And for comparison sake, here’s the edited version of the post:

WordPress and Android

I discovered that there is an android app for working with a WordPress blog and it seems to work pretty well. However, as with all tablet apps the real limitation is in input. I’m attempting to use Nuance voice recognition here, and in some sense it is working surprisingly well; although it requires me to keep tapping the screen to add a new sentence after every time I pause. I have to figure out if there some way to correct the voice recognition and to learn from my mistakes as with the desktop version of Dragon. However, the voice recognition is surprisingly good; and I would rate it about on par with the desktop version albeit someone easier to use. It definitely seems superior to the version of Dragon for the Mac, and maybe on par with the version for Windows

P.S. I am deliberately leaving a lot of mistakes in place so you can see just how good this is or is not.

Bottom Line: This is actually sufficient for writing a first draft of a text heavy, formatting poor post ; but it’s not a replacement for real keyboard.

Update: editing on the tablet is really painful. I think I’ll have to go back to keyboard for that.

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?

The connection has timed out

The server at online.wamu.com is taking too long to respond.

• The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few
  moments.
• If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer’s network
  connection.
• If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure
  that Firefox is permitted to access the Web.

Sadly, I can’t think of a single local bank that’s likely to do better than this.

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.

To make matters worse when I attempt to e-mail a bug report I get this error:

And again I can’t copy and paste the text of the error dialog. When are we going to figure out that all text on the screen should be able to be easily copied without taking a screenshot and typing it all in again?

File. Edit, Help, all those useful things we’ve learned to depend on: they’re gone. Instead, there are a couple of non-standard icons hiding in the right hand corner, off to the side of the location bar. At least they had little down arrows to indicate they might be menus. Otherwise I never would have found them.

I’m not surprised to see this “innovation” coming from a company that seems to believe the only purpose of a desktop GUI is to connect you to the cloud and then get out of the way. After all this leaves an extra 15 vertical pixels or so for the web site to use for its own purposes. Nonetheless, this feels like a step backwards. Menus, and menu bars at the top of the screen, are an improvement over the old way of doing things. I do believe that web applications need better support for menu bars. Perhaps there should be a way for a web app such as Google Docs to tell the browser it wants to take control of the regular menu bar (though the security and UI implications of that would be thorny). However completely eliminating the menu bar is a step backwards. Here’s hoping Google fixes this when they release the Mac version.

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.

Firefox 3 was supposed to only remember passwords after you’d successfully logged in, but on Mozilla’s own Add-Ons site, that’s not working. It asked me to remember a failed password.

Always Remember Password no longer works, but these instructions I found on the Web might:

Always remember password hack for Firefox 3

If you’re on Firefox 3 you can just edit your Firefox installation to get the “Always remember password feature” without having to run some JavaScript code on every page load:

• Shutdown Firefox
• Backup the file PATH_TO_YOUR_FIREFOX_INSTALLATION/components/nsLoginManager.js.
• Edit PATH_TO_YOUR_FIREFOX_INSTALLATION/components/nsLoginManager.js with your favorite text editor and find the following lines:

  Code:

              if (element && element.hasAttribute("autocomplete") &&
                  element.getAttribute("autocomplete").toLowerCase() == "off")
                  return true;

  On the GNU/Linux version of Firefox 3 Beta 5 this code is inside the private method _isAutocompleteDisabled, on the Windows version of Firefox 3 Beta 5 this code can be found inside the local helper function autocompleteDisabled which is part of the private method _onFormSubmit.

  To let Firefox password manager always remember passwords those “autocompleteDisabled”-methods have to always return the value false.

  All you have to do to achieve this is remove the lines above or comment them out like this:

  //            if (element && element.hasAttribute("autocomplete") &&
  //                element.getAttribute("autocomplete").toLowerCase() == "off")
  //                return true;

• Save your changes and close the editor.
• Restart Firefox – Firefox password manager should now always remember passwords ignoring the autocomplete=”off” attribute.

Plus Firefox still hasn’t learned some basic principles of the human interface guidelines, like “If a menu item brings up a dialog instead of taking immediate action, its label ends in …” or that icons do not change the left alignment of menu item labels:

Can I have Firefox 2 back please? There’s a theme that tries to make Firefox 3 look like Firefox 2, but why the hell do they want me to login to get it? Once I install this theme, Firefox 3 is better, but still not quite right. Some of the fonts are still a little off.

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.

This is supposed to be the future of the Web? More like the past of bad user interface design. If one of my students made this sort of mistake, I’d take three points off their homework and make them do it over. When a majorly hyped Web 2.0 app like Twitter makes it, I get seriously worried.

Of course, it’s not like I haven’t seen this before.

Credit Ford Motor Co. CEO Alan Mulally with saving the leader of the free world from self-immolation.

Mulally told journalists at the New York auto show that he intervened to prevent President Bush from plugging an electrical cord into the hydrogen tank of Ford’s hydrogen-electric plug-in hybrid at the White House last week. Ford wanted to give the Commander-in-Chief an actual demonstration of the innovative vehicle, so the automaker arranged for an electrical outlet to be installed on the South Lawn and ran a charging cord to the hybrid. However, as Mulally followed Bush out to the car, he noticed someone had left the cord lying at the rear of the vehicle, near the fuel tank.

“I just thought, ‘Oh my goodness!’ So, I started walking faster, and the President walked faster and he got to the cord before I did. I violated all the protocols. I touched the President. I grabbed his arm and I moved him up to the front,” Mulally said. “I wanted the president to make sure he plugged into the electricity, not into the hydrogen This is all off the record, right?”

OK. So our illustrious leaders are a few homeworks short of a gentleman’s C, and I’m not too surprised that a major CEO would think they can’t be trusted to figure out which end of the car to plug an extension cord into. However here’s my question:

Just what the hell is Ford doing building a car that can blow up and kill people if some random idiot (or the President of the United States) sticks the plug into the wrong hole?

Cars are off-the-shelf consumer products, albeit expensive ones. They’re dangerous enough when moving. Nothing a user can do with one when it’s standing still should have any possibility of killing the so-called leader of the free world, no matter how big an idiot he is.

If it’s really possible to immolate one’s self and various bystanders by sticking an extension cord into the fuel tank, then there’s a major design flaw in Ford’s Airstream Concept. If this isn’t fixed before they go to market, this is going to make the Ford Pinto fiasco look like a problem with the chrome logo falling off in a bad rain.

Perhaps it’s a temporary glitch. I notice I can’t log into my account there right now either:

We’re sorry!

An error occurred when we tried to process your request. Rest assured, we’re working to resolve the problem as soon as possible. If you were trying to make a purchase, please check Your Account to confirm that the order was placed. We apologize for the inconvenience.

The Mac isn’t perfect by any means. I could say a few unkind words about its file copying too. However, problems crop up a lot less often there than they do on Windows.

The Linux community mostly doesn’t even try. These days they’re pretty much all amateurs when it comes to user interface design. The pros all left when Eazel closed shop, and the money spout got turned off. As a rule, talented kernel hackers and server optimizers do not make great designers. However, Microsoft still has the money spout flowing. Can’t they hire somebody who knows what they’re doing?

On the plus side, at least the Aero dialogs look pretty, not the crayon colored monstrosities XP offered. I suspect this time around Microsoft hired a real artist to design the look and feel. That’s important, but it’s still just skin deep. The user interaction design is much more important than the graphic design, and here Microsoft is still sucking wind.