Mokka mit Schlag » User Interface

Minor user interface inconsistencies still annoy me, even in otherwise excellent products. Usually the problems I notice are GUI problems. However, recently I’ve noticed an audio user interface problem, this time in Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Why, oh why, do you put the microphone to sleep by saying, “Stop listening” but wake it up by saying, “Listen to me”? Obviously, the correct, parallel command is “Start listening”. And while I’m on the subject of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, why can I say, “Cap that”, but not “Capitalize that”?

I think it’s time to look for a new local bank. WAMU was marginally competent at best. Chase isn’t even that. I login to my account this morning and here’s what I see:

They say they want this for security, but I call bullshit on that. The real problem is that Chase’s system doesn’t allow the e-mail addresses that WAMU used for its usernames. Rather than upgrade their systems, they decided to inconvenience millions of customers.

And on top of that, the form doesn’t actually work. As I type this, it’s been “Transferring data from online.wamu.com….” for many minutes. And the final result?
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Attempting to install Lord of the Rings Online for the first time on a fairly stock Vista system, and the installer fails while updating some Visual C++ runtime library. When are we going to learn that we should not depend on the latest versions of every single library? Software should simply not require users to upgrade their libraries. (I say this having just shipped a product that fails on Java 5 on the Mac but succeeds on Java 6, so I’m hardly blameless here. The bug is really Apple’s fault, but we should have worked around it. Update: looks like a colleague fixed that a few hours ago. Cool.)

However, the real WTF is this error message I got while the installer was updating the files:

Naturally, I can’t copy and paste that URL. I’m supposed to type it into my web browser. More likely I just won’t play the game and try Warhammer instead.
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I knew there was something bugging me about Chrome, but I just couldn’t put my finger on it. I finally realized what it is: There’s no menu bar!

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I tried Firefox 3 on Windows and I liked it there, but on the Mac? Bleah. It looks like a bad knockoff of Safari but without the attention to detail that signifies Apple products. A lot of the icons are ugly, and off by just a pixel here or there. You’d think one pixel wouldn’t make that much difference but it does. Plus I actually preferred the traditional Firefox 2 chrome to the Safari style brushed metal widgets.

Plus it’s perceptually much slower than Firefox 2. I’m a 20 WPM typist at best and I’m typing faster than Firefox can enter text into this form. The characters are several words behind where I’m typing about half the time.
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So I hear about this new Twitter thing, think it sounds sort of cool, and decide to try it out. I cruise over to their web site and fill out the registration form, and here’s what I see:

Believe it or not, it won’t accept “Elliotte Rusty Harold” as a name. It gets stuck right before the d. Seems it believes no name can be longer than 20 letters, and “Elliotte Rusty Harold” is 21.
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