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Vista design guidelines

by | Sep 25, 2006 | evilzenscientist, Technology, Uncategorized

Another good post from the development team for Vista – Vista User Experience Guidelines. The summary are the ‘Vista User Experience – Top Rules‘

I think it’s important that Microsoft are flagging the ‘visual treat’ that will be Vista. SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 has great visuals – it’s good that this is being flagged across all desktop OS.

Rule 12: Reserve development time for “fit and finish”!

To deliver high-quality fit and finish, build in time to attend to UI details. Scheduling time for a visual clean-up at pixel level, layout corrections (alignment, spacing), and other visual “fit and finish” is as important as it is to schedule time for bug fixing and other types of quality control.

Perception is reality, and if your customers don’t experience quality in your product throughout, they may conclude there is lack of quality everywhere. A visual bug seen by all your customers might do more damage to your program’s reputation than a rarely occurring crashing bug.

Collanos

by | Sep 8, 2006 | 'Web 2.0', evilzenscientist, Linux, Uncategorized

A colleague from Novell moved to Collanos – I looked at their products – and it’s interesting.

The Collanos Workplace seems to fill several of my needs for working with my team:

– document sharing and management
– team task lists
– discussions
– cross platform

Most importantly – the model is peer-to-peer. That means that none of my ‘corporate data’ ever lives on someone elses server. That was one of the major downsides to using something like Backpack or Basecamp. (Cool – but kinda interesting from a risk and security angle).

By having this ‘built’ and in the web it also means I don’t have to build an internal server, manage it, keep it safe, back it up – and also use VPN to get data in and out of it.

Feedback soon. I’ve sent the team the data – we should be running in a couple of days.

Windows Live Writer

by | Aug 14, 2006 | blogging, evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

Microsoft are renowed for getting ‘usability’ right with their products.

Windows Live Writer is no exception.

Three things I like:

  • 1. Installation is easy.
    • Download, install – then point at this blog url – and it detected I was running WordPress without any problems.
    • No fiddling with the correct url for the XML-RPC side of things. No need to remember that I’m running WordPress. (Remember – this is easy for non-technical people)
  • 2. It looks good.
    • Hey – I can use Textpad, Wordpad, Pico, Joe, VI or just pipe from the shell if I need to. But often it’s a lot easier just to have something that works and works well.
    • It looks a lot like Word – or any other Microsoft Office app.
  • 3. In place preview – with your theme.
    • Oooh – this is a sexy feature. Look at the screen shots.

 

Firewall woes

by | Aug 11, 2006 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

Flaky hard drive in my firewall server.

Time to replace it methinks. It keeps crashing out with bad surface – and bringing down the firewall and squid box.

Trouble for me if there is no web browsing or email!