Category: Interfaces

Here’s the panel listing of SXSW Interactive. Pretty typical. Most other conferences do basically the same thing.  But it’s totally wrong. It doesn’t list speakers or more importantly, the room number for each panel.

Is this too much information? Sure! But the loss in usability is outweighed by its sheer convenience of having all the information  on a single page.  I’m printing this page out, but without page numbers, it is practically useless.  Now, each view of the schedule and panels is incomplete, requiring several clicks.  This is wrong, plain wrong.

This typifies the thinking of web developers, especially those writing for database-backed sites. It’s expensive to put all this information on a single page–all those database calls. Never mind the sheer convenience of having all this information in a single view!  Also, the page includes banners and navigation bars at the side; Who really needs that? This is a case where a printable PDF would be exactly what is called for.

Bruce Eckel complains about PDF

Another thing that makes me worry about Adobe: Acrobat has always been very slow to start up; it’s one of the painful things about using the product. But Adobe has never, apparently, felt the need to speed it up, even when there has been (apparently for several years) at least one addon tool that speeds up your Acrobat startup, the Adobe Reader SpeedUp. I’ve used this for a year or two and it’s been great; it’s really reduced the pain of using Acrobat. So if someone can write a tool that, from the outside without the source code, can manipulate Acrobat and speed it up, why wouldn’t Adobe improve their own product to be faster? It’s no wonder I’m concerned about what will happen to Flash.

BTW, I downloaded that acrobat reader speedup tool. Seems to work fine.

Abe Fettig writes:

I�m interested in switching away from Cingular wireless, so today I went to verizon.com to look for some info on their wireless plans. Clicking the Wireless link on the home page brought me to this page, which tells me to go to www.verizonwireless.com to learn about Verizon�s wireless offerings. But when I clicked the link to verizonwireless.com, it popped up a new window instead of taking me directly there. They�re using target=�_blank�. Thank you, Verizon, for keeping me from foolishly leaving verizon.com. After all, verizonwireless.com is a different site, and apparently the concept of a link to anywhere outside verizon.com makes Verizon a little uncomfortable. They�re willing to acknowledge that under certain circumstances a person might wish to have a second site up in their browser in addition to verizon.com, but they certainly aren�t going to facilitate anyone�s leaving verizon.com (even when the destination is another Verizon site).

It�s a little thing, but it�s a telling example of the kind of cluelessness and lack of attention to detail that seems to characterize phone companies.

Fettig wrote a book on Twisted, a networking framework written in python.