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I feel that we’ve reached an interesting point in software design as web applications become more interactive. Regardless of what the UI guidelines for your given platform detail, the real goals of design as I see it are:

• Familiarity: Is the user able to use your application by leveraging existing knowledge learned from other applications?
• Simplicity: Do you really need those 50 checkboxes of options for your advanced search?
• Ease of Use: Does a user need a manual to use your program?

I don’t believe that UI guideline conformance belongs on this list of design goals, and here’s why: With more and more content being delivered as web applications, the rules of design have changed because what the user is most familiar with is their browser and the web applications they routinely use. I feel that desktop software currently still has the best potential to deliver the best user experience, but I also feel that web applications are often kicking the butt of desktop applications in terms of the above three metrics.

And what I’m seeing is that the programs who throw out conventional desktop application design can often yield a better experience. A few quick examples: Delicious Library, NetNewsWire 3, Coda, and iLife. These applications use custom interface elements for portions of the program because they provide a more familiar and simpler way of presenting and interacting with “data.”

What’s interesting to note is that none of these programs are without competition. In fact I knew someone with a Delicious Library-like application that was released before Delicious Library, and it followed the UI standards down to the button. However, that application never took off while Delicious Library quickly became an extremely popular application and sparked the “delicious” revolution in many developers’ imaginations.

Let’s take a closer look at an application that I recently replaced with a web app: NetNewsWire. It’s interesting because I had a draft of an article talking about this mentality change after I had switched from NetNewsWire to Google Reader. The reason? Two-fold actually — the syncing feature in NetNewsWire didn’t work that great, and I preferred the simplistic UI of Google Reader over NetNewsWire’s three-pane approach. After beginning writing the post, I noticed NetNewsWire 3 was announced. I must confess I haven’t retested syncing, but the interface: it now offers a similar interface to that of Google Reader!

I find this progression interesting, because I know NetNewsWire wasn’t the only RSS reader that used the three-pane approach. While I won’t claim that these programs copied Google Reader or Blogline’s UI, I find it interesting that the default implementation of how the “web guys” solved it has become the best UI on a desktop application. To this extent, I believe designing your program as if you were going to make it a web application may inspire new ways at solving information display issues.

Common user interface guidelines are good for certain things like forms or dialogs. However when designing the core portion of your application, try to be creative and solve the problem in the best way imaginable.

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Last night Erin and I watched Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth and we both thought it was a great movie. It’s very interesting to watch, and although I never have questioned global warming, I hadn’t seen all of the evidence in a neatly wrapped up hour and a half information binge.

I don’t believe I have anyone reading this blog that doesn’t agree that global warming is an issue. I’m a little surprised there is such a large debate about it, actually. This is one of many situations that I feel embarrassed to be an American because of our country’s position on the subject. We need to reform not for our own sake (although some experts will say that it is for our own sake), but for future generations’ sake.

What’s the solution? I don’t think there’s any one solution. One that I’ve been in favor of is raising the gas taxes. Sure, I spend quite a bit on gas each month already (over $100), and I wouldn’t enjoy paying $200 per month instead. However, I would enjoy knowing that by doubling the cost of gas would burden owners of inefficient vehicles to reconsider their transportation. This would have two effects: it would create a larger demand for higher efficiency vehicles (or alternative fuel vehicles), and threaten the gas-guzzling SUV market, and hopefully increase our desire to find ways to cut back on fuel consumption such as car pooling, public transportation, etc. Of course there’s the issue of what to do with this additional tax revenue, but that’s another issue entirely — it certainly shouldn’t be going back to the oil companies.

What else? LED lighting I believe is the answer. Sure the compact fluorescent lights are gaining popularity, but there are concerns over the mercury content in the bulbs and how that will affect the environment once they finally do burn out. LED lighting have an even higher efficiency level and don’t have the same concerns, from what I’ve read. If a majority of US households started adopting high efficiency lighting, it can also have a large impact.

Of course while I can do these things and more, if we don’t have the cooperation and participation of large companies to help reduce their carbon level, we can only go so far. While I have no hope for the current administration to do much right in this next year and a half, I will certainly be voting for someone who agrees that this is a problem and wants to solve it in a rapid manner.

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This is a pretty cool application that was released recently: Camouflage. It is for Mac OS X and will hide all of your desktop icons, and with an assignable hotkey, show your desktop icons. This is perfect for people like me who never keep their desktop clean, but like the look of it when it is. Now I can just hide and show my mess! It’s like hiding things underneath your bed again!

It being free is the added bonus.

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iUseThis is an interesting site. It’s similar to VersionTracker or MacUpdate, but offers a different metric to judge an application on: the number of active users. You begin by saying “I use this” to whatever applications you use regularly, and you can hunt for new applications as they are updated by seeing what other applications are popular. One would say that a measurement of popularity isn’t necessarily of quality, but an odd phenomenon occurs on the Mac: People tend to only use things they enjoy using, or there are no other options.

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Well, unfortunately I didn’t attend this year due to everything going on around here, but I certainly read up on everyone’s comments and the announcements, and I have to say things are pretty … much the same as last year.

Ok, I know there were a few holdouts, but nothing worth holding back IMHO. Stacks — sure, they’re cool and I’ll use them to simplify my dock even further. Reflective dock? Ok, spiffy, but useful? Not in the least bit. Reworked Finder? Ok, now we’re talking, but it certainly isn’t Earth-shattering.

But really, I’m a little bit disappointed. I mean I’m still looking forward to Leopard, but I guess I let my hopes get up that there was something major being hidden. In reality, it seems like a lot of the same stuff as last year.

What was everyone else’s reaction?

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Well, not quite. I’m writing this as Erin has taken over driving back to Austin. Last Saturday after a wonderful afternoon at Zilker Park with my mother and both brothers, my mom and I were pulling out of our parking space at the park when she received a call. She answered it, answered “Jon’s with me,” and a few moments later was in tears — I knew what had happened, my grandfather passed away.

He hadn’t been doing well the past couple weeks, or really the past few years. To some extent, everyone was prepared but even so it is hard whenever it happens. I re-parked the car and let my two brothers know the news, and we went home after picking up Erin from work.

I know planning a wedding can be hectic, especially after watching a few episodes of Bridezilla (Erin was watching it, I swear!). However, planning a funeral in Kansas with family living in Alaska, Texas, Utah, Minnesota, and several other states in the matter of a few days is hectic. My mother and I were ready to go pack and start driving about 5 different times until we finally left on Monday afternoon.

Erin’s parents were also in town, and I was recalling how “I was at the park a few days ago.” I then realized that it was Sunday and I had been at the park the day before. It was a long day Saturday.

The memorial service was yesterday. It was a very nice service. Erin sang two songs, and I accompanied her on one. While a sad occasion, it was a great two days for the entire family with nearly everyone gathering and telling stories. I even saw some relatives that I hadn’t seen in nearly ten years.

But as with all trips they come to an end all to early. We said our goodbyes, and have been driving since.

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My mom and I have had a horrendous time with airfare the past few months. Combined, we’ve spent over $600 because of using miles rewards, causing us to barely save any money and stress out over arrangements. Let’s go back to the beginning.

My mom is a grade school principal and was wanting to fly here over her spring break. She had enough miles to get this ticket for free (aka $5). Good to go.

But then one day she tore her meniscus, and was in too much pain to come. She called up can cancelled the ticket. To get her miles back into the account: $100.

A few days later she booked a new ticket to Dallas instead — my sister is a Pediatrician and one of her friends is an orthopedic surgeon that would give mom and MRI and a look-over on the house. $5 for the ticket, $100 for the “expedited” purchase.

She misgauged her pain tolerance and just couldn’t go through with the flight. She cancelled the fare again and out another $100.

Finally. she booked another fare to come out here this past week and the lady on the phone told her they had only overnight flights available for the flight down. She had been on the phone long enough that she decided to take it.

Later she investigated and found out that she could get a flight that was during the day, so she booked that one way ticket and called up American to see what she had to do to make sure she still had her return flight (she just didn’t want the departure flight). It turns out that if you don’t show up for your departure flight, they will cancel your return flight. So, she had to spend another $100 to get the miles back in her account, and for some strange reason she had to pay the entire 50,000 miles to rebook the one way return flight. Talk about a deal! Get your original return flight for $100 more and the same miles cost!

I had 20,600 miles on American, and she needed a flight from Austin to Wichita to visit my grandparents. I had a couple of choices: pay the $350 to book a one way flight, pay $150 + $30 (transaction fee) to buy the 5,000 miles needed, or have my brother transfer the miles ($50 + $30). He decided to transfer the miles, and I booked the fare: Total cost $85. Good deal.

Then on Saturday my grandfather passed away. Had this been a regular fare, they would have cancelled it with no fees because of an immediate family member loss (from what the reservation agent said), but all mileage awards still needed $100 to return the miles to my account. Additionally, rebooking in my wife’s name instead (I was originally going to drive my mom up immediately to Kansas) would cost another $100 to “expedite” the transaction. We finally decided we would wait until today to drive up and just everyone go.

So here I am in the back of a minivan after deciding not to spend yet another $100 to get a ticket, driving up to Kansas. We’ve wasted over $600 in fees for circumstances beyond our control. Add to that the cost of spending an extra $10-$20 to pick your mileage airline for some fares, and it seems to me that in some unpredictable situations, frequent flyer miles just aren’t that great. I know that they are great for some people because the mileage racks up quickly over frequent business trips, but for the casual 4-5 times a year flyer, the program may end up costing more than it’s worth, which makes sense because the airlines wouldn’t have a program they weren’t making money from.

I’m not here to say you shouldn’t use frequent flyer miles and programs, but rather that you should at least consider how much you’re really saving in doing so — it may not be worth it.

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This next week is going to be fun, yet busy. My mom flew into Dallas this past weekend to spend a few days with my sister, and this afternoon I’m driving up to Dallas to spend the night with everyone there. Tomorrow I’ll be driving back here with my mom and eating dinner at a cookout at my brother’s. Friday, Erin’s parents get into town, but will be driving up to Dallas in the evening for a wedding, and they’ll be back Sunday.

Both my mom and Erin’s parents are leaving on Wednesday. I’m not sure what all we’re going to be doing other than spending time together, but I’m looking forward to taking a couple days off to relax.

We also just made the switch to all cellular, which is kind of funny considering what it took to get back to this point. When I bought this house last year, Time Warner offered an all in one bundle for IP Phone, Cable, and internet for lower than I was paying for cable and internet, so I took the 12 month discount. Well, the 12 months expired a couple months ago, and despite my original intentions of not using the IP Phone, it became our most used phone and we had switched to prepaid cellular.

But, now that it’s not discounted anymore it just doesn’t make sense anymore. I’ve called Time Warner and they gave my account a one time $10 discount, but that hardly does much to satisfy my needs. So we went through WireFly.com (highly recommended based on my experience with them) and got a Cingular family plan. So far, so good. I got a Sony Ericsson W810i which I’ve been enjoying. The camera is decent and hopefully will lead to more pictures being taken by me, a hobby I’ve always been interested in but lamented carrying an extra device around.

So now Erin and I are considering not only dropping the phone but also cable. We are interested in some shows such as Top Chef (starting this week!), The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report, and perhaps a couple others. Picking piecemeal though iTunes, we can easily get by on less than 30 bucks a month for the programming we want, and no chance for us to sit and ‘veg’ out in front of the TV. Save money and have more motivation to go do stuff? Sounds like a no brainer

Anyone else do this? What has your experience been?

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I emailed Steve Wozniak the same day of listening to the ending of his book iWoz, which I mentioned was a very inspirational in my post Engineering as an Art. I decided to let him know that I enjoyed his book and how inspirational it was to me. After a month of no response, I had basically decided that he probably had at least skimmed it, but being very busy probably didn’t have time to respond.

And this morning I woke up to a short email thanking me for my email. It’s a great feeling to hear back from someone of such high prestige, even if it’s only a few sentences. What a good way to start a day

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So I’ve been wanting to post a lot of things that haven’t been purely REALbasic related, going on various subjects such as politics, math, science, music, life in general, etc, but until now I’ve resisted. But I shall not resist anymore, and some of you may or may not like that

I know the benefits for readers when more than one blog is available is that they can pick and choose what to read by simply subscribing to the individual topical blogs. However, as one person who tried to maintain a separate blog for personal uses and REALbasic, it left me feeling discouraged when I updated one but not the other, and it lead to the demise of my personal blog.

After today, jon(athan)johnson.net now just simply redirects here, and while all of the old posts are gone from history, new posts both personal and geeky will begin appearing here.

Hopefully this won’t annoy most of you, and you’ll stick around. But if it does, so long and thanks for all the fish.

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