Robot.Floss

I love Google, and I am always excited by the products the release. However, I am never impressed with what they release. They create interesting tools and products, but the execution is always sub-par. And their product launches make it apparent that they’re a large collection of engineers with too few designers. But at times they miss the boat completely. For instance, the Google API presumes you will only turn your phone counter-clock wise and never clockwise. I am impressed with the Android platform. But there is no excuse for an idiotic oversight like this. This is an arbitrary restriction that hinders user experience.

If you turn the phone clockwise, Android’s native menus and text will appear upside down. I’ve seen a few applications that do a good decent job of letting you turn the phone clockwise, such as the game Bebbled (a good game by the way), but call up a menu in this position and you’ll see upside-down menus.

I am beta testing Super GNES application for the Android platform. Before I continue, let me say the developers are doing a great job with the project. Now on to the part where Google failed to have foresight. You can play Super GNES in portrait mode or landscape. On the G1 I prefer landscape as it puts the trackball under your right thumb, and your left hand is free to mash the keyboard. But every video game controller since the NES has put the direction pad under your left thumb.

A more natural setup for playing the emulator would be a rotating the phone in to landscape mode clockwise. It would put the trackball under the left thumb, place the volume buttons on the top side of the phone to become the left and right shoulder buttons easily accessible by the index finger of your right hand, and your right thumb could use the onscreen A,B,X,Y buttons.

I asked the SuperGNES dev team about exploring this orientation, and here is the teams:

“There doesn’t appear to be a good way to orient the screen landscape with the track ball on the left. I even took a tour through the android framework source code to see if I could hack something together but wasn’t able to find anything. I can manually orient the screen but stuff like the menu and settings have the wrong orientation which is frustrating to use.”

Popularity: 12% [?]

I have no need to post blogs from my phone, but the capability exists and I must explore it. This morning I downloaded wpToGo and PostBot from the Android market and ran a quick comparison. Screen shots of the two apps would be a great idea. But this is Saturday morning, and I’m not exerting myself to that degree yet.

Setup – Winner: wpToGo
Both programs are easy to setup and support multiple accounts. This is great because you can log in as different users (ex: admin vs your normal account) on the same blog or log in to different blogs completely. Excellent.

wpToGo has a cleaner user interface in general, and for that it wins the setup round. Although, I think the publisher could do well by removing the post options that are not related to setting up the blog. When you setup a blog you’ll be asked to choose how to place images, what size images should be, how they should be aligned, and what resolution they will be displayed. This should be removed from the setup screen and accessed elsewhere instead.

Posting – Winner: wpToGo
Once again the wpToGo UI dominates PostBot. Not only that, but when you first log in wpToGo pulls a list of the most recent posts. In my case it pulled every post back to the start of this blog. PostBot didn’t have this feature, so editing previous entries is out of the question on PostBot, which is a massive miss.

Both editors give you the options to add pictures, categories, and publish or save as a draft. wpToGo goes an extra step and gives buttons for bold, italics, links, block quotes, and tags. Both editors are pure HTML, so you can always manually add tags where needed. Once again wpToGo could do well by removing some of the options, such as adding a picture, from the main layout and moving them under a menu option instead, which is the route PostBot has taken.

Final Verdict: wpToGo wins by a long shot, but its editing screen can take some lessons from PostBot.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Since setting up OS-X on my PC, I’ve had little interest in using XP. And the binary fate that controls the digital universe decided to reinforce my OS-X use by smiting the power supply of my XP machine. I love OS-X, and as I get more comfortable with each aspect of the operating system, I’ve kept track of the things I like and dislike.

Dislike:

• The behavior of the Home and End keys is terrible on Macs if you’re used to Windows. In general though, I feel that the Home and End keys must take the user to the end of the current line. Command + Home/End should take a user to the top of bottom of a document. Even Linux follows this pattern.
• There is no real maximize button in OS-X. Yes, there is a green button that makes the window bigger, but programs never are truly maximized. There needs to be a nice blue button to the right of the green button that forces a program to use every last pixel of available screen real estate. There are times a user doesn’t want to see anything else.
• Application windows can only be resized from the bottom right hand corner. On more than one occasion I’ve used programs that had a height the went well beyond the bounds of the screen. Thankfully, Spaces allows you to effortlessly move application windows from any point to correct this, but it isn’t an intended behavior.
• When a file is selected, pressing the Enter button allows one to rename the file. This should open or launch the file. Poor behavior choice for the Enter key.
• Menu bars are supposed to be easy to access, but for some ill reason Apple has chosen to make the user press Ctrl + F2. They’ve made an affair of one button, in to an affair of two buttons, and there is no reasonable explanation.
• For keyboard shortcuts, the position of the Command button is better than Window’s use of the Control button. But it means when switching between the two operating systems, I’m constantly hitting the short cuts for the the other OS. There needs to be a key emulation option that switches this behavior.

Love:

• I’ve never had a problem with the Windows Taskbar (not counting Vista), but something about the OS-X dock makes me blissful. It is simple and well designed without being over the top.
• The ability to lock system settings. This is great, because if you’re logged in it means another person can’t edit your system preferences without knowing your password. No longer is your system subject to the whims and plots of co-workers, roommates, or housemates.
• The built in GUI utilities, such as ping, trace route, and disk utilities, make life much easier for tech support. Password recovery from the CD is great. And the disk utility is top notch – allowing you to image, partition, and even securely erase hard drives.
• The ability to boot from the CD, or the network, or a target drive, or a thousand other potential options is great. If there is a combination of hardware you want to boot from, OS-X supports it.
• The theme is well thought out. Microsoft had the correct idea with Vista, but then went too far. Vista is the Circus de Soleil, while Leopard is a gorgeous Monet.
• Spaces are great. Extra desktop space is great, and the fact that transitions between the spaces are seamless adds to the experience. Also, adding extra desktops has never been so easy. Click the add row or add column button, and viola.
• Dashboard’s beauty is that you never have to look at it you chose so, unlike Vista which forces everything to be in sight. While you’re waiting for the long installation to complete or process to finish compiling, you can spent your time watching Panda Cam, exploring Wikipedia, playing poker, and getting weather updates.
• Bringing a Windows machine in and out of sleep takes as long as shutting the system down and booting it up. But Apple has made sleep such an effortless action, that sleep is an option that is viable. I find it fun.
• Built in Spellcheck. Enough said.
• Installing programs is rarely more complicated than dragging and dropping an icon. And the process is much more uniform than the thousands of countless installers of Windows programs. A standard look, feel, and behavior for normal OS tasks is a must have.

Other Things:

• The way the mouse moves. At first I disliked the way the mouse moved. Now I love it, because it borders on giving the feeling of tactile feedback.
• The Mighty Mouse, though pretty, is a horrendous little mouse. The trackball is two small, and often staff I encounter who have a MM are unaware that it has both a left and a right click, due to the complete lack of visual clarification.
• Also, the Mighty Mouse is based on more of a lever than button design. Since the top edge of the mouse is curved, any excess cord that brushes the mouse will block clicking action.

Popularity: 5% [?]

vLite is a great tool I recently found that lets you trim down the size of your Vista distributions by removing unwanted components. I’ve been messing around with it for a few days at home. It is easy to use, has a great interface, and is free. What else could you ask for?

There is no need for me to bore you with every feature available, because if you want to add/remove/configure it vLite has a way for it. To quote the vLite website:

“Main features are:

• hotfix, language pack and driver integration
• component removal
• unattended setup
• tweaks
• split/merge Vista installation CDs
• create ISO and burn bootable CD/DVD”

Popularity: 1% [?]