Hi, My name is Glen and I am addicted to beta software. My latest fix comes from Office 2010. Even before the official beta program, a version of it was leaked to the web. Waht does Microsoft expect me to do? Ignore the leaked version!? Are they insane. Of course, I found it and installed…
You know when you are driving and you see a sign that is written on the pavement itself. The interesting thing is that the sign is written from top to bottom so you can read it one line at a time while you drive over them. Although I often find these signs difficult to read,…
Most software review and analyst sites miss the mark for me. There is a fundamental reason why…I want to see the software in action! Why can’t these sites follow this basic formula: Standard Use Cases in clear language. Reviewer comes up these. I would even ask the software companies to come up with their own…
I heard this concept from Victor Cho at Intuit a few years ago and just read about it again this morning in Small is the New Big by Seth Godin. The basic concept can be described in this picture. Let’s say you live on the little mound at the bottom (Island A). This is, in…
There are 5 ways that a user will guess how to do a certain function. Buttons/Links Menus Right-Click Drag and Drop Keyboard Shortcuts Each of these ways is more or less comfortable for a random user. Personally, I am a right-clicker. I right-click on everything and am usually disappointed. However, when it works, I am…
This morning I received an email from my cousin that I was added to his family tree on a service called Geni. It said it was private and I was intrigued so I clicked on the link. It showed a segment of my family in Flash and immediately satisfied me in multiple ways. It was…
I don’t know if this is something that affects other people. However, I find that if I spend too much time on a single thing, my creativity levels go down. I start to run out of inspiration and general energy. When I can rotate my crops, and work on different things each day, then my…
Microsoft named their new search engine “bing”. I don’t think they realize how lame that sounds. Every time I hear it, I think of this scene from Groundhog’s Day. (Great movie) I imagine Steve Balmer saying, “Yeah, i love it. They search for something and BING! they found it!” This is the same man who…
I just finished reading Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds. It should be mandatory reading for anyone who presents anything, ever. There is so much goodness in this book about communication and it’s so short. I would classify it similar to Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug. A quick read that gives immediate value. Highly…
I just love, love, love the ingenuity and creativity of the human mind. Well, I also hate, hate, hate the ingenuity and creativity of the human mind when it’s applied to torture and cruelness, but that is another issue. In this case, it is applied to something dear to my heart, the environment. Check out…
I work with some great engineers. One in particular is fantastic, named Crash. He is a backend guy, doesn’t touch the UI much. A demo to him is all accomplished at the command prompt. He said something yesterday that was abaolutely brilliant and summed up my admiration for him. When I add a new feature,…
I love the feeling one gets when they realize they are not alone. July 26, 2007, I was at Ajax Experience and asked the presenter Chris Wilson from Microsoft a question: Outlook 2007 doesn’t use the IE renderer and seems to be much less standards compliant, “Why did Microsoft do this to me?!?” While Chris…
I am reading Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds. So far, its fabulous and I would suggest it to everyone. Early on in the book, there is a small section on The Beginner’s Mind. Some summarize the concept this way: In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few. I…
I was helping two co-workers the other day. One wanted to present information in an email and the other in PowerPoint to be used with customers. (Pretty common tasks, you think?) The tricky part for me was to avoid just “fixing it”. I wanted to teach them to fish, not just give them a meal.…