Mix ups

Continuing on from my previous post about the non apparent UX improvements in Vista...

 

Noticed a little hyperlink called Mixer at the bottom of the volume control (..access it with a single click on the volume icon in systray)

Gives you access to this fabulous dialog box.

It shows you all open applications that are capable of making a sound. It allows you to use the left most control (Speaker/head) phone to decide the over all volume. And then allows you to control the relative volume of the rest of the applications)

Watching a cricket match on an illegal site :) without commentary yet want to hear a speaker on live meeting without the new mail to ring a bell while allowing MSN messenger to ping you?

Beautifully done...

 

BTW. Post number 100. Many many thanks to everyone who has participated with bricks and bouquets, blogs and comments.

Thanks

Hilarious Windows (Vista) Error

via Gizmodo



So let me lay it out for you: Windows Problem Reporting has encountered a problem. Because of this problem, Windows needs to shutdown the service. Ok so far.

But it will also notify you if a solution is available. How can you do that when you are shutting down your notification service?

Reminds me of those movies where a dying man reveals only half the secret he's being killed for.

Left is not right, back is not wrong

Continuing on from my previous post about the non apparent UX improvements in Vista, here is one simple, curious little left pointing arrow...



All those years ago, a few days before I was to leave for US, I was teaching my mom how to send emails. I sat many a hour being as patient as she has been with me through all my idiosyncrasies. What I remember the most is her being a deer-in-headlight every time she came to a new screen. She was so afraid to do anything lest it disappeared and she did not know how to bring it back again.

Now it comes together to me.

Discovering is not enough without knowing predictably how to get there again. ("Your highness," said Vasco Da Gama, " Went to India I did, though I know not how to again").

This insanely simple button on the dialog box is a revolution. It sews together the structure of a wizard with the well understood browser back button allowing you the permutation-ally logical option to go one screen back without breaking the workflow!

Wow.

I for detail...

Beating down Microsoft products is fashionable. And products like Waste-ah makes it so much more simpler (and justifiable) to do so.

In the next few week, I am going to blog about usability improvements in Vista. While the overall operating system still has a lot of work on the implementation, I think the product and program managers have done a stellar job.

For example: Do you remember this age old dialog box?

You could hit F2 in the file explorer to in place edit the name of a file. The entire filename along with its file extension would be highlighted, and when you started typing, the file extension, more often than not, was lost. That was not the only problem though. If you selected No in the dialog box, file explorer would revert back to the old filename instead of allowing you to start where you left and rectify.

Very nicely taken care of in Vista. Hitting F2 automatically highlights only the name of the file, preventing an inadvertent change of extension.

These "sixes" are not thrilling...

On the day, Punjad da puttar hit six sixes in six balls, here are six screens you have to bear before finally connecting to a wireless.

Irritating, no?

De-Vertigo?

Ok for this sentence (?) to be a blurt by a stunt-sky diver asked by a film director to jump while still at low altitude...


...not an error message in Vista.

Oblivious Asterisk

Calendar : Usability improvements in Vista

The Vista calendar has some very simple yet effective changes that has a remarkable usability impact. While the calendar seems like a insignificant area to worry about usability, the changes talk about (1) the premium entry point the calendar enjoys on the visual real estate (2) MS program managers watching users (or probably themselves) struggling with the older UX - unchanged since Windows 3.1

Before: XP calendar

After : Vista Calendar

First and foremost, you need a single click to invoke the calendar as against the double in XP.

In Vista, the OK/Cancel button cluster has been done away allowing the screen to be dispatched by simply clicking outside. This has been made possible by seperating the oft-used browse calendar scenanrio from the rarely-used change date funtionality. It also prevents the accidental date changes.

In XP, the simple task of looking at the previous/next month required a combo to be dropped down. Selecting a year required the usage of a spinner control. Obviously selecting a different month in another year was a pain. In Vista, the back/forward buttons on either side of the month-year label make sequential browsing easy. Clicking the month and year label "zooms" the calendar out to show an entire year and subsequent clicks show a dacade and a century. Neat.

Even neater, if you look carefully at the calendar in Vista, you will see grey colored dates before the first and after the last date of the current month. That is what you see in all paper caledars and provides visual continuity. This space has been careless wasted in XP.

In Vista, I like the visible extra week of the next month. I wish they has done this on both side of the month or better still, allowed me to see multiple months at a glance

Vista allows you to display upto three clocks simultaneously - a handy feature in this age of geographically seperated virtual teams.

Then, there are some missing low hanging features I wish the calendar had. LIke

• Simple calculators for counting elapsed/working days between two dates, date four weeks from now etc OR extensibility to build and add such calculators
  
• Holidays being displayed in red - like a paper calendar
  
• Integration with PIMs like Outlook or other web schedulers to show free-open days
  
  
• a 'memory' for the 'Change timezone' combo box that has over 25 entries box, remembering my last few selections. A la the font tool on the office ribbon

And then surprisingly there is a badly painted 'Change date and time' dialog box ! As if somebody threw it together and then forgot to fix it.

Don't see it? Then it doesn't matter to you anyways :)

Misuse of SysTray

The SysTray area on the Startbar is reserved for applications that want to notify the users about some state of the application.

A whole lot of applications , vying for eyeballs like all those portal startups of late 90s, end up misusing systray leaving behind a redundant piece-of-junk icon.

Here is a snapshot of the systray on my laptop. 42% of the icons should not have been there.

(1) Outlook new mail icon - indicates thatI have a new mail in my inbox, could have easily shown how many

(2) The main Outlook icon. Only distinguishes between online/offline. Should have shown connection error, send-receive status, out of office etc

(3) Pen Flicks icon being used just as a shortcut to access other menu items. Should not have been in the SysTray at all

(4) Protector Suite icon for the application that controls the biometric input on my Toshiba wasting useful real estate on my SysTray

(5) The extremely handy and well designed battery staus indicator that shows if my laptop is the approximate battery power

(6) Connectivity indicator shows availability of internet and LAN connection

(7) Volume icon: Shows mute/unmute - wish it showed me te volume level as well by using the green sound wave metaphor like the nokia bars

(8) Smantec AnitiVirus - Could easily have shown the health of my system by adding a simple Green Tick for a clean system, a Red swoosh if it found a virus or a suspect file and a rotating gear when a scan in progress

(9) V 9.2MOH model which currently is "on hold" but the icon tells me zip

(10) Windows Defender currently showing that it has blocked programs at startup using a familiar metaphor

(11) Acoustic Silencer for CD/DVD which can either be in normal or quite mode though the icon is non-resposive to the change

(12) ISA Server icon distinguishes its state of connection with the proxy server

(13) Windows Messeger shows a unique icon for each one of the states that messenger can be in

In short, a simple mesage to the developers: If you decide to put an icon on my SysTray, please take the pains to use the icon to indicate some state, else put the icon on the desktop