Michael Wolfe’s brilliant story illustrates why software projects always take longer then planned.
Let’s take a hike on the coast from San Francisco to Los Angeles to visit our friends in Newport Beach. I’ll whip out my map…
Category: Tech
Here are some of the comments I collected last week on our new CloudOn iPad app.
I will let the images and tweets speak…
A few months ago I “upgraded” Office on my Windows laptop at work to Office 2007. I know, I was using the older version for too long – but it was working fine, till it stopped.
A few months after the switch, I still can not figure out the disastrous Office 2007 user-interface changes. This is a huge step backwards in productivity for me. I keep staring at the huge buttons – 100 pixels tall of wasted space across the entire top section, in all office applications, the strange ribbon (what was wrong with the single line customizable toolbar?), and the unintuitive office button at the top that hides all the useful stuff – it all seems like a move designed to give a sense of “need” to the Office suite, without a real benefit to the user. It clearly seems like Microsoft was trying to desperately make it look much different, in the false pretense that “different” == “improved”. Not so.
This week I actually stopped using word on Windows and moved to WordPad just because of the slow speed and bloated and useless user interface. I know its way too simplistic, but you know what? For editing RTF files, with some headers and fonts, you don’t need more then that.
Surprisingly for me, the Office 2008 suite on the Mac is actually one of the most polished, fast and beautiful applications I have ever seen from Microsoft. Not only it is on par with every other Mac application in terms of sleek-factor, fast-loading and intuitive to use, the user interface stayed true to the original menu paradigm throughout the lasts years, and did not change for the worse as in the Windows version. My guess this is due to the strict UI guidelines developers respect in the Mac application world.
On top of that, its elegant and beautiful. There are many small touches that are hard to notice without a careful one to one comparison – like the nice shading in the active cell in Excel, the beautiful fonts in all applications, or the more useful page layout in Excel. The Mac version of Excel is becoming one of my favorite applications on the Mac.
My suggestion for all the Office power users – try Office on a Mac. You will not believe this is a Microsoft product.
That’s it, it has been said at last.
Here is a statement by Microsoft’s partner group manager, Simon Aldous:
“One of the things that people say an awful lot about the Apple Mac is that the OS is fantastic, that it’s very graphical and easy to use. What we’ve tried to do with Windows 7 – whether it’s traditional format or in a touch format – is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics”
Isn’t it awesome and refreshing?
The following statement is out in the wild now, and there is no going back – in spite of Microsoft’s cruel response (To Mr. Aldous, that is).
Dear Mircosoft: Its OK to take the best and most useful ideals from your competitors, and build upon them. Its OK to praise a competitor on some aspects of their product, while still claiming that your product is better in other ways. But no, Mircosoft, it is NOT OK to lie, and it is NOT OK to throw one of your loyal managers at the dogs.
Also – I am sorry to be the one that tell you this, but we, the simple users, are not dumb. At the end of the day, every one of us decides if they want to use your products on their merits and our convenience. So please continue to improve Windows, make it nicer and easier to use. You can even try to innovate, as you are doing with the Surface. Just don’t lie to me.
Its amazing how frustrating Windows can be. No wonder my wife says she does not deal well with “computers”.
Today while my 2 year old played with my laptop (Dell Lattitude 420), she pulled an amazing feat: She succeeded turning the display completely sideways. I am talking about the whole Windows desktop and apps were 90 degrees sideways. Now this leads to 3 frustrations:
- The touch-pad is now physically rotated to the screen; Up on the pad moves the cursor left. Now try to navigate like this!
- I had no clue how the hell she managed to do that.
- I had no clue how the hell I am getting the machine to function back again.
A quick search and I got to this page on //engtech. This was a real sanity saver! Thanks to this Canadian dude. Oh, and the best part in the page design is that the answer is written sideways! You have to check it out. Thats a very clever things to do.
It turns out that there is a stupid hot key combination (ctrl-alt-left / right / up / down) that triggers this behavior on certain graphic cards. This should definitely be turned off, and also be clearly accessible as a main tab on the display control-panel.
Conclusions
- Turn off this silly feature on the OS level. (Yeah, right, like this will ever happen).
- Google is a worthy asset – but you have to know how to search.
- Common bloggers can be your friends
- Take the laptop out of reach of your two year old.
It still beats the hell out of me how she succeeded pressing ctrl-alt-arrow. Kids can be extremely resourceful.
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
If you want to start an AdSense-based site, and you are wondering which subject it should be about, here are three rules for choosing the site’s subject.
Choose a subject that interests you
You are going to invest tons of hours in building your site. This is going to involve a lot of research, thinking and writing. If this is a subject that you don’t find interesting, you will not have the required energies to put into it.
In addition, if it is interesting to you, that also means that you might know more then other people about this, and that you might be able to contribute original ideas, commentary and opinions about this subject – this is exactly what the readers (and the search engines) are after.
Last, as this is an interesting subject for you, you might be researching and reading about it anyway – this means you just need to put that into your site.
Choose a subject that has enough advertisers
Lets suppose you invested all your energy at your favorite subject, and built a solid and interesting site. Can it be profitable? That depends on lots of things, but surely if there are very few advertisers in this area, or the ads have low value, you will not be able to monetize it.
Obviously, you need to beware of choosing a subject that has fierce competition (most are…). The highest paying keywords are the playground of the pros. If you are just starting, stay away from those.
Choose a subject that is aimed at non-technical people
Ahh, this is the most elusive secret of all: The more technical savvy your users are, and the more web experienced they are, the less likely will they be to see your ads. This is called ad-blindness.
On the other hand, if your site is aimed at low-tech users, the more likely they are to click on your ads.
Here is a short review of my chosen Firefox extensions, which without them my web life would have been extremely miserable. All of them are recommended, and most of them are completely essential.
Ad Blocking
Flashblock
This extension is a must to save you many precious seconds of your life. In essence, in every page that contains a Flash animation, you will find a small (F) instead. Clicking on it will start the original Flash – but most of the time you are not interested in that (Thats because most of them are just ads). You would not believe how faster your pages load with it.
Tabbed Browsing
Swift Tabs
This small extension allows you to assign keyboard shortcuts to switching tabs. I use ctrl-left and ctrl-right, but you can choose your favorite shortcuts. Essential for speed.
Tabbrowser Preferences
This adds a new preferences tab in your control panel, regarding tab behavior. It adds tons of customizable options to tabbing – and if you are a tabbing freak, like me, it allows you complete control.
Favonicize Tab
A simple and cute add-on, that allows you to shrink the tab header to the icon only (favicon). This helps a lot when you have lots of known tabs open, which you can navigate to using the icon only.
Bookmarks Synchronization
Foxmarks
With Foxmarks you can synchronize two PCs to share the same bookmarks. It works like magic.
Download
Download Statusbar
Now all your downloads appear as small and clean progress bar down on your status bar. Go away the download window!
PDF Download
With this extension, all PDFs that you click on will prompt you as to what you want to do – you can safe directly, or open in Firefox, or other options. As the PDF within Firefox is quite limited in functionality, this is a great helper.
Video Downloader
A nice extension to download some types of video to Hard Disk. I started to see more and more sites that this extension is not working for.
Firefox Application
Splash
This cute extension adds a splash screen to Firefox, Thunderbird and Sunbird. This makes the application seem so much more professional. Why the Firefox developers did not place this feature (still) officially is beyond me.
Update Notifier
A great addition to Firefox – notifies you when your add-ons or Firefox have updates, downloads them for you, and let you decide on when to restart. Complete!
Web-Dev
ColorZilla
Adds a small eyedropper icon on the lower-left corner, and allows you to sample the color from any pixel on the current web page – and in addition, has tons of other color-oriented features. Superb tool for web developers!
Tamper Data
This advanced add-on allows you to examine forms data before transmission, and change it at will. With it, you can capture what is really going on between a web-application client to its server – weather yours or not…
When I decided to add AdSense ads to my blog, I made some research (as usual), and came up with a set of guidelines to the whole spooky SEO subject.Here is a set of of tips to improve your site and blog rating, and drive more performance out of your Google AdSense campaign.
Choose and Create Content
- Make sure you have high quality, rich, interesting, useful and original content
- Its good to have a niche site – but with sufficient advertisers
- If possible, concentrate on content with high paying ads
- One page per topic
- Cover all missing subtopics
- Update and add constantly
Optimize Site Flow
- Natural site flow
- Make sure all links work
- Add About page
- Add Sitemap page
Optimize AdSense Keywords
- Mine for the best keywords
- Pay attention to keyword density
- Fine-tune before turning on AdSense
Keywords Fine Tuning
- Important tags: Title, Headings, Bold, Italics, Alt
- Choose the right keywords in title
- Choose the right keywords in headings
- Links: Wrap the link around keywords (text in links is valued higher by Google). Use the title attribute like so: actual text
- Put the best keywords into the links
- Pay attention to the meta tags
- Actively block ads that are wrong
- Ask AdSense
Optimize Images
- Always use ALT with relevant keywords
- Position images near relevant text
- Images around the ad edges are helpful in getting attention
Improve Your Layout and Positioning
- For short articles, place ads above the content
- For long articles, place ads in the middle of content
- Blend ad colors
- Above the fold
Improve Relevancy
- Avoid Non-English characters
- Include specific sections with <!– google_ad_section_start–> and <!– google_ad_section_end–>
- Exclude poison-words/sections using <!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –> and <!– google_ad_section_end –>
- In case of bad relevancy, rename the page to trigger immediate re-crawl
Bring More Traffic To Your Site
- Link from outside as possible
- Promote the site: Submit to digg, reddit, sumbleupon
- Add signature to your emails
Enjoy!
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