, cards, rules and policies are too complex for any man to grasp. They can only be upheld by complex dynamic computer systems like the one we have seen in that store.

Two. People dealing with these systems are tired cashiers with sore finger from touching the screen all day from one end and angry, suspicious customers, tired from constantly checking, arguing and eventually returning products that were not priced as they expected because they failed to read some small letters somewhere or made a mistake in some complex percent calculation on the other.

Three, and the most important. The system is not designed to explain its rules to the user. It can make a decision but it can’t explain why it made it.

Back in time, moment of sale, customer asks a question, the clerk pushes the “Why?” button, screen comes up. “Dear Sir, the discount for juice is for: 1. Card holders only 2. That bought over this amount 3. And wear a black tie. You were rejected for 1. not having a card. Please be more careful next time and have a nice day”. And if the customer does not believe it, it will show the exact scan of the label that appeared on that shelf so that the customer can be sure he talks about the same sale.

How cool would that be.

Have a nice day indeed.

Guess What Happened

I will start with an old haiku which seems painfully appropriate for the moment:

Three things are certain:
Death, taxes, and lost data.
Guess which has occurred.

It all happened so quickly. I have created a new project in Eclipse to add some minor library to the prototype application I have been writing for three days. Since my projects sit outside the workspace, I had to uncheck this little checkbox suggesting me to put a new project in default location and type the new location (a directory not far from there) by myself.

For some strange reason, when you uncheck this box, the text field with the directory path becomes empty so despite the fact that the directory I needed was just beside the one that is already written there by default I had to switch to explorer, copy and paste the path manually into the field.

This is where I erred. After pasting the directory, I forgot that this was the path of the directory where all my projects resided, the parent directory - not the directory of the new project I wanted to create. Before I realized that I hit OK, and there it was - my new project created in the projects parent directory instead of a nice little directory of its own.

Well, I suppose these things happen, said I when I realized my mistake, I will just delete that project and create a new one in the correct directory. So I said, and pressed the "delete" button.

But this story is not about me, it's about Eclipse. After I pressed that button, Eclipse inconspicuously asked me whether I wanted to remove the project from the workspace only or delete its contents as well, all that with straight, poker face, calm as a frozen lake. I thought "why would I need to keep contents of an empty, just created, project in the wrong location" so I hit "delete contents" - and that was exactly what Eclipse did.

He deleted the contents of the entire directory, all three meaningless files that were created with the new plugin project and ALL SUBDIRECTORIES WITH ALL MY OTHER PROJECTS as well.

It was almost too easy. BOOM - everything was gone.

I know what you are thinking so NO - I did not have a backup, NO - it was not in a source control and NO - I did not have anyone to blame. Three days of work, were gone. Eclipse does not have any Recycle Bin and I did not have a good recovery software installed, and I only have one logical drive - so if I would install one I would risk accidentally overwriting the very data I was trying to rescue. The irony tends to get thick in situations like these.

It looked hopeless, but I know you are waiting for the happy ending, so here it comes.

Once, in one obscure Eclipse conference, I heard that there is such a thing called "local history" in Eclipse 3.2, and that in that history they save all the files you work on so you can go back and undo some changes that you have done and compare previous versions. Lucky for me, this history is saved in the workspace .metadata directory that was not deleted during the accident. After a few minutes I have found it, a bunch of tiny little files with long meaningless names, just lying there happily, each holding a class full of my precious code.

It only took three hours of scraping around to restore 90 percent of the code I have written, and I filled in the rest - so in almost no time I had all my stuff back in good working condition, even better, as in some cases I found bugs while reviewing the code and looking for the changes.

Now for the moral.

First, do backup, do use source control and don't be an idiot.

Second, be extra careful with what you DELETE with Eclipse. Eclipse has it's own file system underneath, so everything it deletes does not go to the Windows recycle bin, or any other place you can salvage it from. This is just plain barbaric. Even my browser has a trash can, in case I accidentally close a tab I did not yet bookmark.

Third, just for the sake of emergencies. Find, try and buy a good piece of software that restores deleted files and keep it installed on your computer at all times. It might save you some nerves one day or another.

And last, listen carefully in conferences, you never know what might save your day next time :)

Changing shape size in Microsoft Visio

I use Visio quite a lot. I find it really useful for creating all sorts of diagrams for various presentation purposes and for visual thinking in general.

In many cases, editing a diagram involves dropping many different shapes on a sheet and then playing around with them, arranging them into a visually acceptable layout. In this process, it is often required to perform operations on the shape which are relative to other shapes on the same sheet. Some of those operations are supported by Visio, such as shape distribution, grouping and alignment. However, there are some very basic functions which are simply not there, for example - making several selected shapes the same size.

In my opinion, this is a major usability flow. All you want to do is select several shapes and then click something to make them all same width or same height. It is hard to believe that this operation is nowhere to be found, not even in the 2007, which, frankly failed to make the same breakthrough progress as Word or other Office applications in terms of usability improvements.

Untill now, I have found two ways to deal with the problem. If shapes are of the same type, I copy them instead of dropping fresh ones from the stencil and then carefully adjust the font size to fit in all of them. If I have to adjust their size, I carefully select them all and resize them all at once, which is possible for some not too populated diagrams.

Another, more civilized, way of doing this is to open a Size & Position window from the View menu. In this window, you can see the size and position properties of the selected shape. You can then select several shapes, and update their width or height by typing the required value into the box. In order to make those shapes the same as the one you want, you have to select it first so that its properties are shown in the window. Ah, but there is another problem. You can't just hit enter, the edit box recognizes the fact that no change was made and does nothing, you have to retype the value again to have the desired effect. Still it's better than nothing.

I looked all over the net for the solution and I can't get rid of the feeling that I am missing something here. Can it be? Well, maybe they are saving it for the next version :)

No Excuse

A few days ago, I watched the Steve Jobs keynote introducing the iPhone. As always, it was an impeccable presentation, delivered with the usual quality and style. The iPhone is simply amazing. I have watched the whole event twice and I have enjoyed it like a good movie. It was just awesome.

However, this blog is not about Apple or iPhone, it is about usability. So let us for a moment forget about most of the features iPhone has. Let us forget about the beautiful multi touch display and the wide screen videos. Lets us put aside the full browser and the email, and even widgets. Let's just concentrate on the phone. Just the phone with the most basic stuff. Even without the camera.

Just the phone.

It has occurred to me that there is something strange going on. I mean, Apple, after all is not a cell phone company. Well, of course they have great designers and innovative thinking, but they are not Nokia or Samsung or Motorola.

Yet, amazingly, all of those companies that have the expertise and experience in building phones for nearly two decades have failed to produce something matching the iPhone usability, not even by a large margin.

There is no new technology there. The magnificent scrolling can be done without the multi touch display. Same for the soft keyboard, which has existed for years on all PDAs. The convenient address book with all the details available at a glance as well as the easy interface for putting someone on hold - not to mention the conference call, all of these are not new. A sensor that turns off the display when I hold the phone to my ear is not impossible to imagine either.

The SMS conversation feature, which allows you to see previous messages from the same person in a same thread, is especially painful. After all, instant messaging services were around for a long time now, and technically it is very simple to implement.

It is very strange that such great companies as Nokia and Motorola failed to compete in their own field with an outsider such as Apple even in the most basic of the features of a most basic phone. The usability gap between the iPhone and the existing offering of phones (not just smart phones) is really huge.

They really have no excuse.