The Zero Room

Someone's done a really nice home usability test on Ubuntu 8.04, using his girlfriend as the experiment. Apart from the good old-fashioned flame-bait value of this, I'm finding usability studies increasingly fascinating. From my own experience, it's remarkably common to find features that seem an obvious good idea from one point of view can be intimidatingly bewildering from another (and often I'm the bewildered one).

For example, I have one website that allows anonymous users to post content, although for obvious reasons each post has to be approved by an administrator. When content is submitted, the user is redirected to the site's front page, and gets a message in a little box with a different background colour to the rest of the page, telling them that their post is awaiting approval. Clear enough, you may think. However I got some feedback today from a user saying that the site is broken, because every time they try to post anything, all they get is an error message. You might say that the user should at least stop to read the message, but on the other hand something is wrong from a usability point of view if a message telling the user that everything is working perfectly fine looks at first glance like an error message. Usability is hard.

This appears to be a technology demonstration (requires Adobe Flash), but the intended purpose of the technology is a mystery to me, as I can't read Japanese.

Poor Sony. It's as though they're deliberately setting out to upset as many people as possible.

The latest scandal is their generous offer to remove "bloatware" (or more properly, "craplets"), the software you never asked for, but which you get whenever you buy a new computer. Software vendors typically pay hardware vendors handsome sums to add partially functional "lite" or time-limited trial versions of their software to the systems they ship. The idea is that instead of being incensed by having to manually remove all this awful software, you will instead be so impressed with it that you'll want to pay money for the non-crippled versions.

Sony heard the cries of aggrieved customers over this practice, and very generously offered to charge it's customers $50 for the service of not delivering the software they never wanted in the first place. Predictably (to anybody not on the Sony payroll), this has gone down about as well as many of Sony's previous initiatives.

Sensing yet another customer backlash, Sony has acted swiftly to pour oil on this fire, by gamely admitting their mistake and offering to waive the fee for this "optimization", but it's still only available to customers who pay for the $100 Windows Vista Business Edition Upgrade. Can't you feel the love and respect for their home suckers... er customers?

Robin 'Roblimo" Miller has an interesting bit of flamebait over at Linux.com, talking about why it's so hard to switch operating systems or desktop environments withing the one operating system. His point seems to be that our deeply-held preferences are established by first impressions (or even chance), then entrenched by habit, no matter how vigorously we might argue that we have a rational basis for them.

I'm not sure I agree with him; GNOME is a better desktop environment than KDE; both are easier to use than the WIndows or Mac user interface; nano is a sensible choice for a programmer's text editor, because... ah... okay, maybe he's got me there. ^O ^X

In the lead-up to Document Freedom Day, a couple of interesting articles related to Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) format have surfaced.

OOXML is currently being proposed as a standard at the International Organisation for standardization (ISO), widely seen as push by Microsoft to dethrone the already-ISO-approved OpenDocument Format, and a decision on OOXML's status is expected from the ISO by the end of the month.

Tim Bray, the co-author of the XML specification has offered his thoughts on the pros and cons of Microsoft's proposed standard. As he is understandably anxious about being misrepresented or quoted out of context, i stongly recommend reading his piece in full, but here is my understanding (I stress my understanding) of what he's saying:

On it's own merits, OOXML is not a particularly good format, but neither is it as bad as it could be. The problem is that if it is approved by the ISO, Microsoft will use this as a propaganda weapon against the existing and technically superior standard. Microsoft has already made as many concessions to openness as they are likely to ever make just to get the format this close to standardisation, so there looks like is nothing to be gained from actually approving it, and no downside to rejecting it.

On a related note, one of the benefits said to have arisen from the standardisation process is the "Microsoft Open Specification Promise:", a covenant not to sue third parties for developing software that implements a number of Microsoft technologies, including OOXML, which may (or may not - software patent holders are notoriously cagey about specifics) be covered by patents held by Microsoft. The Software Freedom Law Centre has just published an analysis that suggests Microsoft's benevelolent gesture is indeed no more than a gesture, and third-party software developers who try to make software that interoperates with Microsoft's software are in practical terms not significantly safer from legal action than they ever were.

"Four species of penguins that breed in Antartica are endangered by global warming," notes Richard Stallman. "Even I, the only man in the world who can get angry from looking at a picture of a penguin, find this bad news."

If it's any consolation, the gnu has apparently increased in number from 100,000 in 1950 to 1.5 million. According to Wikipedia, the collective noun for a herd of gnus is 'implausibility'. This means something; I'm sure of it.

Just a reminder: you can help the other implausible GNU (and indirectly, that blasted penguin), by joining the Free Software Foundation. I finally did so this year, and ever since I have experienced a tremendous sense of tranquility and well-being. I now radiate a dazzling aura of geeky freedom, every Windows computer I walk past BSODs (although that may just be coincidence), and choirs of free software angels herald my arrival wherever I go. It's really cool.

It's a shade off a hundred minutes in length, but Lullabot Drupal podcast no. 38 is the most fun I've had since the last LugRadio podcast. A contentious litany of Drupal modules that have outlived their usefulness, or soon will, thanks to CCK and Views, I found myself almost punching the air in delight at how many of the more contentious declarations I agreed with. Just days earlier, I had been trying, and failing, to come up with a justification for the continued use for the taxonomy module, so it was gratifying to hear Jeff Eaton declare that in his opinion it's days are numbered. He pointed out that you can do most of what Taxonomy does using CCK text fields, but I'm surprised nobody talked about terms-as-nodes, using node reference fields, which to me seems an obviously good idea that allows you to retain a heirarchical taxonomy structure, "related terms" and what-not in a more flexible manner.

Moshe Weitzman has written a brilliant article about the site he put together for the New York Observer, eschewing the Scheduler, Scheduled Actions, and Workflow modules for a hand-rolled CCK and Views solution. He declares "CCK has arrived, and helps us build sites quickly, and change them easily". Hear, Hear!

On the topic of modules that should be led behind a screen and shot, I've just finished one site, and am painfully progressing through development of another using the Drupal E-Commerce modules, and I have vowed to never do so again. Which means that I either never do another E-Commerce site (which I wouldn't shed any tears over), use another set of modules which are bound to have similar problems due to the difficulty of devising a general solution to problems that are in the real world so very particular, or use CCK and Views. The last of these seems to me almost a viable solution. In theory, e-commerce modules should give you a convenient one-size-fits-all solution, but in practice I'm unlikely to find a customer whose needs can be met by anything out-of-the-box, so I'm either going to hack or extend somebody else's code, or spend the same amount of effort putting something together using CCK and Views. I'm willing to put money on the latter option being more maintainable in the long term.

Just got my copy of Pro Drupal Development in the post. Very exciting. The first chapter has just been published as an article on Dr Dobbs. I hope nobody minds if I quote at length from the forward by Dries Buytaert, because I think it says everything:

"... on January 15, 2001, I made Drupal available as Free Software.

Haven't blogged here for a while, so I thought I should mention for the record that I think this is a development of world-shaking importance, in order to in future gloat about how precient I am.