usability

Don’t Worry, Vista Will Handle It

Call me a masochist, but I installed Windows Vista on my home machine this past weekend. I wasn’t about to spend much money to get my rapidly aging Shuttle XPC Vista ready, so I simply opted to buy an $85 ATI Radeon video card that would let me run the Aero interface, however creakily.

The list of apps with Vista compatibility problems is truly mind-boggling. We’re talking about stuff I use every day. Dreamweaver, ColdFusion, Eclipse, iTunes, Irfanview. Add to that the fact that my Photoshop disc is on the fritz and you’ve got a major productivity roadblock. But perhaps the app that I miss the most is one that works in the background: Diskeeper.

Diskeeper is (or was) probably the best defragmenter available for Windows. It’s got a feature called “Set It and Forget It” which allows you to configure the program to defrag your hard drive in the background whenever it sees the need, and then, as advertised, forget all about the damn thing. But the bastards at the Diskeeper Corporation want me to pay $30 to upgrade to their new Vista version, even though I already bought an upgrade less than six months ago. So I decided to look at alternatives. (Update 3/8/07: Never let it be said this blogging thing is a waste of time. I just received an e-mail from a nice fellow at Diskeeper Corp. apologizing for the upgrade confusion and offering to make it up with a coupla extra licenses. Thanks, Diskeeper!)

I opened up the built-in Windows Vista Disk Defragmenter, and I was astounded to see this:

Windows Vista Disk Defragmenter

In case you’re looking at this image and wondering what’s so astounding, the only thing you can configure here is the schedule. No setting priorities, no setting unmovable files, no program menus, no help file, no nothing. I wasn’t expecting a robust interface like Diskeeper’s that allows you granular control over what files get positioned in what place on the hard drive, but I wasn’t quite expecting this either.

Windows Vista is full of these kinds of user interface decisions. Places where the operating system presents you with a limited set of options and tells you, “don’t worry, Windows Vista will handle it.” We’ll defragment your disk for you, we’ll switch color schemes when necessary, we’ll block you from handling the nasty files, we’ll decide when the computer should sleep and when it should wake.

Remind you of anything? It reminds me of a Mac.

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Why Is Gmail So Irritating?

I switched over to Google’s Gmail about a year and a half ago from Yahoo! Mail, mostly because I wanted a change. I’m on Gmail about half of the time now, while the other half of the time I use Microsoft Outlook 2003.

I like Google. I have great faith in their ability to bring new technology to the masses in an intuitive, highly functional package. Google Maps quickly supplanted MapQuest as my street directory of choice when it came out. And I’ve got high hopes for Writely, an online word processing application that Google bought earlier this year and promptly rechristened Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

So why is Gmail so irritating?

Gmail logoGmail should be a slam-dunk for Google. After all, I can build a simple POP3 application on a ColdFusion web server in a couple of hours, and that includes time for me to consult the Macromedia documentation to fix my mangled CFML syntax. I’m not saying that that’s all there is to it, of course. (If you want to see a ColdFusion-based application gone horribly awry, look at all the flaws in MySpace.) But I don’t have some of the world’s best developers and billions of dollars in cash lying around either.

Here are my major problems with Gmail:

  • Gmail breaks the browser Back button. To me, this is an absolute cardinal sin. Yes, I understand how difficult it is to make a functioning web application that obeys the Back button in a stateless environment like the web. But certainly Google can do better. I back up into blank, non-functioning pages at least two or three times a day, usually when following links from the Gmail module on my Google home page. And when Google isn’t breaking the Back button, they’re opening up new and unwanted tabs in my browser.
  • Gmail breaks the Reload/Refresh button. Try opening an e-mail message, and then hitting your browser’s reload/refresh button. You get taken back to the list of e-mails. I get hung up on this several times a day too.
  • The interface is very, very slow. I lose patience very easily with the “Loading” messages that pop up at the top of the screen — there are actually two different messages, one that appears in the top right and one that appears in the top left — and they’re up there a lot.
  • No folders. Google assumes that we don’t care for the convention of filing our e-mail into different folders. Therefore Gmail does away with this metaphor altogether in favor of its own Label system, which I can’t seem to get used to. Couldn’t they at least give you the option of using folders, even if it’s not set by default?

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Look Ma… No Program Menus!

It’s pretty much official at this point: Microsoft is ditching program menus. By program menus, I mean that narrow bar at the top of every program in MS Windows which usually starts with “File” and ends with “Help.” These menus have been a part of day-to-day computing experience since the first Macs in the ’80s, and have a history that extends back to Xerox PARC in the early ’70s. And now Microsoft is putting them … Read more