I just ran into a problem that is a real pain in the ass with Internet Explorer 7.

Start with a blank page with a patterned background.  Put an absolutely positioned 24-bit transparent PNG file (like a fade) on the page and make the width=100%.

You can see an example of this on sparkt.com at the top.  In IE7, SOMETIMES it will add a strange reverse fade on the image all the way on the right.  SOMETIMES it will just stretch all the way to the right.  I have been doing this sort of thing for a long time and have never seen it happen.  The versions of the browser are identical.  Both running on Vista.  I can’t for the life of me figure out any significant difference in the systems.

Internet Explorer 6 renders this just fine.  It is only in IE7.

Load the page and look to the right.  Does the fade go all the way to the right or trail off about a centimeter from the end?  Bizarre.  Microsoft is killing me.  They should give up on the browser and just tell people to use Firefox.  Why bother?  Why make a browser?  Do they really have anything to gain there?

And while I am railing on microsoft…why the hell don’t they make a Firebug clone for IE?  Some of us have to live in the mess Microsoft made and I hate it.

This might sound stupid, but I was struggling to find out what font Microsoft used in their menus in Office 2007.  I thought it was Calibri, but that was incorrect.  It turns out to be Segoe UI.

Google sort of let me down there.  I googled and googled and couldn’t find a post with the answer.  This link finally had the word Segoe in it and that helped me.  ALthough the wikipedia links should have shown up.  How very stange.  Maybe my googling skills are getting rusty?

John McCain has proposed a 300 million dollar prize for a better battery.  Although I certainly am in favor of a significant increase in funding for batteries, I don’t understand why this is a prize.  Why not just invest 300 million in R&D grants for better batteries?

Is it really a “prize”?  So one company wins and everyone else loses?  The government can be a powerful force for R&D.  Energy, healthcare, food production, economy and even art are things the government can improve simply by providing grants to enterprising companies and individuals who can make a difference.

It’s a great thing to invest in, but we need to invest MORE.  And we need to do it in a more diverse way.  We need to build geo-thermal, wind, solar and every conceivable way to get off of gasoline.  The encouraging thing is that if McCain is for it, then maybe there is a window of opportunity where both parties can agree and move the ball forward.

I recently upgraded my DirecTV so that I get HD and DVR in one box.  It took a week to get it actually working.  Some technical problem, lets skip that.  The device has an ethernet port so I bought a special ethernet to wifi connection.  It took a little while, but I finally got it working.  Then finally there was a SATA port to have an external hard drive.  I bought  one of those to expand the amount of space.  I can’t get that working.  Ugh.

Ok, but here is the part I want to write about.  The onDemand feature allows you to download content through the website.  My God, who designed this monstrosity?  It is nearly impossible to use.  I tried to download the second season of Dexter and seriously, this is taking me 15 minutes.  Who thought this UI was a good idea?  Did an engineer do it or a very untalented designer or wait wait…the HiPPO!  A HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) got involved with this.  Someone with absolutely no idea what they are doing made the decision.

You have to literally SCROLL through every single available show at a snails pace.  And you can’t filter it at all.  There are all these shows that you have to pay for and you can’t get rid of them.  Search works like crap.  You can’t download a whole season or anything easily.

And to top it all off, they didn’t have all the shows.  Just some of them.  Ugh.

Why am I so stressted over this?  is it because it’s 85 degrees here.    Or maybe it’s because Katie and the kids are camping and they aren’t here?  Yes, it is that.  I miss them very much.   Stupid DirecTV.

I don’t have a Blackberry.  I appreciate it’s UX very much for the primary user.  It’s downright addicting.  However, the UX of the person WATCHING the person using the Blackberry isn’t nearly as good.

Hold on a sec.

Click.

Spin ball.

Type.

Wait.

Wait.

Ok, I’m back.  How lame is that?  Every person with a blackberry stops engaging in the conversation at hand and starts looking at the little screen and spinning the little ball.

You know what is really happening?  They are bored of listening to you or your meeting.  They are bored!  So they look at their email to kill time.

I heard a reporter on NPR saying that you should use the “Crossword Puzzle Rule”.  In any situation, would you pull out a crossword puzzle and start working on it?  Stanley from The Office TV show does this regularly.  It’s a joke, but he is basically saying, “I am bored with you and would rather entertain myself.”.

People looking at their blackberry are bored with the moment at hand.  They are entertaining themselves.  That’s why it is so addicting!  However, there is a downside.

Being entertained too long will make your day go by very quickly.  Smelling the roses is important.  Memories are built on the moments when you are NOT entertained with mindless info-tainment.  Memories are not made while you are using your blackberry.  Life is short enough as it is.  My wife and I just celebrated our 10 year anniversary and it seems like we got married about 2 months ago.  The kids are growing like weeds.

I definetely do not want to have a blackberry.  I check my email enough as it is.

Business Model #1:  Enterprise
This is when your product costs over 100k.  Maybe even in the millions.  The sales cycle is pretty long.  It requires lots of documents to make the sale and build the product.  RFI, RFP, MRD, PRD, Roadmap, the list goes on and on.  This is a tough business to be in.  If you are good at it, then you could get very big like Seibel or Oracle or any other big expensive product suppliers.  If you are a startup, you have to get VERY lucky.  Remend tried this and was not lucky.  They got caught in the classic enterprise mistake.  One customer (the first customer), since they are paying so much, can bully you around to customize the product.  You end up making a custom thing that no one else can use.

Personally, I don’t like this model.  It’s not my style.  You have to slow down releases to a crawl.   You have to cater to single customers.   In general, it’s hard to be creative with this model.

Business Model #2:  Per Seat Subscription
Salesforce is the best example of success with this model.  Your product costs about $20-$50 per seat and you sell hundreds of thousands of seats.  Usually these are SAaS models, where the product is on a website.  It is incredibly hard to sustain this model because competitors come up all the time and ruduce the margins.

This model is tough because you have to scale to many users quickly.  This means you need to make the product simpler.  This isn’t always B2B.  Often this is a B2C play because there are no many more customers in that space.  Personally, I like the B2B space most.  Helping solve business problems is the most rewarding for me.

Business Model #3:  Flat monthly Subscription
This was the Hotkoko model, as well as the Marketo model.  A few thousand a month doesn’t require a RFI or RFP.  A medium level executive can make this decision.  It’s not so much money that it needs huge oversight, but it’s enough to make the customer feel committed and pressured to use the darn thing.

I love this model most.  You can build a pretty substantial product with alot of features. In fact, for this amount of money, the customer expects cool things to be rolled out pretty frequently.  These sort of products often live in a perpetual state of beta.  The key is to keep working on scalability and quality so you don’t paint yourself into a corner.

There are other models out there, but these ones were high on my mind.  Do you know which business model you prefer?

Every once in a while, I do a little exploration on the web to look for interesting things.  I don’t do it that often because it is a road that leads to everywhere and I could get lost for hours.  However, I feel compelled to do it a little bit of the time and this morning was one of those times.  I started with a Google Search of UI Blog.  Here is what I found in the order I found it:

1. User-Interface Blog - Looks promising.  I will subscribe.
2. Jensen Harris Blog - Microsoft Office guy who blogs about UI.  I am going to subscribe.
3. Microsoft Officce Labs - Like Google Labs.  They are ideas and experiments.  Good place for some beta software.
4. SharePointPedia - This is a neat resource on SharePoint.  They are trying to use it like Wikipedia, which I think is fairly brilliant.  Sharepoint might be the coolest web application that exists.  I love it.  I wish I could install the latest version at Marketo, but unfortunately, time is a scarce resource.  Hopefully, we will get an IT person in this year.
5. Taskmarket - This is a site where businesses can find freelancers.  I am going to try it for graphic design.  The neat thing: It’s based on Sharepoint.
6. Sharepoint public demo (latest version) - Sharepoint reminds me of Intuit’s quickbase.  Great applications that don’t get enough respect.

That’s when I came up for air.  I like Design blogs.  If you know if a good one, let me know.

Three bits of interesting UI news today.

First is a spotlight from the ExtJS blog called VersoChat.  Mostly, I just read the blog, skimmed their website and looked closely at the big JPEG on EXT.  Default skin, but very nice icons.  I wonder where they got those ones.  The Information Architecture (IA) is definetely designed for a power user.  It’s laid out for someone who clearly uses the thing every day.  I like it in general, but that is a very hard space to get into.  I think the chat window could potentially have the rich text editor from EXT, but maybe that’s not needed.  I wonder if the user on the other side has the same EXT base to chat.  Overall, very interesting.

Second, Yahoo released a nice stencil kit for making prototypes.  They include the YUI code and design patterns with the stencils.  It’s an excellent way to get people to use YUI, not justinside Yahoo, but elsewhere.  Yahoo definetely has a strong UX team.  I wonder how they feel they are doing.  YUI has sort of dropped down in the list of libraries as of late.

Lastly, I saw news of an ajax library today from a company called Gaia.  It looks ok.  I haven’t used it enough to give it a fair review.  However, it looks like it is targeting asp.net users.  This is a good strategy based on the pain I have heard regarding using Microsoft’s native components.  Maybe Microsoft should buy a company like Gaia?  I had suggested to TargetProcess that they consider ExtJS, but maybe Gaia is better for them considering they are an asp.net shop?

On a side note, I have noticed that Firefox 3 comes with a keyboard shortcut (control-K) to go to the searchbox on the top right.  Previously, Wordpress had used control-k to mean “add a link”.  This is the same keyboard shortcut for MS Word.  Since FF3 co-opted that shortcut, not I have to click Alt-Shift-A.  This is annoying.  It’s an awkward position on my hard and I keep hitting the caps lock key in the process.  I wonder why Firefox chose that shortcut since it has been reserved in general for linking.

Like I always say, “A design decision creates the world in which ordinary people have to live.  Someone made this decision and I have to live with it.”

As previously posted 6 months ago, I had been working on a solid design for HTML emails that would work in every client.  The design of that email worked pretty well.  However, since then, I kept getting asked to do the impossible.  Rounded corners, curved strokes and shadows.  As mentioned, Outlook 2007 doesn’t support positioning and doesn’t support background-images.  This combination makes it really really hard to create a decent design.

I just upgraded one email for Marketo.  I got the rounded corners to work in all clients, but it was really annoying.  Doing the curved corner stroke (not shown) was so difficult, I just skipped it. I used a great tool from ReturnPath called Campaign Preview.  Check out this output of all the different email clients.  That is awesome!  I don’t have to send all those email’s by hand anymore.

One question I have is about Lotus Notes.  They are on version 8.0.1, but the return path does 6.5.4.  Who uses Lotus Notes anyway?  I can’t believe they are still working on it.  And the 6.5.4 rendering engine is the worst I have ever seen.  Why don’t they just use Firefox to render?  Why do all of these different email clients feel they have to reinvent the wheel?

Anyway, feel free to look at the source for the template.  It’s pretty readable and works well.

I love detective work, figuring out how things work.  Here is a quick sample.

Rey Bango (proud new papa) posted about a plugin called ShareThis.  The reason he posted it was because they are using jQuery on their website.  So I click around and see that it has a WordPress Plugin.  Easy to install, (click below, it’s cool) and easy to manage.  So, of course, I look at the source.  Turns out that ShareThis uses MooTools as it’s base to build the feature.

Interesting that they choose jQuery for the site and MooTools for the script itself.

Anyway, I like the plugin.  Although it doesn’t happen that often, I like to think that people COULD share a post if they wanted.