Day: March 31, 2004

I know lots of folks with one of the new Treos… I’ll see if they want to try Mobile Feed Reader from Feedburner. Good luck, Dick, Eric, Steve, and Matt.

The Police. Invisible Sun. Great tune, from a fantastic album. I even took the rare step of rating the song in iTunes.

All the usual suspects warn against the passive voice. Paul Ford does something about it, with the Passivator, a bookmarklet which highlights some obvious uses of the passive voice on a page. While part of my purpose here is to improve my writing, I doubt I’ll spend the time to play with this more than once or twice. But technology in the service of editing is always of interest. [thanks to Simon]

And everyone does. His latest: “Situated Software,” from which, a quote:

Expectations of longevity, though, are the temporal version of scale — we assume applications should work for long periods in part because it costs so much to create them. Once it’s cheap and easy to throw together an application, though, that rationale weakens. Businesses routinely ask teams of well-paid people to put hundreds of hours of work creating a single PowerPoint deck that will be looked at in a single meeting. The idea that software should be built for many users, or last for many years, are cultural assumptions not required by the software itself.

I’m printing the whole essay for a further read.

Struggline with getting Radio to post my home page for the last week or so. But it is upstreaming the archive, 25 files at a time, every time I publish a new item. Maybe that’s a month per post, which means I need 6 more posts to get to the current day?

Google announces GMail via this press release dated April 1. Webmail with 1GB of free storage, plus great search (as you would expect). So… is it real?

I’m asking because Simon Willison’s post ranges from excitement about the idea of the service, but then points out that Google has a sense of humor about these things (PigeonRank, anyone?). If they were ever going to pull this kind of prank, this April — perhaps their last before they go public? — would be the time. And everyone is expecting a webmail service from Google anyway, as part of an effort to provide another platform for their advertising and a reason for people to register with Google, giving them further insight into their immense user base.

If it’s a hoax, it fooled:

• John Markoff of the New York Times
• Paul Festa of CNET News.com
• Amit Asaravala of Wired News
• Jefferson Graham of USA Today
• and over 343 publications, per Google News, are ‘related’

I guess we’ll all see tomorrow. Google gets so much publicity for free already… imagine all the follow-up articles every publication will have to run if this is a joke?

Check GMail.com on April 1.

Jared Spool has a new article at User Interface Engineering, “The Top 3 Priorities of the Talking Horse.

It could be that your site (or part of your site) is a talking horse. Is everyone focusing on just “making it work”?

There is the partial jab at Jakob Nielsen’s discount usability (although Jakob never uses “discount”).

Once the team knows the users’ tasks, they can look for places where support problems can appear. Unfortunately, we’ve found that inexpensive techniques such as design inspections or heuristic evaluations rarely identify these issues accurately. Teams are better off conducting rigorous, task-based, usability testing. Testing is a better approach to help identify where problems will originate.

I know, the contrast between the linked-to article and the quote is slight. But my perception is colored by this cartoon comparing Nielsen and Spool to leaders of opposing gangs. Humor in the usability world.

I’m starting one project where I’d like to get to the “talking horse” phase!

I’m old enough to have a clue who Mr. Ed was, but I never saw the show. Spool is wise to start of his essay with a longer explanation of his horse analogy. Mr. Ed hasn’t made a comeback, as far as I know, even in the world of digital cable.