Radio Found!
I found the radio I lost. One might say it is a waste of money to buy the new radio and ear buds when I found the old ones, but I feel quite the opposite. Buying an inferior solution made me value the old solution even more. It made me…
Taste
I was at Ethan’s (9) elementary school open house. He was showing me all of his sculptures, paintings, poems, stories and other materials. He made this one piece of artwork using colored tracing paper. Of course, there were 20 pieces like this next to it, but Ethan’s stopped me in…
Digital Shpilkas
My parent’s used to call it “Shpilkas“. It basically means “ants in the pants”. I feel like that about my blog. I constantly want to change things like the theme or the plugins. A few days ago, I changed the anti-spam plugin back to WP-SPam from Mollem. I am not…
The UX of Portable Radios
I recently lost a little $15 radio I had. It wasn’t fancy, but it was small and got the three stations I listen to. Since losing it, I tried to replace it and have struggled to find something decent. My first try was the iPod Radio adapter. It’s way too…
My first original Iconography
Usually, I use IconExperience icons. They rarely let me down. Often, I will need to combine and manipulate them slightly, but their base set makes this very easy. 2500 icons in 5 different sizes with shadows and without in a neatly organized set of transparent PNG files. However, for…
The UX of Warnings (Mixed Mode Example)
When you visit a page that has some HTTP and some HTTPS elements on it, you sometimes get a warning (especially in Internet Explorer). Even though most people don’t care, Microsoft feels compelled to tell you about this problem when it happens. Firefox, Chrome, Safari…they don’t bug you with this…
The UX of Safari 4 beta (Windows)
Writing this post in Safari 4 beta on Windows 7 RC1. Some good and some bad news on the UX. Speed: This is probably the fastest browser I have seen so far. Specifically, I am talking about JavaScript, but it’s also very fast with page loading. I am pretty impressed.…
The UX of Windows 7 ReadyBoost
I did some research and decided to try the Windows 7 feature called ReadyBoost. Basically, you put in a USB or SD card and the system puts the swap file on it, thus speeding up the system. I have seen mixed reviews of the effectiveness of this technique. I found…
Killing IE6 Gently
I saw this cute wordpress plugin to encourage people to upgrade IE6. I installed it and it seems to work nicely. Recently, I have been thinking about IE6 because we are developing a Salesforce.com application and they officially support IE6. Therefore, we need to support it in that environment as…
Happy Mother’s Day, 2009
From Ethan to Mom: She makes me food and puts me in a better mood. She whistles to songs I like and encourages me to ride my bike. You’re the best and always will be, I love you and you love me. I would still love you if you were…
The UX of Windows 7 Background Slideshow
Windows 7 has the capability to point the desktop wallpaper at a folder and it will change the background like a slide show. You can set it to change frequently up to once every ten seconds. This sounded nice to me, so I gave it a try. Clearly, no one…
Three Camps of UX
Take any given product organization and you will find they fit in one of three camps: Don’t care about User Experience. Sadly, this is more products than one would hope. The most common version of this is the monopoly. When you have a monopoly siutation, there is no driver for…
Restaurant User Experience
Recently I visited my mother in Florida. We went out to eat and tried to get into P.F. Changs. If you haven’t tried the food there, it is very good, HOWEVER, the line is usually really long and it sometimes takes hours to get a table. This was the case…
Monsters Vs. Aliens Imax 3D
This weekend I saw Monsters vs. Aliens in IMAX 3D in Mountain View. I figured that if I was going to see a movie and pay $40 for popcorn, it might as well be a fantastic experience. I went with my 3 kids and a friend with his 2 kids.…