I had an idea regarding health care reforms.  So I went to whitehouse.gov and clicked on the Contact Us link.  As I was typing away, I realized that the reCAPTCHA words that I had to type were… “the mobsters“!

You just can’t make this stuff up.

Gotta admit, I don’t know anything about football. Our family’s sports fanatic is Robert, my brother-in-law. As I arrived at his place, my first question was “who’s playing”. Yeah, that’s how knowledgeable I am. It turns out that sometimes ignorance is, indeed, bliss.

When the score became 24-17 in the Saints favor, I told Robert that the game was over.

Robert: “No way, all the Colts need is a touchdown”.

Me: “It doesn’t look like they will score a touchdown”.

Robert: “These are the Colts, they will score a touchdown for sure, there is plenty of time left”.

Me: “Hmmm, I don’t know, they don’t like they have the fire in the belly.”

And they didn’t score. I was able to see the likely outcome precisely because of my ignorance, and hence my lack of bias.

I won’t go on and on about how bias can affect your judgement about your own designs and user interface, except to say this: be aware of it, we all have it and it can mislead.

Daniel Jalkut makes the best case yet as to why desktop applications are here to stay and why web applications, almost by definition, will always play catch up with desktop apps:

When something truly innovating and mind-blowing happens on the web, I can drop it into a WebView on my Mac and make it a part of my desktop experience. When something mind-blowing happens on the desktop, you can bet you’ll have people scurrying to painstakingly imitate it on the web.

…I imagine in 5 or 10 years the web will have caught up to something resembling how desktops behave today. But I can’t even begin to imagine what we’ll have at our fingertips on the desktop, by then. iPad?  We ain’t seen nothing yet.

Web apps have their place for sure, but desktop apps will always be the ones passing the baton to web apps. I knew this by intuition but I’m grateful to Daniel for articulating it as only he can. In the past, I have alluded to project Luceen, a new product that we’re just starting to work on. I have discussed this product with only two or three people outside the company, and the inevitable question was akin to “why are you doing it as a desktop app? don’t you see your competitors are going web-based?”

I will be giving them the link to Daniel’s post if they ask again.

Bernhard Jenny in Switzerland wrote Color Oracle, a nifty and free utility for simulating color blindness that no self-respecting programmer, UX practitioner, or web site designer should be without. It runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

I downloaded and tried the Mac version. It works well. When you run it, a small icon installs itself on the menu bar. To see your screen the way that a color blind person would, click on the icon and select one of three types of color blindness. Here is an example of before (left) and after:

The simulation is not continuous: once you’re seeing your screen in the eyes of a color blind person (usually male), pressing any key will return you to normal mode. But Color Oracle lets you assign a keyboard shortcut to each color blindness type, making it easy to simulate quickly. It’s a great way to get a “reality check”, in the words of Nathaniel Kelso, who helped with ideas and testing.

My first brush with what one can do for color blind persons was a 2007 post by Greg Raiz. Greg described how Apple was using red and green circles (same shape) to illustrate which stores had iPhone availability, and how they later switched to using different shapes (snapshot used with permission):

For a company that cares deeply about user experience, one would expect Apple to provide a similar utility to its developers, preferably with continuous simulation instead of snapshots. But until then, Color Oracle is a great addition to our toolbox.

This is a post about writing.

See, after I read Rands’ review of OmmWriter, I sceptically downloaded the program. I ran it. And…

And I took a deep breath. No, not the kind of deep breath you take before your first bungee jump. Or the kind you take when you’re just about to run from the bulls in Pamplona (I’m assuming — not that I would know).

Imagine being surrounded by noise, lots of noise, with one task thrown at you after the other, and you’re struggling to keep up, you feel like you’re on an accelerating threadmail, and then suddenly… Very suddenly. It all stops. It feels great, and you take a deep breath. That kind of deep breath.

OmmWriter is a well thought out minimalist writing tool. It hides everything else on your desktop. You get a calming, Zen-like background to type on, accompanied by equally calming music. And little else.

You start typing. When you move the mouse, a few options appear. Resume typing and all options get out of your way. Simple.

OmmWriter saves its files as plain old text files, so there is no support for bold or italics. It’s fine by me. Spell checking while you type is available and is equally well thought out: misspelled words turn gray instead of the more familiar and more disruptive red underline. Nice touch. Surprisingly though, spell checking is not enabled by default.

The only complaint that I have about OmmWriter is the use of an underline cursor instead of the standard i-beam. In my experience, underline cursors work best with monospaced fonts such as Courier. In the following screen snapshot, it’s hard to tell whether the cursor is under the letter ‘i’ or the letter ‘n’, and I often find myself deleting the wrong letter:

The program is still in beta testing. I wish that the release version 1.0 will add a Find feature and support for smart quotes.

OmmWriter is not the first program to try this minimalist approach but I find it the best. I eagerly downloaded and tried WriteRoom when it first came out but was disappointed. WriteRoom bills itself as “distraction free writing software”; the right idea but off-the-mark implementation.

Google has quietly updated its home page, it is now cleaner than ever:

It remains clean if you type your search query and press Enter. Other items fade in quickly if you move the mouse inside the browser window.

This works on all browsers that I tried except Internet Explorer 6 (it works on IE8, I don’t have IE7). Note also the aggressive push for Chrome. The message “A better way to browse the web / Install Google Chrome” appears on all browsers except Firefox for Windows — it does show in Firefox for Mac. Bug or feature?

I’ve always liked the iPhone’s Stocks app, even in version 1.0. In addition to the eye candy, the app showed out of the box thinking. Most other charts have the axis labels neatly rounded, e.g. if the price range is between 11 and 29, the Y axis labels would be 10, 20, and 30.

But someone forgot to tell the iPhone developers. Instead, the Y axis on the Stocks app shows the low and high for the stock or index, thus conveying very useful information on a diminutive screen. In the chart on the right, you can tell right away that the low and high for the index are 4683 and 5050.

Recently, I was further impressed with how the app handled an interruption in data feed:

Compare the above with how Yahoo! Finance handled the interruption in data feed on the same day:

When we moved from Phoenix to San Pedro several years ago, I reminded my wife all the time how my commute became longer, all of 2 miles instead of 1.5.

We moved again a couple of months ago and my commute is now a whopping 11 miles, driving under blue skies on a scenic coastal road, with the view alternating between Catalina island, beautiful beaches and imposing cliffs, often watching the sun setting on the Pacific Ocean.

It’s horrible!

Or is it? I never thought I’d say this, but I am now liking my commute. It all started when I plugged my iPhone to the car’s stereo. After a few days of listening to music, I switched to the WNYC’s Radiolab podcasts and have been enjoying them thoroughly. I just finished listening to Placebo, their best so far. In another podcast, I was pleasantly surprised that a guest speaker was one of our own SuperLab customers, Dr. Julian Keenan.

Then there are those days when I don’t feel like listening to anything. I enjoy that as well. It’s the pause that refreshes.

Commuting is not so bad after all.

In exploring what we can or cannot do on our new hardware product, I met today with the rep from the company that makes all the nameplates used in our hardware products. I received what I thought was a compliment:

“I don’t know if we can do that. I’m not saying that we cannot, but it’s just that you ask me to do things that we’ve never done before.”

He may have meant it more like “you’re such a pain where the sun doesn’t shine”, but I chose to take it otherwise!

Until April 2005, some applications provided a dictionary, but each had its own. Then Mac OS 10.4 Tiger was introduced and included a system-wide dictionary: teach it the word “Hisham” in Mail, for example, and all the other Mac programs now knew that Hisham is not a mistake (though some friends might disagree!)

I thought that Firefox was the only Mac app to still provide its own dictionary instead of taking advantage of the Mac’s built-in one, but I found a worse app this week: it neither uses the built-in one nor provides its own. The developers suggest that you “Take the time to copy edit your work so that you can avoid embarrassing typos…”:

In essence, you need to type your text in another app, then copy and paste it. And not just to have your work spell-checked: this app’s edit field is not resizable — a very un-Mac experience. You don’t have to type long before it becomes a chore.

Yes, you probably realized it by now: the guilty app is Apple’s own iTunes. iTunes has always had two faces. The nice, Mac-like one is fast and feels, well, like a Mac. The bad face is the iTunes store part of the program that’s built using WebKit. But this hardly excuses iTunes: Safari too uses WebKit but feels a lot zippier, and yes, supports the built-in dictionary.