Nearly a year ago I hired a bright young man by the name of Will Sutton. Over the course of the following months Will and I made this – the official Saint Louis University iPhone App. (Which you are most welcome to download at iphone.slu.edu)

Will initially started from scratch, learning Objective-C and his way around XCode. Even more impressive was the fact that he really never used a Mac much before.

Like a fish to water he quickly had a rough prototype up and running. It was serviceable, but very, shall we say, rickety.

Then we were alerted to the existence of a great open-source app framework created at West Virgina University by then student Jared Crawford.

Will set about updating the framework with SLU specific data sources. We had to meet with legal, create icons and vet our data sources for reliability. With Jared’s awesome framework we were able to quickly turn around a tight first release of what I’m sure will be a vital asset to any SLU student.

Meanwhile the IT department was preparing to launch a mobile portal for some of the very same services. Like some superhero wonder group we joined forces and released our apps simultaneously. Being web-based their app has a much larger reach, but our app allows us to perform some hardware specific feats.

Our next step is to squash a few 1.0 bugs, update the app for the new Retina display and start adding additional features like dining information and athletic reports.

You can read more about the apps from this nice press release.

I’m totally digging the Hipstamatic app for the iPhone. It’s a recreation of a camera developed in the great wilderness of Wisconsin in the early 80s by two brothers. The whole story is being kept alive by the older brother of the two Hipstamatic creators.

The app is very slick and plays a great homage to the cheap all-plastic cameras of yore. With the tiny viewfinder, different films and lenses and the always different results it’s a blast to watch your photos ‘develop’.

The best thing about the app for me is the high-pitched whirring of the flash when you turn it on. Perfect.

Gruber:

It’s a demo of a concept. I’d wager money that we’ll never see an actual product from Microsoft that works like this.

I think the Courier demo is really, really neat. Watching that video makes me want one, now. Unfortunately it will never be as cool as what we’re seeing in these videos.

That’s a big difference between Apple and other tech companies. They demo a product a few months before it ships, in it’s near final form. Microsoft announces products years beforehand and by the time it arrives it’s behind the curve.

What I’ve learned from interacting with most computer users, though, is that they do not give a rat’s ass about how computers work. They want to accomplish certain tasks, and will do this in the way that is most sensible and direct for them. And the way they end up accomplishing these tasks within the multitasking window motif is typically not the way I would do it.

The question being asked is ‘Who’s fault is this?’

Some would argue that it’s users fault, people don’t care enough or aren’t interested in learning more about how technology works. Others say that developers are to blame for making technology far too complicated.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently myself, we just finished a re-design of our website at work and I’ll soon be launching a mobile application as well. Both of these projects have very specific UI requirements and both projects have generated numerous hours of discussion and deliberation on how to most appropriately display our content.

So when we flip the switch and share our creations with the masses, who’s to blame when people are confused or upset?

My friend Tim and I have been busting each others chops over Apple vs Microsoft in regard to their differentiating paradigms of window management. As he told me once, “I don’t know how many times I’ve sat down at a public use Mac in a lab somewhere with all windows closed but 15 apps running.”

And he’s right, this is very confusing. And it’s coming from Apple, a company lauded for their slick user experiences. Who’s to blame?

Anecdotal Side Story

I know a professional who uses a computer for a large portion of her job. She sits in front of her computer the entire day. She’s not a power user, but the tasks she has on her plate all revolve around the daily use of various programs. Info management systems, email, browsing the web, web content creation, to name a few.

What’s interesting is how he interfaces with the computer. She uses her mouse rotated 180 degrees so that the buttons are at the bottom. Somehow, at some point in the past she sat down and started using a computer this way. She uses her fingers to grip the bottom edge of the mouse and clicks the ‘right’ button for  a left-click.

Is she doing it wrong? Why does she do this? Who, if anyone, taught her? Who’s ‘fault’ is it that she does this?

There’s no harm in how she’s doing it. There’s no advantage to teach her how to do it differently. There’s nothing gained professionally if she learns a new way.

As I’ve grown older and entered the world of professionals I have realized that all those dry cut things we were taught growing up are much more fuzzy.

Politics, bureaucracy, limitation of resources, available time  - all contribute to the mired relationship of technology and people. Everyone is to blame/no one is to blame.

It’s a series of large and small events that cascade to to the present situation. How we deal with it moving forward is the interesting part.

I’ve got this great idea. Or so I thought.

A game, where everything is truly interactive. You can pick up anything, move anything with enough force. Now, a game with such open endedness will have a huge problem. How will the player know how to forward the game?

Just imaging that you awoke one day in the very room you sit in now, but you have no memory of where you’re at. you’d start to look around for clues, but where would you start?

That’s where actor controlled NPC’s (non-playable characters) come into play. These actors would be hired by the game company to ‘posess’ NPC’s to help move the story along. Each time would be different, each reacting to your actions/responses to thier input. Since they are hired by the company, they have a vested interest in seeing the continuity of the story progress.

(I’ve had this in my draft folder for far too long. Post or get off the pot – as they say.)

Photo by B Tal – Licensed under Creative Commons

It’s been a crazy past few weeks. I meant to write about this sooner, but haven’t found the time.

The site not only looks a thousand times better (Bryce!) but the slick new navigation (Mark and Robert!) and the awesome content (Amy!) make this something I’m really proud to have worked on.

Here’s some of my personal favorite things we’ve added:

Consistent Left-hand Navigation – We now have highlighting of the current page you’re on (the little red arrow) and a nestled view of sub-pages. This looks much cleaner and is also a lot easier to navigate.

On the content creation side our users now have a clear understanding of how their site is organized and how to manage their content.

More space (wider layout)

We increased the width of the site by 25% giving us more space for content. Video can now be embedded at full SD resolution and pictures can now be much larger to boot. Along with a consistent placement of our navigation we no longer have to munge content around the right-hand navigation found in the previous design.

Flexible framework – We can now develop new interactive elements

We’re already starting to add new ‘widgets’ to the content of our page. Things like what you see in the screenshot above. News tickers, embedded video carousels, instant response polls, you name it. All due to the new framework we’re using to display our content.

We’re not done adding additional features; like a new search engine, custom departmental banners and a mobile stylesheet!

Thanks again to everyone involved and for those who let me be a part of it. It feels good to be proud of one’s work.

After an apropos search on Twitter about the error I came across this tweet.

rbieber: @frumpa thats odd. This time I entered the password first (where focus defaults) and then username and authenticated fine. Bug?

A quick test confirmed that the order in which you enter your credentials for secondary accounts is a bug.  It appears  you need to enter your password first and then your username.

If this doesn’t make any sense, see the video below.

I should mention despite this small bug I’m enjoying Tweetie very much and am sure the developers will remedy this. Most likely right after I hit the Publish button.

Update: Well pretty close, atebits updated Tweetie today to 1.0.2, which fixes this problem.

At first I thought the weekly dump of my tweets would be something useful and interesting.  Not only to myself, but to anyone who stumbles across this site.  (Hi Mom!)

After having it up and automagically posting for a month, it looks ugly and has no real value.  If you want to follow my small bursts of wit and random links, follow me on twitter.

Side note;  The Weekly Updates are the most trafficked articles on the site.  I have no idea why.

What on earth is up with this dialog box?  This is from the most recent version of Dreamweaver CS4!

That pinstripe did not age well.

Update: John Nack from Adobe mentions a simpler solution for this particular menu behavior.

CS4 brings back the joy of the default ‘Show all Menu Items”.  As I’ve previously written when CS3 came out, there is a way to manually modify the Edit>Menu options to enable all menu items to be displayed.  It’s kinda lame that they enable this by default and offer no simple one-click solution to show all menu items.

I’m happy to report that my custom menu file works in CS4 just as well.  Just double-click the Everything_on.mnu file and Photoshop will launch, putting the settings into place.*

<rant>

As to why Adobe has this default probably goes into issues designing the interface of a complex application.  By hiding what they believe to be the least used items, it makes things appear simpler.

However, as a professional application I find this to be a bit oxymoronish.  Why not prompt the user on first run with a simple series of questions.

What do you plan on doing with Photoshop?

1. I’m new here, just the basics
2. Oh, you know, family photos, work on my personal site
3. I’m a web guy, I usually start from scratch
4. I’m a professional pixel wrangler, show me everything

Ok, while that’s by no means an ideal set of default options I hope you get the gist of what I’m trying to say.

Ask the user, don’t make assumptions and then make it possible to easily show all menu items.

</rant>

*With my limited testing this didn’t effect palettes or keyboard shortcuts, but YMMV.